Fruitfly Hard Takeoff, Washington on AI Risk, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Thijs Simonian, Alex Heath & Guy Oseary, Mitesh Agrawal

(01:54) - Washington on AI Risk (23:07) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (34:23) - Fruitfly Hard Takeoff (41:07) - Thijs Simonian discusses his exploratory robotics work as an OpenAI intern, including connecting Codex to an inexpensive, open-source robotic arm that can plan, paint, monitor its progress, and improve through iteration. He highlights the potential for affordable robots to handle everyday tasks such as sorting mail or cooking, while noting current limitations in speed, cost, image processing, and safety. (55:31) - Alex Heath & Guy Oseary. Alex Heath discusses his transition from veteran technology journalist and Sources podcast host to venture investor at Sound Ventures. He explains how years of interviewing leading founders sharpened his instinct for evaluating companies and outlines his continued plans for insightful podcasts and newsletters covering technology, AI agents, and entrepreneurship. Guy Oseary is a music executive, talent manager, and technology investor who manages Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers and previously managed U2. He is also a co-founder and general partner of Sound Ventures, the venture firm he started with Ashton Kutcher, and previously served as chairman of Maverick Records, where he helped build a label that sold more than 100 million albums. (01:27:29) - Mitesh Agarwal discusses Positron AI’s development of memory-focused inference chips designed to offer scalable, cost-efficient alternatives within Nvidia’s ecosystem. He covers rapid semiconductor development, strong demand from hyperscalers and AI labs, manufacturing and deployment challenges, and the importance of open-source software and customer-specific optimization. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, September 11th, 2026. Wall-to-wall coverage in the Wall Street Journal, remembering 25 years ago, the cover of the Wall Street Journal, every single article, except for one, was about, of course, the World Trade Center. The headline that day was "Terrorists Destroy World Trade Center: Hit Pentagon in Raid With Hijacked Jets." Bin Laden is on here. The only story that, you know, attacks raise fear of a recession. Very interesting time capsule. Highly recommend picking up a copy of the Journal today and taking a trip down, you know, in memory of the tragedy.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  The one piece of news that broke through this day that was not related to the terrorist attack was Xerox reached an equipment financing agreement with GE Capital that will let Xerox erase about $5 billion of debt. Very, very odd. Every other story, I mean, the market was closed. Actually, the internet got a very interesting shout-out here. It says telecom systems restrained as terrorist attacks in New York and Washington knocked out telephone wireless services across the Northeast. The internet proved the most reliable way to communicate following the attacks, as the phone system sagged from severed lines and an extraordinary volume of calls. Corporate executives used email to find employees across town or across the country.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  So, interesting to see, but there's so much to go into and lots of interesting retrospectives across all the different media organizations. I don't know that I have a particular, anything to dive into there, but it's interesting for you to go and dig into. Anyway, moving on, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy-to-use corporate cards, bill pay, and accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place, now with musicals. Anyway, what are the AI doomers actually proposing? That's the question I was trying to answer this morning for a while.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  20-year sentences.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  That's one. So, yeah, there will be this weird translation layer between the thought leaders and the people that are writing policy papers effectively, and then what actually gets implemented? What gets, you know, votes, basically? Can be wildly different, because to get the populace to actually support something, you need to wrap it in a different, different structure, potentially. AI 2027 predicted that this month, you know, late in 2026, Congress would wake up, and that is in the Journal. Congress is suddenly waking up to the AI doomsday threat. And so, this is happening all over the place. Was it Matt Damon who was caught on TMZ being interrogated about his thoughts on AI risk?

• 2:49John Coogan?

  There's now protests. I believe AI 2027 predicts a 10,000-person anti-AI protest by the end of the year. I was trying to figure out how big this protest in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, earlier this month was. I think it came in sub-10K, but certainly tracking to it. It was about 150 people at this protest in Chapel Hill, but just two ooms away from the prediction from AI 2027. And AI 2027 and the sequel, AI 2040, frustratingly vague about impacts outside of the AI industry.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  So, there's a lot of really, really amazing predictions about agentic capabilities and the amount of compute that will be marshaled, and like, even lab revenue. But there's not as much predictive stats and calls around, like, what'll it do to GDP? What'll it do to employment? What will, you know, how often will people actually be using this? What will it actually be good at? The diffusion question is still sort of left unanswered, but they're clearly taking it very seriously. There's a huge press cycle around this, and the Journal says that Congress is suddenly waking up. So, I wanted to dig into, like, what the actual proposal is, because the joke for a while has been just like, everyone, when they're pressed on this, they just say, "We gotta talk about it.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  We gotta talk about this." AI 2040, Daniel.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  One thing that stands out, it's interesting to me that there's been so much more seemingly grassroots mobilization around the anti-Flock movement, D-Flock, when you compare that, and you don't see.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  You don't see videos of people with, you know, 100,000 likes, saying, like, "Here's how to cut power to your local data center."

• 4:48John Coogan?

  Not for X-risk reasons, but you will see a post that's just like, "I don't like AI image generation because I'm an artist." And that will get a lot. So, there is a lot of anti-AI sentiment.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but what I'm saying is, like, the sentiment, the anti-Flock sentiment converted into actual, physical actions by a bunch of just otherwise normal people.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm saying we haven't seen that yet. With data centers, maybe we don't.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  But it's notable.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Much harder. Data centers are in remote locations, highly fortified, there's fences.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 5:25John Coogan?

  Just walk in.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Flock cameras are in your, you know, on your street, maybe.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. So, yeah, there's degrees there. But AI, what's weird is that, yeah, I mean, you're calling out grassroots taking down the data centers. The AI 2040 proposal is effectively the opposite. It's like hardened the data centers even more. And the actual proposal is super concrete in AI 2040, and it's very interesting just to hear about how they want to slow things down. So, the thing that I think a lot of people online who are like, "Yay, an anti-AI sentiment that's going viral," are going to be depressed about is that, like, this is not "Stop AI" at all. AI 2040 is like, "Keep the inference flowing.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  The current models are great. Also, let's keep doing capabilities research, but we're just, we just want to reach superintelligence by 2040 instead of 2028 where we're not necessarily prepared." So, they want it to be highly controlled by governments, nation-states, highly secured, and there's a whole bunch of very, very tactical recommendations that they make around that. So, the first mechanism is an AI pause. They want to pause training. They don't want to do any more new frontier training runs or R&D experiments. And to enforce this, they're calling for, to apply inference-only verification to essentially all major AI data centers.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  So, anyone who has more than 10,000 H100 equivalents, roughly $100 million of equipment, and that is like, pretty easy to figure out. You're just like, "Big building over there. Let's send the inspector inside. Oh, says Nvidia on all these chips. Count them up. There's over 10,000 of them. You gotta apply for this permit. You gotta do, you gotta tell us what you're doing, right? Very easy to enforce, at least in the United States. And with an international body, you could kind of do the same thing internationally." So, the whole goal, you can only inference the current models, and you gotta verify your workloads with an independent auditor, probably the government, maybe there's some sort of non-governmental organization that's doing this.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  You know, there's a whole bunch of different solutions that you can pull from across nuclear nonproliferation work that's happened in the past. Major countries, they want them to declare AI compute inventories. Tell everyone, not just your local population, but also the international community, how many, how many warheads you got? How many H100 equivalents do you have? Where are they? Everyone shares this. That's going to be a really tough sell, because international agreements are really, really tough sells. It's much easier to have a groundswell of support for something that happens in America. America changes. We have a system, but we don't really have the international rules to quickly implement that in a way that doesn't, doesn't allow for a lot of defection.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  But they want to know who has compute. So, major data center owners and semiconductor supply chain companies would be required to turn over sales records. Who'd you sell those chips to? Where'd they go after that? Foreign inspectors would do routine chip counts physically at site, onsite at facilities. Large transfers of chips would only be allowed to go to registered audible counterparties. There's some interesting networking-specific components to this proposal, too. They want to physically remove high bandwidth east-west networking inside of data centers, so you can't do large distributed training runs, but you can still do inference. So, again, anyone, all the anti-AI people who are like, "Oh, yeah, I don't want LLMs around anymore."

