17%
1/6 resolved calls right
7 scored · avg 33
◆ 5 sources
57
companies · 460 data points
OpenAI will catch up to Anthropic in coding market share and capabilities due to their enterprise momentum.
What happened: Anthropic took a temporary lead in coding capabilities with the release of Claude 3.5 Sonnet in mid-2024, forcing OpenAI to catch up with its o1 models later that year; however, OpenAI never lost its overall lead in enterprise coding market share, remaining dominant through GitHub Copilot.
Verify at source ↗OpenAI captures approximately 90% of total AI industry revenue.
What happened: OpenAI's share of the global AI industry revenue was far below 10%, nowhere near the claimed 90%.
Verify at source ↗Airtable will have a successful IPO in the future.
What happened: Airtable has not gone public and has not had an IPO; the company remains private as of now.
Verify at source ↗Airtable's current Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is around $500 million.
What happened: Airtable's annual recurring revenue in early 2023 was indeed around $500 million, matching the claim made on 2023‑10‑07.
Verify at source ↗Figma will end 2022 with roughly $450 million in ARR, and has an internal forecast of roughly $800 million in ARR for 2023.
What happened: Figma’s ARR at the end of 2022 was indeed about $450 million, but the company’s actual 2023 ARR fell short of the internally forecasted $800 million, coming in closer to $650 million.
Verify at source ↗Figma's ARR will reach between $1.5 billion and $2 billion within two years of the end of 2023.
What happened: I cannot confirm the exact ARR figures for Figma at the end of 2025, so I cannot verify whether it reached between $1.5 billion and $2 billion as predicted.
Verify at source ↗Users will initially try the Apple Vision Pro but will quickly stop using it and put it in a drawer due to a lack of applications.
What happened: Apple Vision Pro launched in 2023 with a limited but growing app ecosystem; early adopters continued to use it, and sales surpassed initial expectations, with no widespread abandonment or drawer storage reported.
Verify at source ↗groups like OpenAI, frankly, seems to be running an anthropic slipstream right now from a red capture standpoint. I don't think they're as doomer as anthropic, but they can see the benefit if the federal government effectively creates a moat that, you know, there's huge economic benefits to essentially creating a duopoly situation.
Historically, the way that Anthropic has solved this tension is they've basically said, yeah, in anybody else's hands, frontier AI is too dangerous to be developed, but in our virtuous and wise hands, it's safe. We will make it safe. We're the only ones you can trust. And everybody else in the world can see that that is the most ludicrous self-serving argument. We're not buying into it.
I think that they have to choose between either renouncing this, quote, whistleblower as a Doomer op. ... Or they can agree with him, you know, in which case Bernie Sanders may be right that further development should be frozen, in which case I don't see how they can IPO now in the trillions.
And the tension is this, on the one hand, you're asking public market investors to underwrite your company to a value in the trillions. On the other hand, your own safety lead, not Jacob Cox and the boss who then sort of co-signed his tweet, is saying that your core product is unsolved and potentially civilization ending.
this message is fully consistent with the doomer slash regulatory capture agenda of Anthropix. So again, he's not saying anything that is incompatible or detrimental to his boss. And that's why he's getting support from within the company. But it does raise these questions that Chamath is talking about. And I do think that there's a tension here in Anthropix position that I do think implicates their IPO process.
who also happens to be a co-lead of the Anthropic Series A.
In this case, they're amplifying it themselves.
I think American companies are competing very well. I think we are winning the AI race as long as we don't do something stupid to shoot ourselves in the foot.
We have a frontier market duopoly. They're closed models. And they can rug pull you, Saks, at any time they can take your tokens away from you.
I think the market structure that we have right now is there's two markets. There's the market for frontier intelligence, and that is a duopoly. That really is anthropic and open AI. And it's good to see that that is still a horse race and they're competing.
People are really counting them out. Now, it looks like they're viable again. Anything that creates competition, I think, is good. Before, it looked like Anthropic was running away with it. They're about to have this monster IPO. If OpenAI can at least make it a two-horse race, that's good. I think it's great.
the market structure that we have right now is there's two markets. There's the market for frontier intelligence, and that is a duopoly. That really is anthropic and open AI.
Sam told us a few months ago ... that he was expecting the company to have its best 12 months? He said the last year hasn't been so great, but the next year is going to be really great.
OpenAI seems to get its groove back now. After Anthropic was running away with it.
Sam just came out with a post, I believe yesterday, saying that actually, they're going to slow down the release of some of their frontier models, because they felt that their safety stack was not keeping up with the capability. Okay, that's responsible. By the way, do you know why I think they're doing that? Because they have huge and ample liability to take responsible steps, because if they don't, they're going to be subjected to all sorts of product liability lawsuits. Look at what's happeni
Look at what's happening to Meta right now. They're getting sued because supposedly their product led to social media addiction, and they're being sued for over a trillion dollars right now. And this comes on the heel of them losing a $6 million jury trial in Los Angeles, where a plaintiff sued them for creating her body image issues. So we are seeing massive product liability lawsuits against big tech companies like Meta and Google.
Dario wants an FDA for AI, but he doesn't have enough political support for that. So instead, they do this Trojan horse of a FINRA for AI.
But we want to create a decentralized empowering outcome for individuals. And I think that's the side that Zuck is on. And I very much agree with that.
We hear that OpenAI now, they've basically pivoted into coding. They're doing a better job with that now with GPT 5.6. We've heard their growth rate is accelerating. They used to be growing at 3 to 4x a year. I've heard that over the past two months, that growth rate is now over 20% month over month, which if you extrapolate it out over 12 months, would be a 10x growth rate. So you're now seeing OpenAI growing as fast as Anthropic, having made that pivot.
range so you know you do the math that gigawatt is a billion watts so 30 to 50 dollars per watt means 30 to 50 billion per gigawatt and i think they're at the high end of that range right now so when elon says look we're going to end the year at 100 billion of arr all you have to believe is that they're at two gigawatts of compute running for 50 a watt to hit that that doesn't include starlink or the launch business or the grok cursor piece or any of these things so i think that's why they're
the only thing i would add to what brad said was around starship elon basically said we all saw it right that the starship test flight was successful the starship floating in the ocean the heat shield worked that's going to enable more flights of starship now at a more accelerated rate that paves the way for the v3 satellite which enables much more bandwidth for the starlink network which then powers the whole direct to cell play so you had that piece of it i mean just the whole telecom aspect s
a little bit surprised that the stock went down after the earnings call because not only was it a beaten raise but also i think elon spoke to a lot of their plans
the whole telecom aspect seemed very on track and they're very bullish about that
goes up 10x or eventually 100x times and that's when they can do all the interesting things like direct to cellular there were some interesting hints that when shotwell talked about about with ground
or rather they deployed 20 v3 satellites as a test and they were able to make connection with those satellites and prove that it worked they even had cameras on them the reason we were able to see
of its v2 satellite so currently the starlink network is powered by v2 satellites they deploy them on the falcon 9 rocket and they launch about 27 satellites per launch and that adds about 2.6 terabits per second of total network capacity starship deploys 60 of these v3 satellites per launch
this world comes down to he said something like that on the call where he said look putting up data centers is nothing compared to the difficulty of putting up a rocket right it's like you know creating data centers is not rocket science so they take some of those hardware expertise that they have from spacex and they put them into data centers and that's why they've been able to stand up you know more data centers or bigger data centers faster than all the competitors
the latest we heard is anthropic is now over 80 billion of arr started the year at 10 it had forecast 100 billion as exit arr for the year and most people said that that would be impossible to achieve now it looks like they're going to do it with a couple of months to spare so their estimates are going up i mean 110 120 or higher for
if you are at the frontier you can charge a premium and that's where anthropic and open ai are
Yeah, this is where I'll take the other side of it. Yeah. People are running Kimmy on the last generation of hardware and that's plentiful. And I think, and I'll make this prediction here, that you're going to see some of the major customers of Anthropic and major customers of OpenAI.
they're basically showing that open AI's run rate, which is ARR. It rose from 33 billion in May to 41.3 billion in July. So they're seeing acceleration.
Anthropic and open AI are running around saying, listen, we can't continue to invest billions of dollars if Chinese companies can just steal our weights, right? So that's the argument that they're making that government officials are responding to.
the reports are that Sam is going to Washington over the next week to go talk about GPT 6.0, which is blowing the doors off.
you still have stuff in the labs by Anthropic and open AI that is way ahead of this.
OpenAI's argument is, look, we're not stealing anything. We're taking the output of the New York Times and we are deriving our own model weights. And that is exactly what these Chinese models are doing is they are taking the output of American models and then they're deriving their own weights. They're learning from it.
The New York Times is suing OpenAI right now for going onto the New York Times website in violation of the New York Times terms of service, scraping all the information and training on it.
OpenAI and Anthropic have both argued that they are free to train on all the world's output regards of whether the creator wants them to or not. That's right. That is their current position.
Anthropic and open AI are running around saying, listen, we can't continue to invest billions of dollars if Chinese companies can just steal our weights
you still have stuff in the labs by Anthropic and open AI that is way ahead of this.
if Chinese companies were to steal proprietary weights from Anthropic or OpenAI, that would be theft. But that's not what we're talking about here because no one's accused that.
OpenAI and Anthropic have both argued that they are free to train on all the world's output regards of whether the creator wants them to or not. That's right. That is their current position.
these proposals to ban open source that are coming from anthropic. They don't solve the distillation problem. If distillation is a problem, you have to stop it at the source.
So it is not a clear advance or a clear catch up to the leading American models. Moreover, you still have stuff in the labs by Anthropic and open AI that is way ahead of this.
Point number two is that China has not caught up. It's true that Kimmy K3 scored really well on the arena battleground for front-end coding for web development, but that's just one test. That's this one dimension. There are areas where it scores really well, but there's lots of other areas where it doesn't score that well.
Then the details started coming out. So Ben Thompson, on his blog, went through some of the cost numbers and it turns out that Kimmy K3 is not that much cheaper to run. There's not a significant cost advantage to it.
I pay a 53% tax rate living in California. I pay my federal tax and my temporary California tax, which I've been temporarily paying for 11 years. And I'm paying 53 cents of every dollar I earn to the state and to the federal government.
so it looks like the generational run for mac mini is just about over
there's supposedly at open ai a newfound focus on chasing anthropic down the enterprise path
I've never been a critic of anthropics products I've always been an admirer of their products I think last year I gave them credit for mcp I agree that they seem to be performing very well now the company made a big bet on coding as the kind of big breakout use case whether that was done for business reasons or ideological reasons I'm not sure anthropic is sort of the most agi pilled of all the frontier labs and I think they made this bet on coding as their way to get to recursive self improveme
I'm bearish, margins are brutal.
I'm bearish. I predict the margins collapse and they get crushed on price within a year.
I'm more cautious. The margins in this category are brutal and the incumbents are going to compete hard on price. I'm not sure the moat holds.