• 9:07John Coogan?

  Like, these are not your guys. They're not fighting for that. They are fighting for stopping the next training run, which is probably aligned. Those are overlapping circles, but it is not moving backwards in time. It is merely slowing down at this current moment. They also want to install passive optical network taps on anything leaving the data center to independently verify traffic. For any new AI R&D data centers, they want entirely new facilities built from scratch.

• 9:38John Coogan?

  With nation state level physical security and verification. So they're saying like, okay, we're like the data centers that are built, they can inference the current models, your Astra's, your Fables, like your, your Grox, like those can run because we, we, we can deal with those, we can harness those, we have control over them. We're going to continue to align them and, and that's a solvable problem. But for the next run and the one after that, and the one after that, as it gets crazier, we want it in a new building, built inside a Faraday cage. So you can't communicate it from the outside. We want a bunch of physical controls. It's like going to a nuclear facility, highly verified who gets in the building and when, air gap communications.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  This is one interesting like proposal that they have that really shows how deep they thought this through. They want the R and D data center to be connected externally. If you want to communicate with it and you want to tell it what to do, okay, train the next running or do whatever, they will have a bandwidth capped connection at one meg per second. So you can send little instructions, but if you say, send me the weights because I'm taking them somewhere else, it would take you like five years to actually trade it. So interesting like hardware solution to this. I, I, you know, how, how do you actually go and implement that? There's going to be a whole bunch of other things, but interesting that they're thinking about like the width of the pipe.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  So it'd be very obvious if you're stealing the model weights because it's like, wait, this one meg pipe has been at full tilt for months. What's going on here? Someone's taking the stuff out of the data center. They want it front, when frontier model weights move from an R and D facility to an inference facility, they want it to be placed on physical storage devices encrypted independently by both the U S and China. So both countries have to sign off and physically escorted by representatives of both countries to the destination. It's a tall order. That one's a tall order for sure.

• 11:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:38John Coogan?

  And they actually want frontier models to be made deliberately larger than compute optimal. So they want the weights to be a hundred terabytes instead of honing them down to something that's just one terabyte that could actually be moved around a little bit easier. There's a bunch of public disclosure proposals in there, restrictions on various trade offs. So labs would have to share the model specification, the fraction of compute devoted to internal AI use. So you don't get a lab that's just internally using way better models than what's available externally. They want qualitative descriptions on how, how, how powerful models are being used internally. Restrictions on how big the gap can be between the best internally deployed model and customer facing products.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  This has been a common discussion point with like the rollout of Mythos and Fable and Astra and Astronext and all these different models where people have said like, oh, it's really unfair that like this lab gets a better thing than I do. We should be on even footing if we're both going to be competing in web design or we're both going to be competing in legal. Like what, why, why can't I buy this product from you? And so there's some overlap there with like the broader business community, which I thought was interesting. And

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, first of all, this, I mean, a lot of this tracks with the kind of regulation that, you know, we had pushed for, you know, beginning about two years ago around podcasts.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  You know, wanting podcast studios to be air gapped.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  Wanting, you know, Faraday cages.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  Round podcast studios.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  A locked briefcase with an SMB seven, SM seven B in it. And in order to unlock it, Patrick O'Shaughnessy and David Senra both need to give you codes to independently verify that this podcast is worthy of being recorded.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  I like that one.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  It just makes sense. So high level value valve they see as being like the most effective in controlling the speed of capability improvements is compute caps. So there is a world, and we're going to the Bernie Sanders thing because it's already getting like sort of twisted, but the, the, the, the, the big hammer is just chip controls and data center build out slowdown. That's the easiest thing. And I think that's like the biggest valve that they're going to be, that we're going to see twisted around to actually slow down capabilities. And so the goal is to allow models to get better mainly by adding hardware rather than

• 14:03John Coogan?

  inventing better algorithms, which can leak to secret projects. So the goal is like, okay, well, we know that this model is capable of this, so we want this much compute over here. Okay, you've done well, we're allocating more compute as opposed to this one weird trick that AI doomers hate.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  So the goal here is not to go back in time.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  Because when you look at, I mean, anytime you have, you know, really, really hardcore government regulation and international coordination around issues like this, you're going to have a bunch of unintended consequences.

• 14:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  And one thing that feels obvious around this, if, if these policies were to be rolled out is that you would effectively create an incentive for millions of individuals or groups globally to be in secret, like trying to find entirely new breakthroughs that are.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:59Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and again, this incentive already exists, but it kind of pushes a lot of the idea that humans are just going to be like, oh, I'm not, I'm no longer going to try to create the god model because

• 15:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  Like there's this, you know, big global organization that's, that's sort of policing it.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  I just

• 15:23John Coogan?

  I mean, that's the same thing we see with nuclear non proliferation. There's always a discussion about what countries are getting the bomb and when, and how far along are they and wars break out over this and it, yeah, like the game's not over just because you create a framework. But there is at least a, I mean, we've avoided world war three, so you could say that a lot of like the vast majority of nuclear non proliferation work has been successful, even though there's been a ton of examples of people trying to divert around it. In fact, it's like been the backbone of geopolitics for like 60 years has been like who gets the bomb and what, what, what chips are on the table.

• 16:01Jordi Hays?

  But, but ultimately GPUs and computers are much more wide, you know, infinitely more widespread than nuclear materials.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you still got to marshal them all together. Yes, there's some weird scenario where there's a Python script that's AGI that can run on your laptop, but I think most people are convinced, at least in this crowd, that

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  Scale.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  That scale is a prerequisite. And I mean, we were, we were joking about like how it would be so like we, SSI, Ilya Sutskevich's new Neo lab is recently got a big cluster from Nvidia. And we were like, the most bullish thing you could do, if you're this secretive Neo lab would be like, we're actually selling our compute because we've discovered a more compute optimal way to reach AGI and we don't need a lot of compute. But of course, even Ilya is like, it's time to scale up. I need more compute because it seems like even if he's taking a completely orthogonal approach to, you know, innovation and research, he still needs a lot of compute. And so it does, it does feel like everyone is sort of with the consensus that it's going

• 17:11John Coogan?

  to be a big building with a lot of energy, big heat signature, definitely visible from space and, and pretty simple to, to track, at least in the short term, until people start building crazy underground facilities and then you're back to, you know, nuclear non proliferation. But the, their goal is at least to like, you know, try, you know, try.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then the, the other side of this is

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Not a panacea.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  Does it, does AI development actually become something closer to the Manhattan project where, you know,

• 17:40John Coogan?

  That's what a lot of people

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  A hundred, a hundred researchers are working with the government in secret because you can't just assume that other countries are going to slow down or do any of these things.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. And but in, in general, I think the proposal is, uh, don't go back in time. It's definitely not stop everything in its tracks. It's a slowdown with the goal of scaling gradually. They do actually want to reach super intelligence. They just want to do it by 2040, hence the name of the project. So the goal is gradually scale into top human expert capability around 2035. Now, a lot of people are saying, oh, we might get this by 2029, 2028, 2027. And they see that as too fast, so they want to push that out to 2035, then wait five years with AGI and then unlock super intelligence in 2040. This is their initial proposal.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  Of course, there's a lot that could change over the next decade. And, and I think, I think like to zoom out overall, if you're worried about X risk, the AI 2040 plan does feel like a concrete path towards slowing down. The conversation definitely gets dragged down into P doom estimates and trying to narrow down exactly how a human extinction scenario plays out. And that can be, that can, I, I feel like that's almost a sideshow because in a democratic society, in amongst humanity, like it, it doesn't really matter the mechanics of getting to 10% P doom or any of those, which is like, if everyone feels that way, something will happen. This is a concrete plan of what that might look like, and that's valuable to understand in this case.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  So for the safety skeptics, it's easy to see how this level of control over what you can do with computers is authoritarian or anti libertarian, even if we're talking about hundred million dollar computers, there's a lot of people that say like, I should be able to do math on my computer. I can do whatever I want. Let me do cool things. I'm excited about this. That limits your freedom. It might create regulatory capture for a few major players. It might crash the stock market or delay economic gains that come in the good ending where alignment is solved and X risk plummets. You can imagine a situation where in a few years, if X risk fades into the background, you're like, yes, there's still a risk, but it's the same risk that we face every day with like an asteroid hitting Earth.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  Like no one, it doesn't really change anyone's behavior. That would be sort of the good ending, in my opinion. So it's a balancing act. And for most of these slowdown proposals, I personally have a hard time blackpilling about them in the sense of like, if the, if all of this gets implemented. How frustrated will I be? Like, the models are good. I would like better models. I want safe models. But at the same time, like, there is this massive capability overhang. The current models can do a lot of interesting work. We're finding new uses, even for, like, non-leading-edge models. There's a lot that can be done. So I, I, I don't believe the, the doom doomers who are dooming about what the doomers are planning. I find that unconvincing