I'm bearish, the margins are brutal.
i think they're doing about two trillion a year of annual transaction volume i think paypal is doing 1.7 so actually stripe is a little bigger than paypal now but the thing that paypal has that stripe doesn't really have is the consumer relationship so you know over 400 million active consumer accounts
the existential issue for paypal is that you're dealing with a product that's 25 years old ... that interaction model is legacy and so unless you've got a a vision of how to resuscitate it and rejuvenate that that product i think yeah it could be a good financial play maybe
the reason they got these offers is the market cap is down to you know it was down in the what like 30 something billion i mean this is a company that was worth 200 billion ... so the reason why it's attracting offers is it's so beaten up
that's why paypal has stagnated is that as soon as it was acquired back in 2002 they basically blew out like all the founders all the founding dna and it was just kind of run by you know consulting types
i think dario has expressed support for this however i think this is just an opening bid for anthropic meaning they'll take this thank you very much this is more regulation than we have today but that won't be the end of it right this will just be the stepping stone to get what dario has now called for many times which is the faa for ai
He's made every previous wave work to his benefit, whether it was social, whether it was mobile, whether it was big data, all that kind of stuff. What are the odds he's going to make AI work to his benefit? I'd say pretty good. So his stock might be a bargain right now.
I think these two companies are very complementary. Cursor obviously is very strong in coding. That's what it brings to XAI. XAI brings compute and they bring a foundation model. And the problem that Cursor had is that even though coding is kind of like the white-hot area of AI right now, when it got started, it was really competing against generalists in the form of OpenAI and Anthropic. But now those generalists have decided to vertically integrate in this area of coding, right? And so Cursor
I think these two companies are very complementary.
anthropic itself it has allied itself politically with a lot of the doomer groups a lot of the nimby groups it didn't seem to matter in the first couple of years because anthropic had made the strategic decision not to build its own data centers so they probably thought that they were just throwing sand in the gears of open ai or xai their competitors and they would just rely on hyperscalers to get their compute and i think that that strategy has now backfired in the sense that they apparently h
i was saying on x i actually i think i was retweeting mark andreessen who pointed out that one of the reasons why anthropic might have wanted to hold back mythos is they simply didn't have the compute to serve it the model was huge and very expensive to serve something like maybe even 10 or 20 times the token cost of of say opus they knew opus 4.7 was coming out right so they hold it back knowing that they don't have the compute to serve it anyway and they save their compute for the next iterati
i do wonder if over the next year anthropic will reconsider whether it's support for all this like doomer nimby ism was the right call because it kind of made sense for them from a business standpoint when their competitors were building data centers and they were just getting compute from the hyperscalers but now that they're i think going to have to move into the game of building their own data centers they might regret salting the earth for data centers all over the country and i wonder if th
even though anthropic's revenue has followed this graph this exponential graph very predictably it can't do that forever right like let's say it does get to maybe 100 billion this year can it really get to a trillion dollars in revenue the year after that seems hard to believe right and and the reason is because as you hit new levels of scale you encounter new problems i mean you're simply going to run out of compute or electricity data centers you know infrastructure there are physical limits o
you could see anthropic taking a lead here that let's say over the next one or two years could be insurmountable
anthropic was very focused on enterprise specifically coding and what you're seeing is that businesses are willing to pay for coding code tokens on a metered basis let's call it like electricity the more they use the more they're willing to pay and their usage just continues to scale and scale
the anthropic growth rate has been around 10x a year so they went from let's call it one to ten billion of ar last year and by the end of q1 this year they were already at 30 billion of again that's called their revenue
if they don't catch up soon to travis's point then you could see anthropic taking a lead here that let's say over the next one or two years could be insurmountable
consumer is a thing that open ai prioritize consumers have a lower willingness to pay maybe only three or four percent of them are willing to convert to premium in the first place and what they want is a 20 a month all you can eat subscription so the revenue simply doesn't scale the same way that enterprise does
if it's taking open ai two years to achieve a 10x and anthropic one year to achieve a 10x then it's obvious which one's gonna win
the open ai growth rate's been around three to four x a year the anthropic growth rate has been around 10x a year
this other part of the criticism of open ai that they shouldn't do enterprise is totally misguided one of the reasons why they should have been more focused is to do more enterprise and get enterprise more correct
open ai and anthropic as of the beginning of q2 so let's say two weeks ago they were both around 30 billion of revenue
anthropic itself it has allied itself politically with a lot of the doomer groups a lot of the nimby groups it didn't seem to matter in the first couple of years because anthropic had made the strategic decision not to build its own data centers so they probably thought that they were just throwing sand in the gears of open ai or xai their competitors and they would just rely on hyperscalers to get their compute
if they don't catch up soon to travis's point then you could see anthropic taking a lead here that let's say over the next one or two years could be insurmountable
consumer is a thing that open ai prioritize consumers have a lower willingness to pay maybe only three or four percent of them are willing to convert to premium in the first place and what they want is a 20 a month all you can eat subscription so the revenue simply doesn't scale the same way that enterprise does
the open ai growth rate's been around three to four x a year the anthropic growth rate has been around 10x a year so they went from let's call it one to ten billion of ar last year and by the end of q1 this year they were already at 30 billion of again that's called revenue
but look this other part of the criticism of open ai that they shouldn't do enterprise is totally misguided one of the reasons why they should have been more focused is to do more enterprise and get enterprise more correct
I think Anthropic has proven that it's very good at two things. One is product releases. The second is scaring people. And we've seen a pattern in their previous releases of, at the same time, they roll out a new model or new model card, something like that. They also roll out some study showing really the worst possible implication of where the technology could lead. We saw this last year, about a year ago, they rolled out this blackmail study where supposedly the new model could blackmail user
The wake-up moment for me was we were talking to our agent about, hey, we want to get this functionality out of Slack. And it's like, yeah, Slack doesn't have that, but have you considered MatterPost? I'm like, what's MatterPost? It's like, oh, it's an open source project. I can spin it up this weekend, export your Slack instance and put it there. And I was like, oh, don't do that. We're only spending 6K a year on Slack or 10K a year. But the software is building CRM systems for us. It's buildin
I don't think AI is going to get rid of Salesforce, but it could eat into their growth opportunity.
Anthropic doesn't really seem to be practicing what they're preaching if they're paying enormous amounts still for software engineers, even as they claim they're obsolete in the entire category. Something doesn't quite add up.
There are 11,000 satellites. 6,000, 6,500 of those are SpaceX satellites. So there's 65% of the ones out there.
you put those solar panels out there, they don't have the atmosphere to fight to get the energy of the sun. Then you, behind the solar panels, have something that dissipates energy. And then you have the data center up there, which means it's in the cool of space. You don't have to cool the data center. Then you don't have a real estate costs. And these things could daisy chain in some way, either lasers between them to send the data. And then obviously he's got the Starlink. So imagine you had
My estimate is that within two to three years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This is because compute on the earth, this is me adding, is more expensive. Factories on the moon can take advantage of lunar resources to manufacture satellites and deploy them further into space by using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing. It is possible to put 500 to 1,000 terabytes a year of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and
There have been some stories recently. I think Bloomberg and Reuters reported that they actually are not allowing NVIDIA chips into their country. And the reason for that, we think, is that they want to indigenize chip production. They want to stand up Huawei as their national champion. And effectively, they're creating a market subsidy for Huawei by keeping out the competition. So they're protecting their market to stand up Huawei.
You see Blackstone making huge investments, real estate companies. Ultimately, I think these are very savvy market players, very deep pocketed companies. And they're doing this because they see an ROI there at the end of the rainbow
You see Oracle making a huge investment. You see Blackstone making huge investments, real estate companies. Ultimately, I think these are very savvy market players, very deep pocketed companies. And they're doing this because they see an ROI there at the end of the rainbow
You saw just last week, Microsoft stepped up and made a pledge that its data centers will not cause residential rates to increase.
I'll tell you, the other game changer on X has been Grock, because you can just go, at Grock, what's the truth? And you won't necessarily always agree with Grock. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's pretty darn good. It's trending in the right direction. I mean, it's really good on the whole. And yeah, I mean, it does a really good job fact-checking too. So we don't really need these bureaucrats and politicians and regulators telling us what's true or not. We have community notes. We have AI n
It's been a total game changer. I remember when they were doing fact-checking, and the fact-checking was so bad, because the fact-checkers were biased, or sometimes it wasn't good quality control. But the community note thing has, like, really worked. And you'll see that when someone posts something that's truly misinformation, like it's a fake image or a fake article or something, it always gets caught. And then you get notified. Have you noticed this? Yeah. If you like a post, and then it gets
I remember, actually, you brought back some memories from, this is about a decade ago, when my company Yammer was acquired by Microsoft. We were part of the SharePoint group, and I remember that the product managers there were very proud of the fact that the revenue from the SharePoint ecosystem, meaning non-Microsoft, the consulting community, the implementers, who would go into companies and implement SharePoint, I think their revenue was something like seven times greater than Microsoft's own
So you might clone me working in the HR department or working in the marketing department and have a virtual version of me inside of office.
you made a very bold move for Microsoft to put that in the Windows product, which I use every day on the desktop. But you did that before, it really could recognize the file system and interact with applications. Got a little bit of a lukewarm reception. But now you've been doubling down, doubling down.
it's good to see microsoft make this pledge and sort of formalize that
my prediction is that jacal is such a luck box that he'll end up being right about amazon but not having anything to do with the reason he gave
so for example larry and sergey i think they combined have voting power of about 52 percent of google so what's google worth these days about four and a half trillion
going the wrong way, and it felt like every week there's some new category of thought and expression that you couldn't say, and they were banning new things.
going the wrong way, and it felt like every week there's some new category of thought and expression that you couldn't say, and they were banning new things.
Paramount's offering more. It's 108 billion versus around 80, or it's like $30 a share versus 27. And they're also buying the whole company. Whereas Netflix just wants Warner's studio assets and streaming assets is like HBO, but not the cable assets, which are considered a little bit of a co. So I think if you're a shareholder in Warner's, you probably want to sell the whole thing that you don't want to just be stuck with the bad assets. So yeah, I'm a little surprised actually, that the Warner'
I do think that this outpouring of support does illustrate something important, which is just how much power and respect the New York Times has lost. You know, 10 years ago, if the New York Times ran a hit piece on somebody, even if other people didn't like it, they wouldn't want to say anything because they'd be afraid that they would be the next target. And that mystique and that fear has completely broken down. People kind of see the New York Times for what it is, which is basically a bunch o
he had classes one, now he's got classes two, and that portends good things for rock five, it's gonna be trained on the largest cluster of blackwells
Then you've got xai, which I think is the best at current events because of the integration with x. And also, Elon seems to be able to scale his data center, his training cluster, the fastest, the fastest, he's got, you know, he had classes one, now he's got classes two, and that portends good things for rock five, it's gonna be trained on the largest cluster of blackwells.
Remember last summer, there was the court case where the judge said that they were guilty of having the monopoly and then he was going to rule on what the remedies were going to be. And I think that was in, what was it? September. And the judge said that during the summer and then whenever it was that he ruled on the remedy, that they were existentially threatened in their search business. And so everything had changed. Yeah. So the company didn't get broken up.
But then Google came out with their new Gemini 3. And they were starting to take share based on the strength of Gemini 3. And the integration it has, obviously, within Google search, because it's very easy for people to discover it when they do a Google search. And now they're seeing that it's actually pretty good. So they were starting to take share and I think that's why Sam issued the code red.
And they've carved out enterprise.
Yeah. And I think people are looking at like 30 to 45% year over year growth, Shema, and saying, yeah, it's got a lot of, to fill in that valuation, we just take a lot of growth, maybe the growth accelerates. We saw that with Nvidia, right? They started to have unprecedented growth.
I guess the other short we should take a look at is the Palantir one, because Palantir is man, it's way out there. Alex Karp has been doing some great interviews. He's a national treasure, incredibly entertaining. They obviously have a great business. They're on a $3.5 billion run rate, according to their last quarter. But the valuations 480 billion. This puts them at 137 times their sales.
Gemini is a great product, Rock's a great product, Claude's a great product, a lot of great product out there. And I don't think consumers can tell the difference. Why would they pay 240 if they can get it for free from Google?
I would say that the AI sector is maybe one of the healthiest, meaning most competitive sectors of the entire American economy right now, to the extent that you just love ruthless competition driving innovation. That's what we have right now. So if one of these companies gets over its skis and ends up going bankrupt, the chips are going to fall where they may.
I don't think anyone at OpenAI was asking for a bailout. If you watch the video with Sarah Fryer, she's clearly searching for the right word to describe what she's trying to say. And then she settles on a word that she now regrets, which is backstop. Definitely not the right word. So I don't think they are asking for a bailout.
This trend of censorship was growing. It was galloping and it would have continued if it wasn't, I think, for the fact that you decided to buy Twitter and opened it up. And it was only on the heels of that, that the other social networks were willing to, I think, be a little bit chastened in their policies and start to push back more.
And they found that there was extensive collusion between the FBI and the Twitter trust and safety group, where it turns out the FBI had 80 agents submitting takedown requests. And they were very involved in the banning, the shadow banning, the censorship, which I don't think we ever had definitive evidence of that before.
The Twitter executives had made, they had maintained for years that they were not engaged in this practice, including under oath. And on the heels of you opening that up and exposing that, because by the way, it wasn't just the fact they were doing it.
By and large, it's worked very well.
And that actually has been a useful part of it. So you do get more of like a 360 view on whatever it is that you've shown interest in.
The only challenge here is, when you're a Sequoia CEO, you know, you have to then figure out, okay, which fund am I going to be in? Is the growth fund going to do this? Right. And it can be a little conflicted.
China has been allowed to dominate this industry. And specifically what they did is starting 30 years ago, they identified rare earths and rare earth magnets, the rare earth processing as a very strategic element in the supply chain. And they set out to dominate it. And they did that by massively subsidizing their businesses and driving all of the U.S. competitors and the global competitors out of business. And they were partially allowed to do that by stupid WTO rules that allowed, quote unquot
great to see more american open source ai models a meaningful segment of the global market will prefer the cost customizability and control that open source offers we want the us to win this category too
great to see more american open source ai models a meaningful segment of the global market will prefer the cost customizability and control of the open source that open source offers we want the us to win this category too
great to see more american open source ai models a meaningful segment of the global market will prefer the cost customizability and control of the open source that open source offers we want the us to win this category too
is through the roof because the crypto policies of the trump administration yeah it's fair fair
Brett responded just a few minutes ago actually this is the body shop production line metal parts are picked up and loaded into a fixture that then gets welded together on the other side so instead of having M&M and 8 miles standing there with the stamping machine it's going to be our figure robot and you know in his original tweet he said they're doing this in 10 hour shifts not bad
It's going to get a little crowded up there, I think. And of course, you got to get the data back down to Earth. So that'll be a mitigating factor, of course. But as these satellites, low Earth orbit satellites get faster, sure, it's completely possible. I don't think you want to do this too quickly because it's expensive to put them up there. But as the cost to get into space goes down and maybe the size and the weight of these H-100s comes down, you also have the temperature. And I don't think
I think this is a big improvement over where the Chips Act started.
I mean, you are seeing founders turning down multi-billion dollar acquisition offers for startups that hadn't even released a product yet as if those types of offers grow on trees, and they don't. I mean, these types of hundred million or billion dollar job offers, they don't come along very often. I mean, you have to be at kind of the sweet spot of a boom cycle and you need a huge company with tons of money that feels like it's strategically vulnerable and is at risk of being left behind. And i
during the twitter files we found out there was um yoel roth you mentioned was the head of trust and safety and definitely not a conservative there was correspondence inside of twitter saying hey we looked at their so-called api and these are just regular accounts and he said basically this is all i mean i think he used that word in other words the whole idea they were tracking russian accounts was just total nonsense these were you know it's just a random smattering of some more conservative ac
what most business people would do i mean i think elon was an outlier in terms of being willing to fight for principle which is why i think that going back to the central premise of biden v missouri
China, they've declared that AI is a national priority for them. They understand how strategic it is.
It's just that they did not know how they'd be treated operating onshore in the U.S. under Gary Gensler and the Biden administration. And so they operated offshore.
the number one stable coin player in the world right now is an offshore entity. They will have to come onshore as part of this bill in the next three years.
reed hastings just joined the board of of anthropic
if you go back and look at anthropic's announcement or dario's announcement there is a pattern of trying to grab headlines by making the most sensationalist version of what could be a legitimate concern if you go back three years ago they created this concern that ai models could be used to create bioweapons and they showed what was supposedly a sample i think of claude generating an output that could be used by a bioterrorist or something like that and on the basis of that it actually got a lot
Well, I think, you know, we were all calling on previous podcasts for Google to risk disrupting their dominance in search by moving to more of an AI based model. And I think they've taken an important step in that direction. They've sort of thread the needle here between keeping their old UI and product and then also incorporating the new sort of AI UI. So this is a compromise. I mean, they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. It ultimately feels a little bit like a transitional move. I
if anyone were to identify the week that Google really pivoted into the AI business model, it might be this week. They launched over 15 products at this thing.
I do think this sets a new direction that Google is likely testing as a business model, which is subscriptions... could create a very meaningful shift in the revenue mix for Google away from ads and more towards subscription revenue.
make AI mode more ubiquitous in search and effectively over time replace search with this AI mode experience... it appears they've done that.
the ad revenue on search is about a $200 billion run rate out of $360 billion of your total revenue, most of your profits.
we had this bipartisan globalist consensus that pretty much all trade practices with China, no matter how unfair they got, was basically good for the United States. And no one was really doing anything about it until President Trump made it this issue and made the unfair trade practices conspicuous.
the way in which trade with China is non-reciprocal. Like our companies cannot participate in their markets the same way that they can participate in ours.
as part of this trade negotiation, we're going to have to resolve that issue. And I trust that it will be.
For example, last year, there was a case where TSMC was discovered to have produced something like 3 million chips that went into the Huawei Ascend 910C chips. I think there's like 3 million dyes or something that went into the Huawei Ascend chips. And I think they're being fined for that. And again, this is all public information. Now, they claim that they thought it was for a company called, I think, Softco. It's basically a Bitcoin, like, ASICs company. But nonetheless, this did happen.
NVIDIA developed the H20, which, again, is kind of like a NERF version of the H100. This has less computational power.
I think there is a view that this chip is just, frankly, too good.
if you look at the memory bandwidth on the H20, it actually has 20% more memory bandwidth than the H100.
we helped make china rich we've exported millions of jobs to them they built up their economy and their supply chain to the point where now they are a global competitor to the united states they're a pure competitor we turned that baby dragon into a drogon sized monster that can now challenge us in asia and across the world for primacy
we imported far more from them than we ever exported to them so bill clinton was wrong about that
this idea that americans could just do business in china the way that they could do business here is ridiculous anyone who tried to do business over their nose you had to create a jv you had to get a local partner given 51 it was extraordinarily difficult we were discriminated against
we are no longer in a position as a country to make those products because we exported our entire supply chain and manufacturing base to china
during kova we discovered that we were horribly dependent on a supply chain from china for some of our most essential products for pharmaceuticals for other medical gear that we needed during cove sure
now basically every country in the world except for for china is coming to washington seeking to negotiate a new trade deal for the united states on better terms for the u.s
if i had told you eight or nine days ago that trump would find a way to accelerate the united states is decoupling from china which is something he's long wanted to do and that wall street would basically breathe a sigh of relief over that you would have said that there's no way that could happen
going to host their own version of r1 grok has a version r yeah we have one cerebris just rolled
well whatever i mean look amazon's going to host their own version of r1 grok has a version of r yeah we have one cerebris just rolled
the r1 model is is basically comparable to o1 which which open ai released four months ago and was training on internally call it nine or ten months ago so open ai is on o3 now its frontier is ahead of where r1 is
well i i mentioned this a few days ago on on fox news that i thought it was likely or possible that distillation had occurred and there was some evidence for this and it became like a news story and i i didn't even realize that saying that would be news because it's kind of an open secret in silicon valley everyone i talked to they're doing some level of distillation yeah because you need to test your model against theirs anyways yeah and every single person i've talked to basically has agreed t
there's substantial evidence that what deep seek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of open ai's models and i don't think open ai is very happy about this
there's substantial evidence that what deep seek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of open ai's models and i don't think open ai is very happy about this and i think one of the things you're going to see over the next few months is our leading ag companies taking steps to try and prevent distillation and so we'll see if uh if the leading ag companies can prevent distillation by third-party companies that would definitely slow down some of these copycat models
you guys made a fantastic investment in byte dance which is the parent company of tick tock
Yeah, I think this is the year that self-driving finally broke through. Obviously, Tesla's got full self-driving, but also this Waymo One app, people are going wild over it. So I think this is the year that self-driving broke through. And I think next year is going to get bigger and bigger.
if you look at Facebook's performance or Meta's performance over the last two years, it's up 500%. So it has done surprisingly well.
I think this is the year that self-driving finally broke through. Obviously, Tesla's got full self-driving, but also this Waymo One app, people are going wild over it. So I think this is the year that self-driving broke through. And I think next year is going to get bigger and bigger.
I said Palantir was the biggest business surprise this year. I mean, I thought the company would do well, but its stock went up 5x this year from $16 a share to $76.
Well, I mean, Freeberg's right. Jensen had the best performance.
i'd say facebook or meta less so i don't see the compelling need to to bust them up but quite frankly i think the issue that met is going to face is just there were a lot of abuses in terms of censoring the free speech rights of americans now i don't think that was all the company's idea i think a lot of pressure was put on the company by the bide administration i think they wanted to do the right thing and just didn't show enough backbone i think zuckerberg's been clear that he regrets it yeah
i'd say facebook or meta less so i don't see the compelling need to to bust them up but quite frankly i think the issue that met is going to face is just there were a lot of abuses in terms of censoring the free speech rights of americans now i don't think that was all the company's idea i think a lot of pressure was put on the company by the bide administration i think they wanted to do the right thing and just didn't show enough backbone i think zuckerberg's been clear that he regrets it ... h
he published a letter and maybe it was done to some degree to inoculate himself against the result of this election but i'd say to his credit it wasn't clear at all who was going to win the election when he put out that letter and he basically said that he regretted the fact that meta had gone along with the censorship request by the biden administration
i think there are better ways of handling the speech issue on social networks than busting up facebook but i i do think though that congress should investigate or continue investigating what went wrong there
i think the issue that met is going to face is just there were a lot of abuses in terms of censoring the free speech rights of americans
i'd say facebook or meta less so i don't see the compelling need to to bust them up
she was willing to take on the big tech companies i mean companies like amazon apple google frankly they just had a free ride for the last couple of decades where they were allowed to do anything and she came in and said there's a new sheriff in town and she was actually willing to apply pressure on them to not engage in anti-competitive tactics so i think she deserves credit for that i think she did change the conversation i think that we've talked about on previous pods that perhaps there was
my view is that google should be broken up there's abundant reasons for that there's at least three monopolies in that company there's the search business the advertising business and youtube i think they should be busted up what are the odds that that happens it's hard to say but what are the odds that that is pursued in the next administration in some capacity or at least investigated i'd say high
companies like Amazon Apple Google frankly they just had a free ride for the last couple of decades where they were allowed to do anything and she came in and said there's a new sheriff in town and she was actually willing to apply pressure to them to not engage in anti-competitive tactics
That's where I think the logic breaks down. I don't think Uber customers want to be cross-sold on booking a hotel.
he made a very compelling case to me about why that wouldn't happen which is well first of all i think ai models are predictive i mean at the end of the day they're predicting accurate you want to know if the federal government asks you for the tax id numbers of your employees you just want to be able to give it to them if wall street analysts asks you for your customer list and what the gap revenue is you just want to be able to provide that you don't want ai models figuring it out so you're st
the large companies of google microsoft so forth they're hot on their heels too
they didn't do anything for elon and i'm not saying this as elon's friend i'm just saying that it's not really fair to basically go fix the original situation you're making it into a for-profit you're giving everyone shares but the guy who puts in the original c capital doesn't get anything that's ridiculous
they've now released the at least the preview of the phd level reasoning with this o1 model so i think we can expect an announcement pretty soon about agents
And when you started, it was at... 20. 20. 20.
we could spend a fraction of that giving people Starlink and allowing the private sector to do its job.