• 20:50John Coogan?

  right now. But people are starting to lay it out more. Brad Gerson, Jensen Huang, David Sacks are talking about the other side of this equation. But, but I haven't, just like it's hard for some people to concretize the Terminator scenario, I also have a hard time concretizing the, the, we didn't, we didn't race and we're unhappy about that. I guess you could say, you know, the housing scenario. There's been other times when we brought in too much regulation, slowed things down too much, and been like, ah, like, this was really not the right move. But at the same time, I think we, we have a lot that we can do with the current technology, that there's still cause for optimism, even if

• 21:33John Coogan?

  something like this gets, you know, universally voted on. It wouldn't, I, I don't think it would be the worst thing for, for, for companies and consumers and businesses and all sorts of different folks.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. There's also a big question around what, does, does, do the 2040 people have a point of view on robotics and, and physical AGI? Because it seems like if you, even if you pause, like, you know, efforts towards RSI, well, if we add billions of robots into the world that are just running on today's model, that also presents today's, like, you know?

• 22:11John Coogan?

  I don't think they're worried about that.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  I don't think they're worried about billion robots with GPT-6 level intelligence and years of alignment work that is currently happening. That's fine. It's the next, next, next thing, the superintelligence, the thing that might have its own goals. I think, I mean, we're talking to someone from OpenAI's robotics team, hooking up Astra to a robot, a paintbrush and a camera. We talked about it earlier, painting. I don't think we're at a point where that poses a risk. It's the next model. It's the model with its own volition, basically.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  Which a lot of people still aren't seeing. They're just like, yeah, like, the models keep getting better, but they seem to follow your instructions, sometimes too much, and then you need to worry about the paperclip scenario. But, but, but, but it's not that they, they want to do their own thing necessarily. I don't know. But people are going back and forth on this. Clem over at Hugging Face says, sorry, but asking Jacob about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change. Not saying it's necessarily uninteresting or wrong per se, but let's keep things in perspective and hear from the full range of expertise across the ecosystem. And Nathan Lambert says, banger. What was, what was our take? AC guy might be right about climate change.

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, my AC guy would be like, I don't really know about that, but I just want to make sure when you're hot, that we can run this AC cool.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. I guess it's, yeah, the AC always seems, seems.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about all that, I don't know about all that mumbo jumbo, but, you know, when it's a hot summer day, I don't want you to be worried about the heat, brother.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  I like that. Yeah, this is, this is kind of an unnecessary shot at AC guys. Yeah, AC guys are important. I don't know. It's funny. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System text. What did Bernie Sanders have to say? Is this, is this real? Entities will, shall, shall be subject to the corporate death penalty and persons shall be, shall be subject to more than 20 years, not more than 20 years in prison, if they don't pause AI development. That seems pretty easy to comply with. I don't know. I guess, how do

• 24:37John Coogan?

  you define AI development? Is prompt engineering AI development? Then you get caught because your model sort of did a little prompt engineering in the final stage, and then you're guilty of this, like that. Yeah, it could be a negative knock-on effect, I guess. It does seem aggressive. But his overall proposal is banning artificial superintelligence, so no person or entity may develop or deploy superintelligent AI systems. He defines artificial superintelligence as an artificial intelligence system that exhibits or can easily be modified to exhibit capabilities that match or exceed human cognitive performance and capabilities across a broad range of domains or tasks. Because it sounds like the mission statement. It

• 25:22John Coogan?

  sounds like the explicit goal of, of like 17 different companies right now. AI, AI system, or AI systems that have sufficient capabilities to plan and execute the disempowerment of humanity. Okay, that's a good one. I like that. I don't like overthrowing or undermining the US government. So strongly in favor of banning that. Pausing advanced AI development until a new federal AI regulatory body is up and running, and then the new cabinet-level federal agency will monitor frontier AI systems at all stages of the life cycle, supervise the removal of dangerous capabilities, and supervise the destruction of artificial superintelligence. We're coming for it, which is similar to the.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  Corporate death penalty is a line that you don't hear a lot, right? Usually, usually these companies just, you know, go bankrupt and wind down. But corporate death penalty goes pretty hard.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  It's kind of metal.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of, it's kind of metal.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, you kind of got me with that one. Yeah. Rough, rough, rough situation. We'll see, we'll see where it goes. Jamie Cox over at, over at Fluid Stack, the co-founder of Fluid Stack, a compute provider, shared his convictions, sort of pushing back on a lot of this, saying that he thinks America should build more, they're pro-freedom, pro-democracy, they believe AI will bolster human flourishing, we support simple, clear, enforceable regulation frameworks that set simple requirements proportion to capabilities and risk with clear responsibilities

• 27:01John Coogan?

  and no unnecessary barriers to competition. Yeah. The, the real, you're going to see a lot of pushback from people who are like, the, like, the regulatory stuff is going to be like, these 10 companies, and I'm going to be number 11, and I'm basically getting the corporate death penalty then, because I didn't make the cut to be one of the regulated, one of the approved companies. I'm still early in my stage. So there's a lot of nervousness, I'm sure. But Will Monitis said, we believe AI will make everyone rich, healthy, and free. His novel and interesting comms from the frontier. He's, he's endorsing this. And I, I agree. I like, I like this, I like these convictions. I think it's generally

• 27:43John Coogan?

  like, a positive direction to move in, not a direct response to the, the proposals that are going out. But we're going to get a whole lot more of them. Where'd you want to go to next?

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  Over on TikTok, they're sharing a photo of the whistleblower and saying, in every worldwide disaster movie, there's a dude that looks just like this that nobody listened to. And he really does look like an actor. He does look like an actor here.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, he looks good. But people are, people are all.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  And please stop calling him Scary Potter. I've been seeing people, I've been seeing people over on X calling him Scary Potter.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  That's the goal. The goal is to, is to wake up China, wake up Congress, wake up everyone.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  DoorDash has entered the conversation.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Indeed.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  They say, two years at DoorDash, I do not say this lightly, we are extremely close to the burrito arriving before you decide you want it. We are not, we are not asking for a ban. We are asking for a pause. I don't know why they would ask for a pause.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  That seems like a very, very aligned to humanity.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  And to their business.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  Which I think is fantastic.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  The doom is very much contained to the frontier lab work. Everyone in the application layer who's applying the models, diffusing them, they're like, I just, I can't get this thing to work right. I gotta get, I gotta get forward deployed engineers to teach people how to use this thing. Everyone deeper in the stack is like.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  Jim Rainbow over Jim O'Reilly.

• 29:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Or Jim Riley.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jim Riley.

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Jim.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  O'Reilly, I'm a part.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  Jim Riley over at Charleston AI says, it's a whole lot of mumbo jumbo.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  That was your word.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  He just, he's just happy to get, you know, eight hours back.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, everyone deeper in the supply chain, like Jensen and all the different semiconductor manufacturers are, are not particularly on this side. And then you also have Wall Street, who's just like, what's the enterprise acceleration? So lots of different groups around the table that need to be brought on board to this movement. The discourse truly is fascinating. Let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password reset.

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  That's a new.

• 30:05John Coogan?

  Too much diet coke.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  New, new approach.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  New. Okay. So what is Tyler Cowen calling for?