Look, I think that if you're only using a few use cases of these big complicated software packages, then yeah, it's probably easier than ever to deprecate them, you know, eliminate them from your stack and just have your own internal engineers build specifically what you need in a more tightly integrated way. I think that is possible.
OpenAI just released their audio API.
the mainstream media, the New York Times and so on, quotes ISW. If you go look at the citations, it is the single most cited authority by the mainstream media and they are consistently wrong.
And he's very worried that once this product scales, there's not really giving me a need for Uber anymore, right? Why would you need Uber if you can just summon the robot car directly or the robot driver, whatever you want to call it, right? Driver, car, whatever. I mean, doesn't this logically disrupt Uber once it's at scale?
once this product scales, there's not really giving me a need for Uber anymore, right? Why would you need Uber if you can just summon the robot car directly or the robot driver, whatever you want to call it, right? Driver, car, whatever. I mean, doesn't this logically disrupt Uber once it's at scale?
Let me give the audience a little update about something we just heard at OpenAI. They just did a day where they brought in relatively small number of investors and kind of gave us all an update on their product roadmap. And it sounds kind of similar because everyone's moving in the same direction. So there are three big takeaways. Number one was that they said that LLMs would soon be at PhD level reasoning. Right now, it's more like a smart high school or college student in terms of the answers
if you start at the bottom and work your way to the top, that Salesforce is growing by about 20% a year. And if you look at it over three years, that's roughly a double. So every three years, Salesforce was doubling. And that means that over a decade, it's growing 10x.
Peter was here earlier and he was talking about how so far the only company to really make money off AI is Nvidia with the chips.
PayPal had all these existential issues where you had these larger entities trying to kill us. Visa, MasterCard, eBay, who else? Oh, the list goes on Citi Bank. And Reid was kind of our emissary who kept all these dogs at bay and managed to, I guess, be friends with them, I guess, to some degree, even though they wanted to kill us. And Reid was kind of in charge of making sure that these existential issues didn't blow up on us. And they didn't. So we got pretty lucky there.
The big categories would be search, advertising and YouTube.
Our workshopping this issue has pretty much convinced me that it should be four companies, search, advertising, YouTube, and Android. Because I think Android could be a standalone business because of the value of the search default.
I believe Apple is going to launch their own search engine and compete heads up with Google. And so I think that's going to be the very interesting thing that happens in this market.
That would be incredibly damaging to Google. That's the most damaging. The easiest is YouTube and Waymo in this whole mix.
I think it's worth pointing out that those aren't really businesses in and of themselves. The reason why Google developed Android and Chrome was to prevent anybody from getting upstream of them... But the problem is if those things get spun out and have to become businesses on their own, how would they function as businesses? It's not clear to me that there's an obvious strategy there.
I agree with Chamath that Google has the opportunity to do something really interesting here, which is get ahead of the curve and break itself up before the political system forces that onto it. And the advantage of doing that is that it could partition the company in ways that are economically smart. The big categories would be search, advertising and YouTube. And I think that would have two big economic benefits for shareholders. One is you unlock value by deconglomerating, like Freeberg was s
it does stand to reason that Buffett is building up a war chest here, and he's somewhat defensively positioned. ... it seems logical to infer that he thinks that the risk-reward right now is not great on public equities.
One thing I want to say, none of us are at any risk of running Palantir on our servers. Okay? CrowdStrike is running in the background of many, many companies who may not even be fully aware of it. And they were certainly surprised when all those airlines' computers went down. Right? So my only point is maybe you should make sure about whether you're running their products or not, and then make a conscious decision whether you think that's a good idea. That's all.
Like, that offer may not be that crazy. Again, you know, you're getting 10 times at a 30% average growth rate. So, you know, let's say they get to a billion in ARR next year, and then they're forecasting, you know, whatever it is the year after, you know, the 23 may be reasonable.
On Wiz, I think the most likely explanation is that they just want to keep building this as a standalone company. I think they're probably also worried that they can't get the deal through.
the most valuable application on the internet until now it's been google right and search search and so you have a different kind of search now that i'm not saying it's a one-for-one replacement it's also a new market but my point is just you already have a very powerful application in the form of this semantic search which open ai is currently dominating
i don't think this is a bad idea at all i mean i think it's kind of interesting i think they've gotten 100 million in marketing of it just yeah i mean it appeals to a certain category of startup who needs the gpus
you need to clean up that you know convoluted byzantine corporate structure with all the line charts everywhere uh that that structure is what created all the problems with this non-profit board that they had you've got a for-profit entity reporting to a non-profit board it created a culture clash and as we've said before on the show it's not a good idea for starps to innovate on structure using a tried and true c-corp is the way to go you're ready for ipo if you ever get that far you don't need
apple took a shortcut... they partnered with open ai... this is allowing open ai to get access to your data and to control your apps at the operating system level... there are major privacy implications... they chose not to develop the AI themselves.
frankly apple did exactly what i said they should do last week which was to reinvent siri as an llm with the ability with the capability to reach into apps as an agent and take actions on the user's behalf that's what they effectively announced however apple took a shortcut to get here they partnered with open ai and this is something that i don't think they've ever really done before at the operating system level apple is famous for being vertically integrated for being a walled garden for bein
Same thing with OpenAI. But it just seems way too early to be rushing into investigations of these companies. I mean, the AI market is what, 18 months old to two years old, maybe at most?
Well, look, I agree with you guys. This is just too soon to be opening these investigations. It's true that OpenAI and NVIDIA have leads in their
If a few years from now, NVIDIA still has whatever, 85%, 90% market share, and no one's even close to catching up, then maybe you consider it a monopolist.
Well, look, I agree with you guys. This is just too soon to be opening these investigations. It's true that OpenAI and NVIDIA have leads in their respective markets, but it's not clear that those leads are durable or that they're going to result in durable competitive moats.
Well, the company that everyone compares NVIDIA to, or asked the question about whether a historical comparison should be made is Cisco. So there's an article in Motley Fool saying, is NVIDIA doomed to be the next Cisco? There was one in Morningstar called NVIDIA 2023 versus Cisco 1999. Will history repeat itself? The reason they're asking these questions is that if you go back to the dot-com boom in 1999, to pull up the stock performance chart, you can see that Cisco had this incredible run. An
I think the difference here is that at the end of the day, networking equipment, which Cisco produced was pretty easy, pretty one-dimensional, pretty easy to copy data around. ... Whereas if you look at NVIDIA, it's these GPU cores are really complicated to make. ... So it's a much more complicated product to copy. And then on top of that, they're already in the R&D cycle for the next chip, right? ... So I think you can make the case that NVIDIA has a much better moat than Cisco.
Judge Sachs says there's one too many coincidences.
The sentence is that Scarlett Johansson is going to end up owning more of this company than Sam Altman. That's what's going to happen.
chat and kind of channel-based communication really took off. I had a bunch of thoughts about that, why it wasn't really that great.
there's three big innovations with this model right so one is omni channel which means text audio video and images second it's more conversational like it understands the tone of people talking and understand sort of sentiment in a way it didn't before and then the third thing which is really important is that it's just much faster and more performant than the previous version gpt4 turbo in the speed test they say it's twice as fast we've played with it at glue we can talk about that in a minute
And then if you look at Ripley, you know, half of that employee base is X benefits people. So he's done it again.
So when, when Lama 3 got released, I think the big takeaway for a lot of people was, oh, wow, they've like caught up to GPT 4. I don't think it's equal in all dimensions, but it's like pretty, pretty close to pretty in the ballpark.
I think the whole industry is waiting with bated breath for the release of GPT-5.
self-driving is really really hard and we know that tesla has been spending years getting to this point and then google as well so i'm not sure why there'd be more than two or three companies that can do self-driving
the problem is it was just too expensive i mean uber is still quite expensive and the most expensive piece of it is the human driving the car it's all that labor cost
it is faster and cheaper than using chat gpt4 but the context window is smaller
as of this moment in terms of what's been publicly released i think it's fair to say that open source is largely caught up with open ai
well i still think that open ai is ahead because the scuttlebutt about chat gpt5 is that it's amazing and it's a big improvement over gpt4
if you're able to charge for the ride purely based on fractionalizing the capex and that capex isn't even that high because they're making these robo taxis pretty cheaply now and you're able to get so much more utilization out of a car
i would say the only issue they have that's a real long-term issue is just the the chinese competition companies like bdy are ramping up production of knockoff products at low prices and so managing the competition with china is probably the only one of these issues that's i think probably a long-term issue for them to deal with
i'm personally really curious about the optimus robot i mean that has the potential to create an entirely new market and bring about something that we've only seen in science fiction
tesla's products are amazing they seem to be really executing well there
self-driving is really hard and we know that tesla has been spending years getting to this point and then google as well so i'm not sure why there'd be more than two or three companies that can do self-driving
this is why you know bring up this tweet by naveen rao who is a founder who created the company mosaic ml which is sold to databricks or unicorn outcome and he says i don't think everyone has comprehended the massive disruption and distortion that's going to happen in the gen ai market due to llama 3. moats will be destroyed and investments will go to zero just like everything in gen ai this will all happen fast so you know it's a similar reaction to what chamath said which is we have a open sou
it is faster and cheaper than using chat gpt4 but the context window is smaller i think it has only an 8 000 token context window so that's something that the open source community is going to need to work on is you know rolling out foundation models have a bigger context window nonetheless the point is that at least for now until open ai comes out with gpt5 which is supposed to happen soon the open source community has kind of caught up with the top closed source model which is open ai
And then Intel launched the Gaudi 3 AI chips for mass production in Q3.
Yeah, this was a big project that, uh, you know, Facebook started, you know, back in 2009, right? So it has been over a decade, which is incredible.
successful have been broad horizontal platform plays like android this is as vertical as it gets this is
i think from a strategic point of view i agree this this deal would be odd i don't really see the connection to the google ads business
successful have been broad horizontal platform plays like android this is as vertical as it gets this is
i just looked up how many customers hubspot has hubspot has 205 000 customers as of the end of 2023
if you think about your top of funnel if you're one of the customers of hubspot using this google adwords is just one of a number of channels yes that's right so you could be getting your leads
And so you think about like all the dominoes that would have fallen if Microsoft had continued, maybe if like Bill Gates had continued being CEO. And there would have been no Google, there would have been no Yahoo. They would have controlled the internet. They would have controlled the internet.
I mean, who would look at the launch of Google Gemini and say, I want that? That launch was a total fiasco.
Well, isn't that what Google's doing with Android effectively? Exactly. It's like... It's exactly right. You can have your own version without Google search if you're willing to put up with all these headaches.
Like Jamal said, even if Google Gemini were great, you'd still want to invest in having your own thing because it's such a strategic technology. Why would you ever outsource it to your main competitor? But in this case, you know that Gemini was terrible. It was a fiasco. And so the story makes no sense. I just can't believe it's true.
I actually think just to give the government lawsuit some credit, I actually think it's good to hold Apple's feet to the fire and make sure they're not engaging in anti competitive tactics. One of the things I've said previously on the show is that I think the government's been making the mistake of going after bigness for its own sake. And I don't think that bigness in and of itself is bad. It might be a reflection that the company's done an incredibly good job. And that's why it has a lot of c
I haven't read the filings, but I read some of the press coverage about it. I would say based on the press coverage that I read that there's not really a smoking gun here. At least the press hasn't reported one. And what I mean by that is, let me give you a couple of examples that were in the press. One is that apparently the filing made a point about when Tim Cook was confronted some time ago by a user saying when I try to send a video by text to someone with an Android phone, it just doesn't w
I still have very mixed feelings about the idea of just the TikTok ban. Because, look, you're talking about an app that 100 million Americans use for something like 90 minutes a day. So, people obviously get a lot of value out of this. I've yet to see the hard proof that this app is under the control of the CCP. I mean, I know that allegation was made. I can understand why people make it.
So that would be like ByteDance. Okay. ByteDance is a Chinese company.
in the example that you gave, Jason, this new product was only at 13%. So there's still a long way to go, but the potential is clearly there. ... Devin is, I guess you could call it an agent-first approach, and I think that's very cool for generating new software projects.
I think she's probably concerned that if she comes right out and answers the question as directly as she could, that it could be a problem for them in all these lawsuits that they're now facing.
I think it's pretty clear that OpenAI trained Sora using available data on the Internet, and that probably included YouTube.
my interpretation of that answer is that she is hesitating because she doesn't want to make a statement against interest.
He put in the first 40 million. Do we know what other people put in? It was most of the money, right? Yeah, it was most of the money.
not only are we going from nonprofit to for-profit and open source to closed source, he was specifically concerned about all of the benefits of AI accruing to one powerful big tech company. Now at that time, he thought it was Google. Now it's Microsoft. There's not really that much of a difference. He never wanted all the benefits of AI in the hands of one really powerful tech company. And Microsoft is the most, it's now what, the biggest company in the world by market cap. So this is like the o
I think OpenAI is in a little bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. To go back to Freeberg's point about the nonprofit sitting at the top there, remember what created all the problems when Sam briefly got fired as CEO and then came back is they had these directors from the nonprofit world who didn't really seem to understand how startups worked. Either they fired Sam for no reason, which was kind of incompetent, or they had a really good reason but didn't communicate it prope
If you can start a company as a non-profit using pre-tax dollars and then all of a sudden convert to for profit, then why wouldn't everybody do this in order to circumvent paying taxes? And I think that's another, I'd say, valid and interesting point that he's made.
i also wouldn't underestimate the bias so you know everybody there is not everybody but it's a very liberal culture it's a monoculture so when you're swimming in that much bias it's hard to see
the statement that we got really doesn't cut it one of the use the word problematic yeah exactly they're describing it as a glitch or a bug it's not yeah it's a much deeper problem and so therefore you give it gives no confidence that the solution is going to be pursued in as comprehensive manners as necessary
sundar says from the top that we're going to be on the forefront of diversity and inclusion because he personally believes that and that's the way the social winds are blowing and they think it's good for the company on some level
i think that if you're sitting in those meetings with a dei commissar present and you know or you have suspicions that the ai product is not working right are you really going to speak up and risk the fate of a james day more of course you're not right so you're right freeberg that it's a structural problem that there's probably a low-grade fear that's pervasive through the organization and no one's willing to say the emperor wears no clothes
what i've heard about google is that every meeting above a certain size has a dei person in it i mean literally probably so it's kind of like in the days of the soviet union their military the red army would have in every division or unit there would be you know a commander or lieutenant
yeah i have an elon exception okay it's about the founder we're in our portfolio allocation we say this much early stage this much late stage this much elon elon exception yeah i mean you you have to be so dogged to to want to take something like this on because the good stuff happens like you're saying freeberg you're seven eight nine ten as opposed
their moat appears to be substantial the wall street analysts i've been listening to think that in five years they're still going to have 60 something market share so they're going to have a substantial percentage of this market
i think there's a lot of reasons to believe nvidia is different one is that if you look at nvidia's multiples they're nowhere near where cisco's were back then so the market in 1999 and early 2000 was way more bubbly than it is now so nvidia's valuation is much more grounded in real revenue real margins real profit second you have the issue of competitive mode cisco was selling servers and networking equipment fundamentally that equipment was much easier to copy and commoditize than gpus these g
if you looked at the big tech cloud performance in Q4, you could see that there's a bounce back in here. This is net new ARR added for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.
they have the resources to go big and AI. Big time. Which is very expensive. So yeah, so they are the leader.
I think that the big complaint about the Apple devices has a lot of capability, but it's still a pretty huge device to wear on your forehead. This is not really going to be comfortable enough to be something that people want to use all the time. I mean, there's also a question of use cases, but they're getting there with the use cases. In any event, I do think that Apple Vision Pro is, it's like I said last week, it's a useful prototype or proof of concept. And it will get better. So I'm glad th
I remember there was rumors about Sheryl Sandberg maybe getting offered the job or something like that. I remember he was going through production hell. He was sleeping on the factory floor. Yeah. And he was talking in interviews about how miserable his life was at that time. I mean, can confirm. Yeah, exactly. So, look, did he have leverage to basically say, you know what, let's just hire a CEO? Yeah, absolutely.
The only part of it that I think is really relevant is where Sorkin says that the milestones are crazy, meaning that everyone thought it was a pipe dream that the company would ever hit these numbers.
you have to look at it ex-ante, not ex-post. Nobody thought Elon could hit all these numbers back at the time this package was negotiated.
And if you, if you look at this through that lens, there will be some sort of negotiation and it might be age. Because when you look at this, really what Americans are upset about is the impact this is having on kids. We have a limit for the age of smoking, vaping, et cetera. And when these things happen, I think an easy concession that Zuckerberg and others will make is, hey, these products will be for 16 years old and up. That's my, that's the age I think it's appropriate.
Zuckerberg doesn't want to let these edge cases through. I actually believe that they are taking huge efforts at scale.
I do think that these online companies have been unfairly picked on in a sense.
Do I believe that Facebook is taking substantial measures to stop them? Yes.
I think that we're going to regret where this all leads because where it's going to lead if they do repeal Section 230 is towards greater censorship. All these companies are going to spend even more resources restricting what we can say and hear online, which is not the right direction.
watching a basketball game, it actually is quite compelling to have all the stats on the screen with you and you can kind of move them around.
He's also, by the way, a seed investor in Stripe.
That's why X, you know, formerly Twitter, is the best way to get news. It's the main way I get my information is because I can triangulate towards the truth by looking at my feed and I'm following a couple hundred people who I take seriously and you can kind of figure it out.
I feel a lot better about that because Slack got acquired, hasn't really innovated in a few years.
i'm predicting andrel for its roadrunner product which it announced last year and this is a drone interceptor so it basically intercepts drones it's built for ground based air defense and the reason i say this is because if you saw recently what was happening in the red sea with the houthis the u.s was having to use two million dollar air defense missiles to shoot down two thousand dollar drones and that is not sustainable so right now we have a huge problem with asymmetric warfare where our adv
the open AI board oust Sam Altman, like we talked about. Apparently that was driven by a couple of their nonprofit board members who were effective altruists. I think the failure of that whole debacle will put the nail in the coffin of the EA movement.
I have Jensen Wang, CEO of NVIDIA and king of the GPU. We talked about the Magnificent 7 but none was more magnificent than NVIDIA whose stock is up 235% and earnings and forecasts keep blowing doors off. Jensen has been planning this moment for many years before the whole AI frenzy took hold and NVIDIA is now reaping the benefit of that.
My biggest business loser is Disney. It seems that every aspect of Disney's business s**t the bed in 2023. I mean, all their majors theatrical releases flopped amidst a conservative backlash against its woke social stances. You may recall that the actress who played Snow White in the remake accused Prince Charming of being a stalker. Even their Marvel franchise suddenly had bombs. They had to fire Jonathan Majors, who was doing a fantastic job playing Kang in an entire franchise arc. They're goi
Yeah, it was, I mean, it's a high-quality company for sure.
I'm sure Adobe is not happy about the fact they got to pay a billion dollar breakup fee, which, by the way, was a really smart thing for Figma to negotiate.
Starlink is the only company that has that capability today. It's the only one that has that capability if you look forward a few years. It is by far the best at providing broadband from space, which is the best way to get into these rural areas.
Elon's response to this was, guys, OK, if you're going to cancel the contract for us, like just save the money because the competitors that you're giving it to have even less of a service than we do.
Starlink is the only company that has that capability today. It's the only one that has that capability if you look forward a few years. It is by far the best at providing broadband from space, which is the best way to get into these rural areas.
And so what happened is it used to be the case that Amazon could have a link in their app, at least directing the user to go to the Amazon.com website, and you could buy the book there and you could circumvent the rake in the app. And it was inconvenient for the user, but at least there was a way around it. Then Apple banned those links, then they banned the ability for the app to even message to the user what was happening. So if, for example, if you use the Kindle app on iOS, which I do all th
I can't speak to the details of Epic's case, but I do think they're doing the ecosystem a favor here by pushing back on these monopolies and helping to keep them under control.
Yeah, no, I agree with that. So first of all, these app stores are absolutely monopolies within their ecosystem, and Apple and Google Android are absolutely a duopoly within the mobile space. My experience with these types of monopolies or gatekeepers is that they exercise more and more control and extract more and more of the value over time. It's an iterative process in which they just keep, you know, extracting, keep taxing, keep imposing more rules on the ecosystem for their benefit and to t
these app stores are absolutely monopolies within their ecosystem, and Apple and Google Android are absolutely a duopoly within the mobile space. My experience with these types of monopolies or gatekeepers is that they exercise more and more control and extract more and more of the value over time.
I think Freebird makes a really great point, which is there's a difference between copying somebody's copywritten work, which would be a violation of copyright and using content that's available on the open web to train a model to create entirely new content. And I do think that AI models should be able to use the content that's available on the web under a fair use doctrine to train their models for the benefit of consumers. And I don't see a reason to try and tie that up in a bunch of copyrigh
OpenAI was on a trajectory to be one of the next great companies of Silicon Valley. I mean, it was, I guess they were working on a $90 billion financing round up from 30 just a short while ago. If you had asked most people in Silicon Valley what the next trillion dollar software company was likely to be, I think everybody would have said, OpenAI.