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  He's banging the table, saying, bet on this.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Tyler Cosgrove. Are you named after Tyler Cowen? Is that, is that your namesake? Tyler Cowen says, if you have very pessimistic fears or predictions about AI, name the market prices that will support or confirm them. This is what taking this seriously means. And I love Tyler Cowen. I'm not sure this matters, because if you, if you, you're not going to be around to collect it, right?

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is what, what deep, deep dish enjoyer says. Tyler, why would short-term existential risk affect market prices in any meaningful way? Spell out the exact mechanism. Contracts that pay out if everyone dies aren't worth anything to me.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he's just, he's calling for like, you know, he wants to like, make a falsifiable claim. Like, is this, am I able to tell if your claim is like, true or false? And so it's like, very hard with these scenarios where like.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  Isn't it an unfalsifiable claim, though? Just by definition? And like, you just have to like, accept that and move on?

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but then it's like, so hard to have any, like, real discussion.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Was, what, was nuclear any, any different? Like the threat of nuclear apocalypse, the threat of World War III. This was a very motivating factor for decades. Most of the 20th century, people made real decisions based on it, based on where to do business and where, where, where the, where the conflicts were going to be and the motivation for nuclear treaties and nonproliferation and how we.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  You can make financial decisions, uh, like thinking about nuclear war, right? You have, you have a bunker. That's like a decision you make.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  Bunky?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Or is anyone making like AI bunkers? No, because they think it's going to be so totalizing that the bunker actually doesn't do anything.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. So if you think it's so totalizing, then you don't make the bunker. And so saying, hey, you don't have a bunker is not, is not proof that the person doesn't believe what they're saying.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I like, I don't know the answer to this question either, but.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's odd.

• 32:12Speaker 02

  It seems like, I don't know, maybe there's some question you can ask that is falsifiable.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't know. I think you just gotta, you just gotta believe these, like this crew that like that's what they believe and, uh, you know, like they, they believe it. There, there is the other side of this, which is Paul Cristiano, uh, who, uh, is, has been worried about risk. He recently just joined the board of OpenAI and, um, and, uh, Tyler Cowen, you know, has this quote, if you're a doomer, why aren't you short the market? And Paul Cristiano is, uh, 2X levered long and he's short the, isn't he short the, the, the bond market or US treasuries, right?

• 32:56John Coogan?

  So he has 5% of his net worth in Tesla, 90% of his net worth in AI bets and 100% of his net worth in normal investments, no Tesla options. Uh, that sounds like a scary place with lottery ticket biases and the crazy Tesla investors. Uh, and then you, uh, Eliezer Yudikowsky says, am I correctly understanding you're 2X levered? And Paul Cristiano says, yeah. And so, um, he says he's personally short the US, the, the US 30 year debt. I think that just means you have a mortgage. I, I'm pretty sure that's like, if you have a mortgage, you are effectively short the US, uh, 30 year because you have, you have sold that debt and you got the cash effectively. That's how that works, but, um, still it makes sense because you, if you have enough

• 33:40John Coogan?

  money, you could pay off your mortgage, go long that debt and short the market on a relative basis. So, um, but, but again, that's not, this doesn't seem like a doom based bet. This seems like this bet also pays out in just like the good ending and like AI is real and delivers value. So your AI bets perform well, the market performs well and money slides from US debt to data centers and AI build out debt or something like that. So, uh, he is putting his money where his mouth is, but it doesn't feel like a representation of like doom by any means. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces and now with AI agents.

• 34:25John Coogan?

  Uh, speaking of AI agents, people have been creating AI agents of fruit flies. Have you seen this?

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  Okay. So where should we start? Because I want to set the table on what, what is actually going on. Um, Tyler, do you understand this?

• 34:42Jordi Hays?

  Break down, break down what people are cooking.

• 34:45John Coogan?

  We've seen this before. We've talked about this before, but what's actually going on with the, with the fruit fly? Because now people are taking the fruit fly all over the place.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Yes. I'm understanding is, is Google basically mapped out, uh, all of like the neurons in a fruit fly.

• 34:59John Coogan?

  Fruit fly. So they probably took a, took a deceased fruit fly and put it in like a mass spectrometer or something that can, can investigate the brain at a very, very, like a deep, high, high powered microscope effectively.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, like the entire.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  3D, they got the entire structure and now people have been able to recreate that in software, in a simulation.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Yes. I think in theory you can like replicate all of the, the flies, like decisions or whatever. It's like movements.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 35:30Jordi Hays?

  And this is notable because many people have said I have, I have the mind of a, of a fruit fly.

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  I have the, they've, they've said I have the intellect of a.

• 35:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. So now they're going to put it to the test to, to see which performs better, the simulated fruit fly or just Jordi Hays, who we got right here.

• 35:46Jordi Hays?

  Organic, farm to table Jordi Hays.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  So, so now that this is out and the code is out and you can run this fruit fly in simulation, however you want, people are having, uh, they, they're doing all sorts of experimentation. So, uh, Kevin said he trapped the fruit fly in his rabbit R1. When he shakes it, he can see its brain, brain's escape circuit light up. Um, by the way, our consciousness is physically defined, which is why our physical things like drugs, neurotransmitters or events alter or initiate or end our consciousness and things like sleep, hallucination, waking or death. Computer simulations are also physically defined representations.

• 36:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think what, what ends up being unsettling and, uh, weird about this is, is if, if it just, just purely you being human and doing this, uh, is, is probably not good for your own soul. Uh, and you know, imagine, imagine you have a fruit fly in a box and you're shaking it and you're like, look, it, it wants to escape, right?

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 36:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm not a huge fan of small insects. I don't really want them around that much. Um, but when they're in my house, I try to, you know, if a spider's in my house, even if I know it might want to take a nice bite to me.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm still gonna, you know, try to transport it out of my house and, and put it back into the world. I think it's, I think, uh, it's, it's not good for your, for your soul to be, you know, a merchant of death.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  Sure. And yet.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  Situation.

• 37:20John Coogan?

  And yet if you're playing a real time strategy game and you highlight a bunch of soldiers in this simulation and you send them on a charge that will result in their virtual death, you might not feel.

• 37:36Jordi Hays?

  But those soldiers opted in to riding and dying with me.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 37:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 37:41Jordi Hays?

  This fruit fly is just sitting there, John.

• 37:43John Coogan?

  So they made the fruit fly play Doom. What about if you play Doom? You are killing a demon who's simulated? Is that immoral? Like.

• 37:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, that, well, is that demon trying to kill you?

• 37:57John Coogan?

  A lot of it comes down to like the fact that it's simulating a, the actual representation of the fly makes it a lot more concrete than just, oh yeah, it's a, it's a 3D model in a Python script that just says, if you see a, if you see a character shoot at them in the simulation. But we're, we're clearly starting to grapple with like these odd moral questions of if you're simulating something, then the next step is a couple order of magnitude, but you get there and you can simulate a human and you could talk to that human and it would do everything the human does. Does that human have rights and agency as an ethical, moral agent? Or is it merely just a simulated, uh, just a really good computer simulation? It's just existing on transistors.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  So you don't need to feel any moral weight about anything that you do to it. Uh, I agree with the, just the vibes based analysis that like torturing a real fly, torturing a virtual fly, probably just don't be in the business of torturing anything. You don't need to overthink it, but people are, the, the real debate here is like the question of, you know, are LLMs sentient? Are they moral? Do they, is there a moral weight to the, uh, to, to, to synthetic intelligence, to artificial intelligence? That's what people are debating here. And I'm sure the debate will continue. Who knows if it will ever be ended, but they did teach it how to parallel park, which I think is cool.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  Uh, interestingly, last night I had Astro use computer used to play a video game that I very much enjoy playing called Bellatro. It's sort of like a modified poker game and I don't feel like I was torturing the LLM by that. I feel like I was giving it a treat. I was like, hey, instead of doing my taxes, you get to just chill and play a video game. Uh, it did very well. It won. Soul was not able to win and it was really fun because I would like pop in while it was using the computer and kind of armchair quarterback and be like, hmm, is it making the right decision right now? It felt like, uh, felt like a coach coaching like a kid on the soccer pitch or something.