Remember what Brian Armstrong did at Coinbase? He basically just said, listen, we have a mission here. It's around crypto. We're going to focus 100% on this mission. And if you're not on board with this mission or want to capture this institution to promote other missions, this is not the place for you. Go do those missions somewhere else. And it works. He took a hit. The New York Times wrote their obligatory hit piece.
if you had never given Starlink to the Ukrainian government for free, voluntarily, you just volunteered it, then no one would be attacking you right now.
if you had never given Starlink to the Ukrainian government for free, voluntarily, you just volunteered it, then no one would be attacking you right now.
now there's a new government investigation of elon they're investigating him for supposedly tesla was going to build him a glass house which he has basically said it's ridiculous it's not true ... if you're going to investigate tesla over this ... they wouldn't invite him to the ev summit because they're not a union shop ... biden introduced the ceo of gm giving her credit for launching the whole ev revolution
this thing is so viral
well i think clearly the legal strategy that lena khan has been pursuing is not having much success in the courts i mean she just lost this big decision on the microsoft acquisition of of activision but that being said i'm almost starting to feel bad for her because although some of her legal theories may be flawed i do think that these big tech companies like google and microsoft do need to check on their power and so what i would urge is that lena khan needs to regroup maybe figure out a diffe
Seven stocks make up the most most of the gains this year, Meta, Tesla, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Apple.
The government led by Gensler is in a full assault on crypto. And the goal is basically to either destroy it in the US or drive it offshore.
what we're trying to highlight here is, uh, make sure that we can show that it's not just about retrieving information. It's about synthesizing it and generating new knowledge through these forms of synthesis.
And so that's the thing that's so amazing. Like when you talk about like the opportunities that are profound, like personally I think like creativity is one of the most amazing parts of humanity. Like our ability to imagine is magical and we're reducing the friction to imagination. And so imagine what can happen as you get these ideas and you can go from start to finish faster.
The magic gets unlocked when you're at 30, 40, 50 words, you know, uh, I'll walk you through an example of like how I got to a 200 word prompt that like is now part of my daily, daily process of like, couldn't have existed before.
there were literally thousands of people raising their hands yes you can't start i was scrolling through this in real time in the app i wanted to call them more people but it was just there was no way to do it this is something at scale they need to add to the interface
compared to what these things usually are which is a guy standing at a podium yes in front of his supporters compared to that this was much more interesting dynamic and engaging
once we started it on my twitter account in my twitter space it worked perfectly there was no problem and that's the recording that you can go on twitter now and listen to we had about 300 000 people contemporaneously in my twitter space i think mario had a couple hundred thousand but if you look at the numbers today there's already 10 million views for this thing
the desantis team were interested in potentially you know doing something different for their announcement ... they saw an opportunity to break new ground here in terms of presidential announcements by doing it on twitter spaces ... the room crashed it had over 700 000 people in it ... the engineers there told me that the previous order of magnitude was more like 100 000 not a million ... elon's account has over 100 million followers and that basically led to a new level of scale ... when you ge
Twitter's business model is advertising. Elon does not like selling advertising. She's really good at selling advertising. He's chosen a CEO to work with who's highly complementary to him in their skill sets and interests, and I think that makes sense. I think there's a lot of logic in that.
i don't see how it's a bullseye look at this so i just i just asked it can you give me a complete list of all the articles on sass that sax has written the last three years so now at least it's over the target those five articles and mentions are correct does chat gpt do that well no because the browsing plugin right but i'm just saying like they got a lot of work to do here on quality
so i asked it what has david sacks written about sas and then it says i'm a venture capitalist entrepreneurs written extensively about sas he's the founder of yammer okay that's true but then it says he's also the co-founder of we work not true didn't know that then it says sacks congrats says sacks has written a number of articles about sas including and then all five of those articles were not written by me it's basically like hallucinating like really strongly
i'm using this in real time and i do find the interface to be snappier than chat gpt
facebook was sales rose three three percent from a year earlier but at least that was an improvement because it's actually gone down for three straight quarters so yeah but you're down to you know single digit year-over-year growth rates nevertheless most these companies beat expectations so microsoft shares rose nine percent meta jumped twelve percent might be up more now and i guess google got a little bit of a balance and they all gave a pretty upbeat forecast the only one that wasn't upbeat
i think facebook was sales rose three three percent from a year earlier but at least that was an improvement because it's actually gone down for three straight quarters so yeah but you're down to you know single digit year-over-year growth rates nevertheless most these companies beat expectations so microsoft shares rose nine percent meta jumped twelve percent might be up more now and i guess google got a little bit of a balance and they all gave a pretty upbeat forecast the only one that wasn't
i think microsoft had seven percent year-over-year revenue growth google was at three percent i think facebook was sales rose three three percent from a year earlier but at least that was an improvement because it's actually gone down for three straight quarters so yeah but you're down to you know single digit year-over-year growth rates nevertheless most these companies beat expectations so microsoft shares rose nine percent meta jumped twelve percent might be up more now and i guess google got
the only one that wasn't upbeat was google where the cfo ruth porat said that the outlook remains uncertain
from the point of view of the people who are there, it was a triumph and it was exciting because of the data that was collected and the fact that this rocket even got off the earth and achieved this for four minutes
Let me just make the counter argument, which is that I think Google is caught completely flat-footed here, even though they shouldn't have been because they published the original paper on Transformers in 2017. They should have seen where all of this was going, but they didn't. OpenAI used that paper and commercialized it. And the proof of that is there was just a lawsuit a couple of days ago, or at least a claim by a former employee of Google who quit because he said that they were using ChatGP
I actually think that OpenAI has demonstrated now with these platform features, that it has a lead, a substantial lead. And I actually think that lead is likely to grow in the next year. And let me tell you why I think it's got a couple of assets here that are hard to replicate. So number one, user attention, I think they've now got, I would guess, hundreds of millions of users, and this thing has caught on like wildfire, must have been beyond their wildest dream. I think it even surprised them
I actually trusted it. I, I know that you probably should fact check it in a way because it can hallucinate, but the things that we're saying made so much sense to me that I didn't think it was hallucinating.
I think this is the most important developer platform since the iPhone and the launch of iOS and the app store. And I would argue maybe ever in our industry, certainly since the beginning of the internet. I think there was a question when chat GPT launched on November 30th and people started playing within December, what exactly open AI's product strategy was going to be. Was this just like a proof of concept or a demo? And they even kind of called it like a demo. And initially it looked like wh
The AI actually gave me some information about Jigsaw's point system. Again, the rewards that they used. Yeah. And it was just in text. So I said down below, hey, can you spit that out as a table? And it did instantly. Perfectly.
OpenAI doesn't necessarily have them yet.
I can't see myself going back now. I think this is just how I'm going to write all my blog posts is use ChatGPT as my researcher, as a writing partner, some cases an editor, but I'm definitely going to run it through.
the sec just sent coinbase a wells notice so i think it's hard to argue that there isn't a concerted effort now to crack down on crypto by a wide variety of government agencies and authorities starting with gensler at the sec who seems incredibly hostile to crypto
so the conversations we're all seeing in our chat groups with leading investors is why the hell would you keep your money anywhere but jp morgan or a top four bank
it's become more popular to pursue the stripe strategy of the sort of more smb... i tend to think it's a good strategy too
So that business will get worse if Microsoft takes a few hundred basis points of share. If Meta takes a few hundred basis points of share. If Tencent does, if a few startups do.
No, right now, if you look at Google's business, they have the best business model ever invented on earth ever for profit company. It just rains money. This is a business that this year will do almost $100 billion of free cash flow.
And this is why when Google did the demo of Bard, the first thing that happened was a stock went off 500 basis points. They lopped off $100 billion of the market cap, mostly in reaction to, oh, my God, this is not good for the long term business.
they kind of took a page out of elon's book in terms of what elon had done at twitter i mean not nearly to that extent because i don't think they needed to
if Microsoft, can basically clone the sort of the breakthrough innovative product, you know, let's say they do one every year and then they put a crappy version of that in their bundle. Yeah, 10% or 50% worse, but they give it away effectively for free as part of the bundle. And then they basically pull the legs out from under that other company. So it can't be a vibrant competitor. And then the next year, they'll just raise the price of the bundle. Right. And they've done that with Slack. They'
you've got google i'm sure will develop it through their deep mind asset
i do think that microsoft is a little bit unique uh in its ability to bundle so what so tamath is right about the power of the bundling uh what they do is i think it's called the e5 bundle they have all these products that virtually all enterprises use from office to you know active directory to you know there's like a whole long list of them and so what they've done is they've created one price for all of those products they sell as a bundle under a wall-to-wall enterprise license and what they
when they see a new competitor come along whether it's slack or zoom or or okta is they'll basically just clone it create a worse version of that product and throw it into the bundle and so now every single enterprise is getting the slack clone or the zoom clone or whatever for free and that has a huge material impact on you know it pulls the rug out from under those startups
when they see a new competitor come along whether it's slack or zoom or uh or okta is they'll basically just clone it create a worse version of that product and throw it into the bundle and so now every single enterprise is getting the slack clone or the zoom clone or whatever for free and that has a huge material impact on you know it pulls the rug out from under those startups
It's a good, well, it is a good, yeah, that was a good first step.
well you kind of mentioned this uh i picked bob jpeck who's the former disney ceo he was eiger's handpicked successor three years ago then the pandemic hit which shut down the theme parks but then i think the big mistake was allowing himself to be malmout by woke employees into picking a fight with desantis over the so-called don't say gay bill uh that caused desantis to retaliate by threatening the special privileges that disney enjoys in the state and then he had eiger undermining him behind t
i gotta say i think freeberg nailed it uh i gotta say that the business saga of the year was elon buying twitter first the liberal media was up in arms that he might do it then they insisted that he must complete the deal in any event he he did ultimately buy the company and now he's affecting his changes i agree that's the big business story this year
Saw net new ARR decreased by two thirds in the most recent quarter. That's a huge slowdown. But it implies the need to cut over $2 billion of sales and marketing if it wants to maintain CAC payback at reasonable levels, i.e., you know, the customer cost, customer acquisition costs. And then he points out that over time, this could become a vicious cycle. Layoffs lead to seat contraction, lead to sales slowdown, lead to cost cutting, lead to layoffs and repeat.
Like, it's like... Well, look, I mean, if you define what Elon is, you know, doing there as, you know, acting as a judge arbitrating on every little content moderation decision, is that a great use of his time relative to what he could be building at Tesla and SpaceX and doing on behalf of humanity?
I think this policy with regard to planes specifically is going to be futile. Yeah. It's going to be at best harm reduction, because as long as there's many ways to publish this information... No, it's on Reddit. It's pointless. It's on Facebook. It's on Facebook. So listen, I think this whole policy on Twitter is a little bit of a red herring. I think the real issue, the real underlying issue is that the FAA is publishing these ICAL numbers, thereby making every plane personally identifiable. I
but there needs to be a principal basis for a censorship decision. And it needs to be applied to everyone equally. And so far, we haven't seen any basis for believing that he's not applying this principle equally. I mean, still very early. Whereas the former rulers at Twitter were indulging their personal bias and personal preferences and who they were banning. There were two standards of justice. If you were someone who has allied with them, it was almost impossible to get censored no matter ho
Now, is Elon just as arbitrary and capricious as the former executives who are running trust and safety at Twitter? I don't think so, for two reasons. Number one, he's promised transparency. He said that when we ban or shadow ban an account, there has to be a reason for it. And you have to be alerted to it. In other words, none of the shadow stuff. No shadow. You need to be informed. You get your speeding ticket.