• 39:56Jordi Hays?

  I had a fun, I had a funny moment, uh, last night. Uh, I was, uh, on my racing simulator, uh, comparing, uh, asking chat GPT for, uh, for, to, to compare my times, uh, Laguna.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, to, to just other, other, you know, what, what would best in class be like? What's beginner like, et cetera? Um, and it said, if you want, I can help you, uh, you know, cut, cut some seconds off of this time.

• 40:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and it, and it was like, why don't, why don't you take a video of a full lap?

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Jordi Hays?

  So that, and I'll analyze it for you. And I was like, yeah, yeah, dude, I bet, I bet you'd love to just.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  Chill back and watch track.

• 40:39Jordi Hays?

  Hang out and, and watch track footage.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  Pretty soon it's gonna be like, you want me to just get in the seat? You want me to just take over? Cause like I'd really.

• 40:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, computer use in iRacing is something I'm, I'm gonna experiment with this weekend.

• 40:50John Coogan?

  I'm down. I'm down. Take, take half my quota, my monthly quota, just play games, chill, do whatever. It's a nice treat.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  I've got some bank resets.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  That I'll put to work.

• 40:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, we have our first guest. Um, I don't want to mispronounce Tyler, how do we pronounce his name?

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Tees?

• 41:08John Coogan?

  Tees? Let's bring him in. How do you pronounce your first name?

• 41:12Speaker 03

  It's Tice.

• 41:13John Coogan?

  Tice, like nice. That's right.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Like nice.

• 41:16John Coogan?

  Well, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 41:19John Coogan?

  Tell us about your, your role in robotics and also some of your recent work, uh, hooking these models up to robotic tools and, and infrastructure. Uh, it feels like we're going to be entering a boom of like people, they ordered the Mac mini recently. People are going to be ordering 3D printers and robotic arms and doing hack projects. Super excited for like the DIY world to explode over the next couple of months, but, uh, let's start with just like your most interesting projects recently.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm incredibly excited, uh, for that. And, and that world's definitely like just around the corner. So I'm, I'm super excited about that. Um, yeah, I work here on the robotics team at OpenAI. I'm an intern and have been doing lots of exploratory projects. And this is just one of the projects I, I basically noticed that our models are really good at painting and doing various like computer use tasks in software, like you were just talking about, and learned a lot, uh, that you could actually basically connect these into physical robots in the real world and, uh, wanted to see how they would do that sort of drawing and tasks like that as well.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If you can, if you can paint in Google Calendar with calendar invites, probably translate that, uh, to, to the real world.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's really like everyone is doing everything. Like I've seen people paint the Mona Lisa in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, and then you ta- take it back and you can do Excel and MS Paint now if you want with computer use. And it's like everything becomes everything. Um, what, what, what is actually the, the important like precursors to a good experience? We were talking to a Y C founder who built a, a humanoid robot with some basic claws for like under two grand. And it feels like there's, there's an importance of some on-device, you know, API or some on-device models in some case, doing some slam on-device. Uh, but then there's also just, uh, tools that give you a very primitive interface that

• 43:18John Coogan?

  might be kind of clunky, but it doesn't really matter because you can just vibe code your correct interface. But what, what have you liked? What are you excited to, to put in the repertoire of tools?

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Like within robotics?

• 43:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, within robotics.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, I think that of course, like a lot of these demos and stuff is very early. I think like the whole space and exact modeling and methods are still definitely being figured out. Um, but I did really like the fact that you're sort of able to hook in the intelligence of like what the models are able to do, as you can see with all that painting stuff and plug it into something physical in the real world and get it to do things. Um, there's probably going to need to be like some combo right now, like, uh, running, basically my experiment here is, is plugged right into Codex, uh, and that's of course probably quite expensive. Um, definitely pretty slow. I think these paintings took between one hour and like two hours, depending on, uh, the methods exactly that the model like chose

• 44:15Speaker 03

  to use here. Uh, but yeah, there's definitely a lot of improvements to make, but it's quite cool to see what you're able to do already.

• 44:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you balancing trade-offs between speed and reasoning effort? I was, I was, I've been testing computer use on a bunch of video games that I just mentioned. And, uh, there's like, you know, like part of what the fealty AGI moment is, is when the cursor is moving at like at least near human speed, uh, and, but then also you don't want to be making a bunch of mistakes and just, uh, so that's this like balancing act is really key. Did you try multiple reasoning effort levels across different paintings and see like noticeable results? Can you see qualitative differences in speed and quality based on models that you pick?

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's like a lot of different ways to sort of go about doing this. Um, and I initially started out these experiments by just telling the model like here, I, I, as you can see, I actually have the bot behind me, um, over here. It's currently painting a TVP and logo.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  Oh, cool. I love it.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  But it has, it's, it's doing its best.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Good start.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  We got basically this camera up here.

• 45:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  That the model, uh, which is connected right into the Codex over here is connected to.

• 45:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  And the biggest challenge is that images are like quite large.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  Uh, to process, especially like for the model, there, there are a lot of tokens.

• 45:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  Um, and the loop of like taking an image, doing, taking an action, taking another image, taking an action. That's the thing that has taken a lot of time. So what I ended up doing, like it's not directly doing like image, like one small movement, image, one small movement. And I think like that would probably result in the best performance for like general robotic tasks and stuff. But like at the moment, it's basically taking an image, uh, writing a plan and code of where like what it should do and where it should go next after it has done like a lot of the calibrations, maybe a slower sort of methods at first.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  And then after it has that plan, it executes it and then monitors it in the background, like taking images every second or few seconds and watching like to make sure things are going well and like making it small adjustments to the plan throughout. And I found that has been like a, a good balance of speed here.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  Have you been, uh, thinking about like compression on the input? You men, you, you mentioned that the images are lots of tokens. I, I, I have this monitor that renders at like 5K resolution. And I was like, this is probably going to be really slow for computer use. I should like run this game in a window and give it like a 720P input because that's probably enough information. But I'm wondering like how important the, the, the resolution to speed and quality is that you've seen.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's very important. Um, in this case, for like a lot of the early demos, I was using like 512P, just compressing it just to make, yeah, make sure. Cause I think the model is just pretty much, uh, it's pretty much solved like a lot of the perception challenges here. So it's like really good at, uh, understanding what's going on, even with like a lower quality photo here. Um, but in this case, like with the longer planning and, and sort of like it plans sort of a minute of action out, uh, it's less important. The like specific resolution probably, but yeah, as we go to more like faster, much more smaller loops of like control, it's definitely going to be important.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  Jordy?

• 47:30Jordi Hays?

  I, I'm super excited about, about this project mainly because it feels like we're right on the precipice of, of, uh, sort of like what, what I, what I think is going to be a big breakthrough is like a sort of a deep research moment for robotics, like simple robotics use cases where deep research for so many people was their first time using agents. And the idea that you could type out a prompt and then get back what would have been maybe, you know, at least hours of human work, right? Somebody reading all these different sources and combining that information into a document that's, uh, that, that has a consistent narrative and, and understands the, the right information. That was just such a big moment because a lot of people were saying, wow, I can't believe

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  that, that, uh, that the AI was able to do something that would have otherwise, I would have hired, had to hire somebody to do or just taken a bunch of time. But there's like very simple tasks that I feel like you could probably start working on sooner than later, which is like an example, at least for me, would be like, if I could just take all the mail I get and dump it in front of a robot like that and have the robot sort it, you know, take all the, you know, 50% of everything I get is probably some sort of advertisement. So like figure out what's an ad and shred that. And then, uh, actually, you know, basically like photograph and respond to if I have like a utility bill or, or, or any, any number of things that I actually need to respond to. Theoretically you could close that sort

• 48:57Jordi Hays?

  of like IRL to digital loop where the agent would like actually get a task from the real world and then close that loop online, uh, with, with just normal computer use. And like, that's the kind of thing that you don't need to, you don't need like a $50,000 humanoid robot. You theoretically could have a actual desktop robot that was able to do this thing that otherwise takes me, I dread going and like, okay, I have to like sort through all this mail and figure out what's important and make sure I don't miss things. Uh, but I feel like there's a bunch of other use cases like that where people are like, okay, I didn't just generate a pretty picture or, or, or answer some question that I had. I like actually saved myself. Yeah. An IRL spam filter, a spam, spam filter robot.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think there's like two really, really cool things about this project, which sort of shows that direction that things are going. One is that this arm, I don't know if you know about like too much about the prices of like classic robotics equipment. It's like thousands and thousands of dollars, um, at the moment. And like this arm that I'm using here, like right behind me, this is a Hugging Face SO100 robot, which is like open source, fully 3D printable. You just need to get the actuators, um, which are like much cheaper. I think at the moment, which is, I think more expensive just because of supply chain issues. It's like around $200 or so, but like, that's like incredibly cheap for robotic equipment and what you're able to do with it. So like, I can see a world like quite soon where similar to, and someone put this really well on Twitter, similar to how there's this whole 3D printing craze where everyone went and bought 3D printers

• 50:26Speaker 03

  and ran software. Like everyone's going to buy these, uh, sort of cheap before, uh, we get like really industrial equipment for like personal use and personal product, like buy these, uh, plastic cheaper, uh, robot arms that you can just like sort of clip onto a table and just put stuff in front of and plug them into like agents that are already, you can already do things with that are like already out there. Like Astra is something that people can just pull up Codex and start controlling, uh, robots with right now, which is super sick. Um, and we've also been seeing like at least on Twitter, I've noticed a lot of like sort of academic researchers at, at different institutions start to like realize the, that you can do this with these models and start doing like, uh, initial explorations and things with it, which is super sick to see. Uh, and there's so much more to explore in this space.

• 51:11Jordi Hays?

  There was a Y C company on the show yesterday that has managed to build a humanoid robot for under $2,000.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh.

• 51:19Jordi Hays?

  And that feels like a price point that people would experiment with. So I, if I, if I know I can get a robot for like two grand and connect it to Codex and then tell it, like it, it basically lowers the stakes a lot where I can be like, hey, go every weed like this that you can find in my yard, go like pluck it out and, and try to put it in a, in a, in a bag or whatever. And like that, that's basically like the gardening robot. And it could like flounder and fail, but I have like pretty high confidence that even right now, Astra would be able to identify like hundreds of like a specific type of, of, of weed and probably, and there's of, of course, like safety, safety concerns with that. But yeah, yeah. The, the Nat Friedman like leaf robot, like that feels like we're,

• 52:02Jordi Hays?

  here, the models can do it. It, it, it's not, it's not cheap, but, uh, we're.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  What is, uh, what is the next medium that you want to explore? Are you going to get into whittling? Ceramics? I want to see you whittle a bench as a benchmark. Whittle bench.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  That's really good.

• 52:20John Coogan?

  But whittling a spoon or something, I don't know. It just feels like 3D is the next thing.

• 52:23Jordi Hays?

  You really want to give the robot a knife. John wants to give the robot a knife. I don't think that's, I don't think. Read the room, John. Read the room.

• 52:32John Coogan?

  Maybe we'll stick to.

• 52:34Jordi Hays?

  Intern, OpenAI intern gives robot a pocket knife.

• 52:38John Coogan?

  We'll do some ceramics, maybe get it on the pottery wheel, make a nice vase, something like that. But I mean, is there anything where you're like, oh yeah, okay, this is where this goes next?

• 52:47Speaker 03

  I think I was having the exact same thought, which is like, giving a robot a knife is like probably a very bad idea. But I, I do want to like sort of see if it can help do like cooking tasks or do various tasks that are like things that you do in your life. That'd be really sick if you could have a robot help you out here and there.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Um, yeah, I, I, I'm so, I'm so interested to see the, because there's a whole class of tasks where you can't wait a full minute. I was testing on like a real time strategy game and you can pause the game, but if you're not moving at a certain APM, even on easy mode, like you will just get smoked. And so, uh, but, but it feels like with new chips and cerebrus and spark models and stuff like the, the, the speed up is gonna come, but it's just, and that's gonna unlock a whole new, a whole new host of, of capabilities. Uh, what, what, what advice do you have for, for young people that want to get into DIY? Uh, you know, like this, this type of work. I mean, you mentioned that one hugging face,

• 53:46John Coogan?

  uh, uh, device that you have behind you. Uh, are there any other, uh, devices or tools, toolkits that you recommend as places to get started?

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that the hugging face robot is like an incredible tool. Uh, you can also 3D print like a completely new embodiments and stuff. There's lots of open source projects online where people have like changed it around to get better grippers and things you can do with that. I just like, also just don't give up after the first attempt. Like this was the very first painting that the robot, that's upside down even. I couldn't even tell. You can see the Golden Gate Bridge here. You can kind of see the ground it was trying to do. Um, and just like if you keep going and, and you can, you can sort of see the progression as it, as it improves.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. You need to frame those next to each other. That's, that, that's incredible.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. I think you're putting them all, all, all five of the progression in like a frame and calling it self-improvement. Cause yeah, the model, this was, this was a thread. The model just was able to figure things out with a few pointers here and there. Uh, how to make, get better and better at painting.

• 54:46John Coogan?

  Who's, who's going to sign it? Is it you? Do you have Kodak sign it? Astra sign it?

• 54:52Speaker 03

  I've also given the robot, I've given the robot a, a pen and it's gonna try. I don't know how well it's gonna do, but we'll see.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  It's an axe or something. Uh, well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  So cool.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  Very, very cool.

• 55:05Jordi Hays?

  Come back on soon.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm feeling, I'm feeling the physical AGI.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 55:09Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye.

• 55:12Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. And let me also tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real time experiences and new value with Cisco. We have two guests with us in the TVP and Ultra Dome. How you guys doing?

• 55:35Speaker 04

  We're good.

• 55:36John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 55:37Jordi Hays?

  Partners.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  Yes. Partners.

• 55:39Speaker 04

  Thanks for having us.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, welcome. Uh, introduce yourselves. Introduce yourselves.

• 55:44Speaker 04

  My name's Guy Oseary, um, from Maverick and also Sound Ventures. Yeah, welcome.

• 55:48Speaker 05

  And I'm Alex.

• 55:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:49Speaker 05

  Now with Sound.

• 55:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:51Speaker 05

  Also running sources still.

• 55:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 55:52Speaker 05

  Very excited.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 05

  It's been a big week.

• 55:54John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 55:55Speaker 05

  I don't know how big it is.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  No hat on your head.

• 55:57Speaker 05

  No hat at all. No hat right now.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  Uh, we, we were debating.

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, every time I've, for the last year, every time I've seen you have the capital.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  Capital J journalism hat on.

• 56:05Speaker 05

  It's off.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  But it's off now.

• 56:07Speaker 05

  It's off.

• 56:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:08Speaker 05

  Yeah. Uh, but getting him here, guys.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Capital J journalist.

• 56:12Speaker 05

  Um, 10 years?

• 56:14John Coogan?

  10 years.

• 56:15Speaker 05

  15.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. Started when I was in high school. So, yeah.

• 56:19John Coogan?

  And then now capital V venture capitalist.

• 56:23Speaker 05

  Capital V.

• 56:24John Coogan?

  Right?

• 56:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  Capital I investor?

• 56:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  It, it feels, we're, we're aligned on the vision and, uh, really excited to get started. He's, this guy's a force, but also a talent.

• 56:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  You know, like you guys, I mean, there's you guys, you guys understand how to work with people and talk to people and help them tell their story. And I think it's so aligned with what I've been doing my whole life as well, which is helping people tell their story. And so when we got together, it was, it was just magical.

• 56:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 05

  It's awesome.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  What are you interested in investing in?

• 56:56Speaker 05

  We're spending a lot of time on, on different things. Um, personal agent space.

• 57:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:01Speaker 05

  Very interested in.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:02Speaker 05

  It's very hot, obviously.