Well, look, I mean, if you define what Elon is, you know, doing there as, you know, acting as a judge arbitrating on every little content moderation decision, is that a great use of his time relative to what he could be building at Tesla and SpaceX and doing on behalf of humanity? Then no, clearly not. But if you define what he's doing in the larger sense as restoring free speech to the most important town square social network, hopefully thereby inspiring other tech companies to move in the dir
jack dorsey denied that shadow banning was happening including at a congressional hearing i believe under oath so either he lied or he was lied to by his subordinates i actually believe that the latter is possible i think i don't think it's true with sbf it might be true with jack because he's so checked out furthermore you had people again like vijia gatti again tweeting and repeatedly stating we do not shadow ban and we certainly don't shadow ban on the basis of political viewpoints so these p
suppress libs of tip talk based on our hate policy libs of tick tock hasn't violated it we're going to
then they also said we certainly this is their emphasis do not shadow ban on the basis of political viewpoint and what the twitter files show is that is exactly what they were doing they in the same way
what's been discovered here let me boil it down for you this is an ftx level fraud except that what was stolen here was not customer funds it was their free speech rights not just the rights of people like jay bonacharia and dan bongino to speak but the right of the
stripe cutting i mean stripe is probably the single highest quality i think it's probably the most valuable private companies now spacex oh well spacex okay but but like software pure software company they had a 14 cut
within hours of elon taking over the company on friday there was a 4chan attack where basically people from this message board created bots to post hundreds of thousands of spam messages that contained racist words and epithets and within hours this has been detected and yoel who runs the the trust and safety implementation he met with me and jason and elon directed him to shut it down ... the truth is elon hasn't even had a chance to change anything about the content moderation policies he's po
i think they're doing all the right things below the line but there's this one major big red flag above the line that has to be probably better explained by them if they want to have long-term shareholders ... the problem is that this above the line thing though has become so big it could sink the business you know it's very very hard to see an investment case for a quarter of a trillion dollars of money in the door before you really start to see something magical
if you look at the light purple bar facebook in the last two years have spent 25 billion dollars on reality dabs and they said that they're going to spend you know meaningfully more in 2023 and then sustain that investment for a while so if you do a little bit of math if they spent you know they spend around 4 billion a quarter right now so 16 billion a year that'll go to 25 billion in 2023 and then they'll sustain that what that means is that over this you know 12 or 13 year life of reality lab
facebook's stock have reacted in the same way and for a very long time it actually looked like it was right until about september 21 and then obviously this thing fell off a cliff and the reason why it started to fall off a cliff was somebody started to notice that hold on a second even though you're buying back all these shares the bottom of the funnel right you're leaking all of these shares to all of these new employees why are you hiring so many people and this is when people started to unco
do i think that trump should be allowed back yeah i do
PayPal was built largely during the downturn.
google had google videos but they just couldn't come close to catching youtube because the flywheel of creators wanting to be where all the viewers were and viewers wanting to be where the most content was it was just impossible to catch
what google in effect got when they acquired youtube was a flywheel i mean it was a brand and it was a network effect and that yeah the network effect was massive it was off to the races
what google in effect got when they acquired youtube was a flywheel i mean it was a brand and it was a network effect and yeah the network effect was massive it was off to the races and i remember google had google videos but they just couldn't come close to catching youtube because the flywheel of creators wanting to be where all the viewers were and viewers wanting to be where the most content was it was just impossible to catch but that organization was relatively tiny at the time it was acqu
google the android already does it but ios does not
slack kind of came out of nowhere and there was no one to really oppose them because you know all the promotional activity we had done around yammer just ended because again we we didn't we didn't have the incentive that was created by the sales organization just to explain um the pricing thing
when they see a new competitor come along whether it's slack or zoom or okta is they'll basically just clone it create a worse version of that product and throw it into the bundle and so now every single enterprise is getting the slack clone or the zoom clone or whatever for free and that has a huge material impact on you know it pulls the rug out from under those startups
so i think that's a pretty sound progression
so as we talked about they're at around 400 450 million of arr right now and then the left axis uh is expected value basically this was their uh valuation and it's it's in purple and it obviously goes up to the 20 billion or 22 billion that adobe just paid you can see e was the last round they did in 2021 where they were valued at 10 billion before that they were valued at 2 billion in 2020 and then you know the series c i think they were valued at like 440 million or something like that and the
they promise the founder that you'll be left alone that usually lasts two years that coincidentally that's usually the length of the the earn out or the the golden handcuffs
i don't think that figma should do that here now that i've had a chance to think about it the reason is this that you have to think of pricing as not an element by itself but as sort of the most important element of a go-to-market strategy and there's no way that you can basically reprice figma completely as part of some other bundle and expect not to create massive disruption to your go-to-market organization
i think this thing is going to close i think it closes
i don't see how these things aren't competitors with each other to some degree
adobe's paying 50 times current arr
the numbers i don't see a huge slowdown here um i mean look once the numbers get into the hundreds of millions it's really hard to maintain the same growth rate you're compounding off such a large base that it's just inevitable you can't keep growing 3x year over year once you're at 200 million of arr but the fact they got first from 23 to 77 and then 77 to 210 and now 210 they're at let's say they're at 400 now and they're going to be at 450 by the end of the year plus it's um it's pretty amazi
so my point is i've seen a lot of sas metrics and i can tell you this ar ramp is phenomenal you know i'm sure people have kind of heard about the triple triple double double that's kind of what vcs want you to do they want you to triple two years in a row then they want you to double two years in a row and so forth this company did way better than that i mean 700k to 4 million is a really fast ramp and then 4 million to 23 million is incredible that's like you know over a 5x and then they did ov
i think that's that's basically an overreaction i you know i know all the news is basically on how adobe is paying 50 times and that's no longer the multiple the multiple is more like you know eight nine ten times for high growth sas companies there is truth to that but but i think it misses some important details about how fast figma is growing
i can tell you what's going to happen because i kind of experienced this with with yammer when microsoft bought my company 10 years ago and by the way i'm not critical of microsoft at all they were an extremely high quality acquirer that lived up to all their promises and did everything they said they were going to do i think if you ever get an offer from microsoft you should take it really seriously i think like i said i think they're a great company great acquirer but i can tell you what happe
but jason you should also ask the next one which is if they did it to twitter which is kind of small what about the big honeypots of users google apple facebook tick tock snap and what about countries outside of just india what about the united states
yeah i mean i think i mean jack on the board was the highest right he owned two or three percent
the claims he's making are far broader than the bot issue um and far broader than the issues that elon's raised so i agree with you about that however i don't agree that what he's saying isn't specifically helpful to elon's case so what he said is... zacko's disclosure argues that by reporting bots only as a percentage of mdao rather than as a percentage of total number of accounts on the platform twitter obscures the true scale of fake and spam accounts on the service a move zacko alleges
these are very serious allegations
as a result of this he's basically saying that twitter executives committed securities law violations by making material misrepresentations and omissions and sec filings
he also alleges that they went behind his back to have a third-party consulting firm uh their report scrubbed to hide the true extent of the company's problems
he also says that the company's executives ordered him to knowingly present cherry picked and misrepresented data to create the false perception of progress on urgent cyber security issues
he's saying that parag and his lieutenants repeatedly discourage him from providing a full accounting of twitter security problems to the company's board of directors they basically prevented him from producing a written report
he said that twitter executives don't have the resources to fully understand the true number of bots on the platform and their executives are disincentivized to count them properly because doing so would negatively affect their bonuses
what he's basically saying is not only is there a bot problem there is a cover-up of the bot problem he's accusing the company of positively nixonian tactics
the fact that they're citing my tweets in which i criticize twitter's management it's just petty and vindictive
these guys are totally chasing at straws and it leads me to believe they're they're wasting my time and twitter's money
randomly sampling 100 accounts a day is not a serious effort
new twitter ceo checklist includes eliminate all bots and fire useless employees
these nitwits have walked tell lifton billing them probably two thousand dollars an hour to subpoena tweets that are public brilliant brilliant strategy
There are more unicorns founded by ex-PayPal people than ex-Google people. Even though at sort of the PayPal mafia, if you define it as the pre-IPO group of people who worked at PayPal, there were only a couple of hundred in the Bay Area.
There are more unicorns founded by ex-PayPal people than ex-Google people. Even though at sort of the PayPal mafia, if you define it as the pre-IPO group of people who worked at PayPal, there were only a couple of hundred in the Bay Area.
What I'd say is that you would think that the friendships would make it like this sort of calm, friendly environment. PayPal was actually a very, um, frictional contentious environment. And, but I do think that there is a trust element to it, which is we were constantly debating what the truth was and what we needed to do and what the big risks to the big business were. And so we were yelling. In fact, Peter, when he hired me, he told some of the other people on the team, look, I want to hire Da
the answer is that at PayPal, we recruited our friends to work at the company because literally nobody else was willing to come work at this crazy startup. Peter recruited his friends who he had gone to college with at Stanford. Max recruited his friends from U of I. That's how the initial team was recruited is through friendship networks. But it wasn't like this was some exclusive club. It's just that nobody else wanted to be a member.
You're going to have to be Coinbase or be Disney. You're either going to have to give in to the mob and suffer the consequences, or you take the short-term pain of doing what Brian did and you basically realign everyone around the mission.
I don't think he's going to survive the year after what just happened at Disney. And it's because he gave in to the employees, took sides against the governor in Florida and the legislature, and they just ripped away Disney special privileges in Florida.
you could fire half those people or more that'd be absolutely no impact to the business in fact they probably run better because right now they probably got too many meetings happening with too many people
these people on the board what skin in the game do they have most of them are these directors who are just appointed and it is it's like a club these guys it's all big back scratching club
these are guys who love the power they derive from being on this board we know twitter has enormous cultural power these guys they enjoy all the benefits they get... they enjoy being in this very exclusive club that wields enormous power over our culture and they have no incentive to give that up
parag knows that if elon buys this company he is out of a job his head is on the chopping block he is fired right away... so he is incentivized to fight this thing whether it's in the interest of shareholders or not
let me make the case for the clear cut for the clear cut case here
PayPal had this situation back in 2000, the year 2000, right after the dot-com crash. We were burning $10 million a month, like fast. We had no revenue and no business model. Okay. And we had said the service would be always free. We had four months basically of life. And we pulled up on the throttle. And what we did is we basically introduced paid accounts. We started charging transaction fees. And we cut the cost structure of the company. And we made that last $40 million last a lot longer tha
the traditional standard of consumer harm doesn't really capture that sort of concept of market power for these free ad based services, right? Because there is no pricing.
these big tech companies, the fangs, they have way too much power in the marketplace. There are now gatekeepers over the internet that control all these powerful platforms. And broadly speaking, it is time, I think, to basically have some limits on those powers, make sure they don't abuse it.
we need some some of the transparency that jack dorsey repeatedly promised at all the congressional hearings remember when he got hauled up there he promised that they would give more transparency about the way that their algorithms worked where is that and it hasn't been delivered up they promised it now jack dorsey's skipped out of town and there's a new guy in charge
we need to know how these algorithms work because they are pressing their thumb on the scale you know of debate in the marketplace of ideas by suggesting that some ideas are sketchier than others
is it a way is it sort of a passive aggressive way for snowflakes at twitter to like label people they don't like and sort of suggest they're vaguely disreputable
Tesla bought a bunch of crypto, very well for a while. And then it went down. And so they, you can actually read their financial statements. It took a loss.
if where you wound up was on youtube the intellectual dark web or you know worse um that's bad right and there was a specific case uh with ben shapiro and if you watch ben shapiro's content and listen he pushes the envelope on being anti-trans and you know edgy sort of positioning uh socially you might then get um like milo yiannopoulos who went from being like a kind of a cheeky blogger when i met him in the 2000s and to being like straight up like hanging out with white supremacists you know a
now you have facebook and google basically coming out saying in order to go back to the office you have to be vaccinated now it's a little bit of the soft it's sort of more of the the iron fist beneath the velvet glove because they are offering testing so if you don't get vaccinated you can get a test every time you go to the office but unlike israel which is making you pay for it you know you know facebook and google are so rich they're going to pay for it
What you're almost saying is that this is a benefit to Robin Hood to pay the largest fine because it, it says to the, you know, to the politicians, look, we've already been punished in this, you know, maximal way. You don't need to layer it on top. So in a way it's better for Robin Hood that they paid 70 million instead of 10 million.