• 57:03John Coogan?

  Are you a daily driver of anything yet?

• 57:05Speaker 05

  I'm using everything.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Everything?

• 57:07Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah.

• 57:08John Coogan?

  What's the last agentic thing you did? Did you book a flight?

• 57:12Speaker 05

  Um.

• 57:13John Coogan?

  Did you email the CEO of Walmart for a refund on $5 at raspberries? Did you hear about this?

• 57:19Speaker 05

  No.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. Some of these agents are very persistent.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  There's very persistent personal agents where, you know, a lot of like, one, one of the seemingly now very obvious use cases of agents is just like, hey, like do a bunch of things that would take me a lot of time that could maybe save me some money, right? And when you're using a free agent, you don't care if it's spinning its wheels for, for 24 hours to get you a $10 refund if the refund, if it's not costing you anything. So apparently somebody was trying to get a refund on a $5 pack of blueberries they got at Walmart.

• 57:50John Coogan?

  They used raspberries?

• 57:51Jordi Hays?

  At raspberries, raspberries. And the agent actually reached out to the EA of the CEO of Walmart. Trying to see if that was the last place to escalate. It was like, I gotta take this right to the top.

• 58:03Speaker 05

  These agents are getting crazy.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:05Speaker 05

  They're getting crazy. They're swarming.

• 58:06Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but I guess like re, yeah, rewinding a little bit. Guy, you invested in OpenAI and Anthropic like years ago.

• 58:15Speaker 05

  And hugging face.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  And hugging face. I didn't know that.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  Nice. Um, and so I, in some ways, like you probably the last few years have been just sitting back and ah, just basically just getting to like, getting to, uh, experience your own conviction and, and, and watching the space evolve. But I think like, everyone has got to the point in the last, or at least has consistently been feeling like nothing is like settled yet. We have these new kinds of businesses, labs, some of the labs, you know, are making products, but there's still tons of room for other players to come in and make things. Um, so are you feeling like renewed excitement around early stage?

• 58:58Speaker 04

  When, when we did Anthropic and OpenAI, I, I think we were the only fund that, that went in so deep back then. Um, and it was confusing to some people, but to, to, to us it felt like this was it. This was the time. These were the companies. These, these were going to be longstanding foundational, uh, uh, platforms. And today it's a lot more confusing. I, I, you know, it's so much going on and every single week, every single day, you guys are announcing people's raises. They're raising now, they're raising now, they're raising now. And it's hard to tell, you know, it's not as easy as it was for us to, to really decipher these are going to be the things people use in 10 years. And, and now it feels like there's

• 59:43Speaker 04

  so much going on, but I'm also as excited. I'm also as inspired. I, I don't, I want to be part of, of these exciting companies. Uh, we just have to pick right.

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 04

  Um, I'm, I'm meeting with some really incredible founders and, um, visionaries. It feels really exciting. And so it's like when it's starting in the music business, it's like the early days where I got going and you're just getting demos everywhere. You know, you're walking out of a club and you're like, hey, yeah, you're the guy at the, here's a demo, here's my demo, here's my demo, here's my demo. You're like, how can I tell which one of these artists? But if you just, if you put enough work in, enough time in, and you're diligent, they start to like, they start to become a little more obvious.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Speaker 04

  And, and there wasn't initially. I had a hundred demos. I literally, I was like 17 years old with a hundred demos. But as you listen to a hundred, my first three demos.

• 1:00:33Jordi Hays?

  At 17, they were your.

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  These were hundred people that I would.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  People had given to you.

• 1:00:38Jordi Hays?

  Given them to you.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, people that I would go out and go, let me hear your music, let me hear your music. And you know, the first three demos I had, I had my favorite one, my favorite two, my favorite like in, in order, but a hundred in, those three are not even in the top 20, right? So you have to just, you have to, you know, pattern recognition, you have to do a lot of work, you have to listen, you have to meet a lot of people. And then through this crazy time, there's, it's, it's pretty freaking crazy. I think the right things appear and then, and then you just have to be there to be part of that. And so I'm still as excited. Yeah, I have, we have been able to sit back a little bit and watch our, our, you know, we, we've also not, we didn't just invest those companies, we also invested on the way up.

• 1:01:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  So that also keeps you busy. We put a lot of money into Anthropic on the way up. We put a lot of money into OpenAI on the way up. And, um, I think we have close to a billion dollars worth of, of, of money, uh, invested into those two companies. Um, and so, so we're not just like laying back, you know?

• 1:01:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Speaker 04

  But, but it is a lot harder today to decipher between what is real and what is not real.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  When you make, you know, when you have like two effectively recent investments that are now two of the most important companies in the world, I do feel like the bar goes up on other, on, on other investments because it's like, it's suddenly is like, is it, is it as thrilling to invest in a company that, that can only be a $10 billion company, right? When, when, and when.

• 1:02:04Jordi Hays?

  A lot of VCs were very excited to underwrite a company to 10 billion, you know, six years ago, even during the period that you were making those two investments.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think about it differently. I have heard some people say, hey, zero to 100, that's like, it's not a big deal anymore, you know?

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  I just like, I've always been attracted to talent and visionaries. So I don't start with, okay, this, you know, we're fortunate to be in these two incredible companies. But there's a lot in between and there's a lot that's to come. And I just love sitting with a founder and problem solving and figuring out how we're going to get from A to B. And sometimes it's where you get in. I saw a lot of people, you know, John from, you know, BetaWorks did really well on Hugging Face, you know, we came in, we did well, but he came in where, you know, at seed, so he did really well. And sometimes it depends where you get in as well.

• 1:03:06Speaker 04

  But for me, what excites me is the same thing. It's been constant my whole life, which is surround yourself with really, really incredible, brilliant people who are trying to change the world.

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  How does identifying creative or musical talent differ from startup entrepreneurial talent? Because I'm sure there's some common threads, but whereas in music, you might back a musician that's, that has like, you maybe know they have a drug problem and that's part of the music. But in startups, you know, a founder that's like, has like some crazy, crazy, crazy stuff going on in their personal life, maybe it's like, hey, you should figure that out before you build a massive team and you're managing people and stuff like that. But there has to be like a bunch of common ground between the two.

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  Well, I was able to transition seamlessly because of music. My job was to identify artists before anyone had heard of them and to sign them very quickly and to then help them reach an audience. So when I meet a founder, I actually feels the same. I always say founders are the rock stars too, because when they walk in and they also have their music they want to share with the world. So I have to identify that founder, same way I used to identify music artists. And then go, this guy has, or she, or whoever have music that is so good. Oh, I love that chorus. That's a great idea.

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  You mean a car shows up and it picks you up and it takes you, or you mean an apartment people could share? And you're like, oh wow, that's a hit song. So I always listen to every pitch like it's a song or an album or a music artist. And I just go, that guy's got the talent. He's a rock star. We just need to make sure the world knows it. We need to make sure that people are aware of what he's building. Let's go get a base. Let's go, let's go create, find that audience first and tell this story. And so for me, I feel like I've been doing the same job since I was a teenager, which is, you know, identifying talent and helping them reach an audience. But music is the constant. I'm always listening for the chorus. You know, and if I don't hear the chorus, I'm like, hmm, not sure about this song.

• 1:05:25Speaker 04

  This is, you know, or the performance of the song, or I don't think we can, I don't think this one will work. You know, so it always comes from that. The DNA is being around music artists.

• 1:05:38Jordi Hays?

  Is that, in tech world, you see entrepreneurs that are truly visionary as in they're seeing opportunities before they are obvious and pursuing those. And they have an idea of the way that the world should be and they're trying to sort of mold the world into that state. And then you have actually the majority of entrepreneurs, which are just like, they don't know something's an opportunity until they see someone else pursuing it. And they're like, that seems like a good idea. I'm going to do that. Is the same thing in music where, you know, you have somebody that has like truly a new sound and they have a life experience that they're trying to, like, they feel like they need to create art out of. And then there's the follow on of like, ah.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  You want to back a cover band entrepreneur?

• 1:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a cover band entrepreneur. That might be a good.