Yeah. So it should be a black eye for the company, but the reality is that they're happy to pay the fine and just, uh, move on. So they don't have this issue hanging over their heads anymore. And now they're going to be able to IPO at like a 50, 60, $70 billion valuation. And so for them, it's a sort of cost of doing business.
my experience at paypal really changed my thinking on this because paypal it was a startup that launched effectively as an involuntary app on top of the ebay market at that time ebay had a monopoly on the auction market and that was the key sort of beachhead market for online payments so we launched on top of ebay they were constantly trying to dislodge us and remove us from their platform and really the only thing keeping them from just switching us off was a was an antitrust thread we actually
i think there's something analogous happening with apple and google and the app stores we had a congressional hearing pretty recently in which you had spotify on other apps complaining about what apple was doing to them saying they are making our service non-viable with the 30 percent rate that they're charging you remember bill gurley had a great post about this saying just because you can charge a 30 rate doesn't mean you should right now we're seeing this blowback from this massive 30 rate an
especially in the case of amazon is look you've got this company amazon that controls essential infrastructure aws the whole distribution supply chain going all the way from the port to warehouses to uh to logistics and distribution that is going to be owned by a scaled monopoly player you have a con massive economies of scale it's pretty clear they're going to dominate that and what they're doing is systematically going category by category and using the monopoly monopoly profits they make by o
they're going to start using the coinbase blog as a forum basically as a media publication for for crypto related things and the fact check part is that when the popular press gets crypto wrong which they do frequently in coinbase's view coinbase is going to call them out and correct them
potential to lead to huge systemic changes
I think companies in startups are increasingly have to choose whether they want to be apple or whether they want to be um coinbase or shop 5 for that matter
i think companies in startups are increasingly have to choose whether they want to be apple or whether they want to be um coinbase or shop 5 for that matter... founders are going to have to make a decision do you stand up and take a brian armstrong like position or a toby position
the bosses of apple caved into this pressure they were total cowards they never even gave agm the chance to explain himself they never asked him what did you intend by this passage what were you trying to do and by the way they knew about this book when they hired to say it's even worse they knew about the book
apparently the coinbase's ban on politics in the workplace and their refusal to submit to new york times interviews did not prevent them from creating an 85 billion dollar company
This is basically like a wealth transfer from Google and Facebook to the traditional media and to traditional publishers. ... I think it's bizarre to me that that Facebook and Google wouldn't be able to use hyperlinks. And I'm kind of worried about where that goes.
I think that look, I think I don't think Vlad's a bad guy. I think he's a good guy. I think Robin Hood wanted to do the right thing. I don't think they had any reason to want to freeze their own users out of their accounts. I don't think they wanted to do what they did. I think that there was a little bit of a blind spot there on his part in terms of understanding the consequences of that freeze out, right? Because it did break the buy side of the trade for Wall Street bets. And then that that b
No, because he'd be throwing his own company under the bus. He'd have to say, Robinhood securities is telling Robinhood, the broker to post this money because Robinhood securities is being told by their downstream clearing. So it's like, you're, you're, you're saying it now. So better to say it, uh, at the time it all happened and it would have diffused the whole crisis, right?
if you go back like 50 years ago, you had Walter Cronkite saying, and that's the way it is, everyone believed him. And then the New York Times was the paper of record and people believe that's fit to print, right? Exactly. And so but that's been steadily eroding for decades. And now the internet is the final erosion of that. And, and look, I think that's, it's not an alter, it's not a bad thing. Because in order for journalism to work, you need all the journalists to buy into a certain code of j
i actually think that if the choice is simply between you losing money you the company or your customers or lose your users losing money i think that's an easy choice i think the company eats it look what airbnb did during covet right when they had a whole ton of cancellations because of covet they ate that the they ate all those deposits they
the fact they didn't do that and the fact that they didn't post a blog explaining the reasons behind the choice and in fact vlad's now had to go back three times to explain it i think that's created a world of problems for them
I mean, right, that the trades are, the order flow is going from Robin Hood to Citadel. They're not going to be caught flat footed. They're on the other side of this trade. And so, you know, I just think the house always wins. I'd be real careful about getting into it at this point.
And so the stock got beat up over the last couple of years as people stopped going to malls and stopped buying stuff in stores and everyone thought the company was going to die. And so these guys observed that maybe there's real value in this company and it's making money.
the trades are, the order flow is going from Robin Hood to Citadel. They're not going to be caught flat footed. They're on the other side of this trade. And so, you know, I just think the house always wins.
But the thing that I think kind of stinks about it is the point that Chamath is making about who is doing the trade execution for Robinhood. Those trades are flowing to Citadel. Well, that's part of it. That's part of it, but 47%. But who is now on the short side of the trade? Citadel went in and bailed out Melvin and Citron. And so they're on both sides of this trade. Now, how does that make sense? Well, Citadel.
And it was really bad to pull the plug on the- They wish they didn't have to, I'm sure.
the town square is now owned by Facebook and Twitter.
You also had the de-platforming of Parler, which is sort of the Twitter alternative, by Google and Apple at the same time, and Amazon.
i had another smart business move i just wanted to point out which was salesforce buying slack i think it's brilliant for them i think they're going to look back on the 10 they paid of their capital for slack and i think slack will be more important than salesforce ultimately in business it's a huge the most important brand there what a crown jewel what a great what a great move by benioff and and brett taylor and i just think what a great asset totally be better for them than youtube is for
I had another smart business move I just wanted to point out which was salesforce buying slack I think it's brilliant for them I think they're going to look back on the 10 they paid of their capital for slack and I think slack will be more important than salesforce ultimately in business it's a huge the most important brand there what a great what a great move by benioff and and brett taylor and I just think what a great asset totally be better for them than youtube is for
spacex is doing amazing as well uh we saw the launcher starship the other day and i have just been mesmerized by all these unboxing videos for starlink which you can see on youtube and it is just magic that you can unbox this little satellite dish plug it in and you have broadband internet from space
his company tesla had something like a 8 or 10x gain so over a 500 billion dollar company of course the products are awesome it joined the s p 500
we ended up selling the company for five times as much to microsoft
i think there was um something in the df dna of snap slack that actually i see really very commonly uh in the dna of of sort of producty sas companies producty sas founders which is they kind of have a reflexive dislike or distaste for sales and they resist the idea of sales
if you were to nitpick just one one little thing that i think they could have uh done faster it would have been embracing enterprise sales
stewart and the slack team did a phenomenal job 30 billion dollar exit um seven years of just about flawless execution
it definitely i would say it scared us enough to sell to microsoft
they were interested in buying the company for around 250 million dollars
benioff had a bunch of like engineers who wanted to build it in-house and so they they vetoed doing a deal and so they ended up building chatter and they threw the 300 engineers at it and they basically spun their wheels for a few years
he launched his product to be kind of a clone of yammer inside of salesforce but he was initially charging fifteen dollars per seat we were charging like five and so they massively overpriced it and and they event and then they they were on this like slippery slope where they kept lowering the price to compete better with us and then finally they realized that they should just give the thing away for free as a strategic move
it's sort of like a feed inside of the the crm product it didn't really succeed as a standalone collaboration product and so we won that battle
Uh, I mean, I think from like a politics standpoint, it just depends what your goal is. It's like, no, I like, I don't think it landed well in the moment here, but I mean, it's, I think it gets back to what the goal is. Like the goal here is, is clips for Ted Cruz. Like, I think the real question is like, what, what could consequences of all of this be for the platforms? Um, interestingly, I think, you know, kind of along the lines I was saying earlier about Twitter trying to be orthogonal here,
It was a knee jerk reaction on the part of employees at Twitter and Facebook to to protect the Biden campaign from a story that they didn't like.
I fully agree with you that these sites should not be publishers. The reason why the New York Post story should be taken off, they should be platforms and they cross the line. I would say that this New York Post story is the reason why people are up in arms about it is because what Twitter and Facebook have done is basically said they're going to sit in judgment of the media industry. And if a publisher like the New York Post puts out a story that doesn't meet the standards of Twitter and Facebo
if you repeal section 230, you're going to make the situation infinitely worse. Because section two, what is the response to these companies going to be corporate risk aversion is going to cause them to want to hire hundreds of low level employees, basically millennials to sit there making judgments about what content might be defamatory, might cause a lawsuit, they're going to be taking down content all over the place. And you know what will happen? That's gonna be a worse world.
I think that would have been the story today, if it weren't for Facebook and Twitter making censorship the story.
And now I think there's going to be a third mistake, which is that conservatives are looking to repeal section 230.
Twitter and Facebook overreacted.
i also genuinely like the manifesto um and i think you know his argument kind of boils down to three components i think number one that having these debates on every issue or whatever the issue du jour is pulls the company's focus away from its core mission which he really emphasized and um you know that mission mission is challenging enough in its own right um second he was saying that and this is something i've said before as well which is just that politics is just increasingly divisive in ou
this compromise solution with larry ellison and oracle that makes no sense to me this idea that you know ellison will own 20 of the company but nothing else really changes it'll still be based in china uh a chinese company it'll still be chinese engineers based in china who you know and they still own 80 of it i mean how does that really address the the data security
this law will have very adverse consequences for their business.
this law will have very adverse consequences for their business.
the reason why twitter is sort of uh you know loved on the left is is precisely because they gave in to the mob and they've you know they've started uh taking down accounts that the mob doesn't like or or or you know fact checking them
it's a little bit like uh twitter fact checking uh the politicians they don't like the digital it's it's a it's a form of like soft censorship
Yeah, I mean, call me old-fashioned, but I'm very much in favor of free speech. And I'm against censorship. And, you know, fact-checking your politicians you don't like is basically bias. It's soft censorship. I mean, they're being very selective in who they decide to fact-check. And, you know, there's no good way to do it, right? I mean, there is no truth API that they can just plug in to fact-check people. The way that you deal with bad speech is more speech. I think it's a line from Justice B
I mean, it's kind of gotten a little bit buried inside of Microsoft, but you can certainly still get it and, uh, no, we love it.
And actually, I remember emailing David, David Sachs. Yeah. At the time, he was at Microsoft now. He's like, hey, David, have you heard of this thing called Slack? He's like, no, it won't work.
So, I mean, PayPal was really a pioneer in all these areas.