• 1:06:29Speaker 04

  When we started the record label, you had Jimmy Iovine here the other day.

• 1:06:34Speaker 04

  When we started the record label, it was just like four of us, small companies, Madonna's company. So that's cool. But we're still, there's just, no one knew what to make of it. And Jimmy was on fire, Interscope Records was on fire. And I was always thinking, if I don't act quickly, he's just going to pay them more and get them. So, and we were competing with big labels, but Jimmy was the guy who I always looked at like, hey, he's, he can, he can just come in here and just wow them and get them. So not only do I have to, I have to hear your song and decide right then and there, I want to do it. So I don't have any background. I don't have, oh, they, oh, you know,

• 1:07:17Speaker 04

  my biggest successes were always the things no one else wanted. But, you know, Alanis Morissette, I mean, she tells the story where every single label passed. I didn't have any of that history. She came in, she was in my office with her producer, Glenn Ballard. They played me one song, which is called Perfect. And within 30 seconds or 40 seconds, I think I was like, I'm in. And so that muse, you know, the band from England, they came to LA. I flew them in because I liked their demo. They flew, they did one, after they were there to perform a few songs. After the first song, I stopped them. I said, we're ready to go. And they're like, we flew all the way from London. Can we just play out the next few songs? I'm like, of course, but I just want you to know.

• 1:08:01Speaker 04

  So I developed that act quick intuition and it really just came from, I had to, or else someone else would just figure it out and overpay and then I couldn't do the deal.

• 1:08:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's so many of the market dynamics that you see in music. A friend of mine, Zach Bia, was telling me about like some of the process of signing the artists that he works with, where these artists are like, you know, the same thing that happens on, like with, in tech, where like some X account pops up and maybe there's like a team attached to it. There's no launch video yet, but you see a bunch of people following this person and then you hear that they're meeting with this firm and this firm and that firm and the whispers start going around. Same thing in music where like an artist might one day have no followers on Instagram, be totally, totally under the radar, living like in their parents' basement,

• 1:08:56Jordi Hays?

  but they have some little bit of magic. And then soon enough, they're like doing a roadshow basically with different labels. And then you, as a label, need to be like, well, how much can we, how much can we invest in this person? How big do we want to bet? We need to get to them, we need to get to them first. But, and then you're also sometimes competing on price, but other times you're just competing on like, well, how great a partner can I be to this artist? So like, I can see how music translates just so well into venture because the exact same thing. Venture is not a game. Once somebody's talented and they're known, it's like very obvious. Obviously you want to be.

• 1:09:35Speaker 04

  It's harder to get in then.

• 1:09:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:36Speaker 04

  And it's the same with, I have competed when things are big. I remember when Prodigy, everyone wanted them and I flew to London like twice in four days to try to get that and I got it.

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And every VC will have a story like that where they're like, I flew to this backwater place.

• 1:09:52Speaker 04

  We have those. We have all of those. But, you know, you know, you look at, when we did Anthropic, when we did, we did SPVs in Anthropic. We couldn't, a lot of people were not, hey, you guys.

• 1:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Tough to fill.

• 1:10:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, tough to fill a few times. People didn't get it. Of course now, you know, we're begging to get more of it. So I just, again, I always go back to, don't listen to anybody. You know, you talked about, I think the other day also, you talked about blinders? Did you talk about blinders or something on the show?

• 1:10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jimmy Iovine has that concept.

• 1:10:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that.

• 1:10:28John Coogan?

  Force blinders.

• 1:10:29Speaker 04

  So our, we have a mutual friend and he's my mentor. His name's David Giffen.

• 1:10:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:34Speaker 04

  And David said to me when I was like 21, he told me that story. I didn't know this. He said, you know, guy, you need to be a racehorse. And I was like, he goes, you know what racehorses do? And I go, yeah, they race. I had no idea. And he goes, no, no, they wear blinders. And so just race your own race. Because if you don't wear your blinders, if horses don't wear blinders, they could literally, they could kill, they could die. They could trip over their, they'd look over and they could trip over, they could break their legs. And, and so I really stuck with me that, you guys talked about it, that really, that concept stuck with me. And I really tried to just not pay attention, you know? When we did Anthropic and OpenAI, a lot of people doubted it.

• 1:11:18Speaker 04

  And we, you know, we didn't have any doubt. We were determined to do it. And, and I want to stick with, we're really trying to continually connect to that approach of not listening to all the noise. Of course, data is important and we want to get more details and more information and we're structured. But that gut that has gotten me here, I need to continually respect.

• 1:11:46Jordi Hays?

  Alex, on your side, you've spent.

• 1:11:50Jordi Hays?

  How is it fifteen years, a decade, fifteen years ish? Did it take, do you feel like it took a few sort of cycles to hone your intuition around companies? Because in our first conversations, I was always impressed with your ability to just see directly through the marketing on so many different companies. Like, some people, like, marketing just works on them. Marketing works on all of us. Advertising just works, period. But like, marketing works, marketing and good comms work like, too well on us at

• 1:12:22Speaker 05

  times. Or there's some people that are just like, this is a good story, so I'm chasing it from the capital journalism.

• 1:12:27Jordi Hays?

  But for you, you'd be like, you would, I would, I would, we would be talking about something and you would be aware of like, a dynamic around a company that no other journalist had talked about. And at times, like, you would be like, yeah, the story's not for me. But you were like, clued in on a, on a story and you knew exactly what was going on with the company. And then, in, in, in the example I'm thinking of, I won't, I won't name the company, only six months later, did it, did it, has it even started percolating up that, that that dynamic is going on?

• 1:12:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57Jordi Hays?

  And so I feel like, for me, and at least personally, like, I had to see the cycle of like, company like, starts, gets hot, attracts a bunch of capital. But sometimes you have this intuition around the company where like, something doesn't really like, feel right about this company, even though it has a lot of momentum.

• 1:13:14Speaker 05

  Yeah. That's it. Yeah. I don't, I don't know where that comes from, except that I've, I've been fortunate to spend time with a lot of like, the best founders in the world. I mean, I just had Zach on the podcast, Sam Allman before that.

• 1:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:13:26Speaker 05

  Incredible lineup coming up.

• 1:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Speaker 05

  And I've gotten to know these people over years and years and years. So when you see like, the people at the apex, who are crushing it and who are at high integrity, are beasts at the game on the field, you can quickly see when someone is pretending.

• 1:13:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:43Speaker 05

  And I just try to stay really close to like, what's actually happening and ask around, do my diligence, leave no stone unturned. And that's got me well so far. But like, the thing you said about, like, six months later, you saw it, I have that a lot, where I'm like, oh, this seems really interesting. This seems like everyone's gonna be talking about this. And then it happens. And it's happened enough in times to where I'm like, okay.

• 1:14:09Jordi Hays?

  You're like, I gotta figure out a way to make some money on this.

• 1:14:10Speaker 05

  Well, yeah. And like, what Guy was saying about his gut, and this is where I think we really hit it off, is, yeah, you have to trust your gut. Like, if you can get enough pattern matching recognition in, it's just instinctual.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  How do you think the podcast will evolve in this new role?

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  It's going full tilt. I mean, first two episodes, again, were, were Sam and Mark. I can't share the names, but it's, it's going. It's amazing.

• 1:14:39John Coogan?

  I just mean, like, like, there's, there's interesting ways, when you have a position in a company, the critiques, I was gonna be like, they're only having them on the show because they have a bag or whatever. But when I look at like, what Dorkesh has done with Maddox and Rayner, like, explaining his expertise, it doesn't feel like a sales pitch for that company at all. It's actually just tapping the network at a deeper level. And at the same time, if I'm a founder, and you're the place that I go to hear Mark Zuckerberg talk about his vision, that adds value and attracts, even if it's not a company that you're actively investing in, because you're not doing publics. So I'm, I'm wondering if there will be more, like, less, like, this person's on the funding track, or more,

• 1:15:24John Coogan?

  like, 360 views. Do you want to climb the mountain and do all the Mag7 CEOs? Is that the goal? Or is it more like, go deeper with certain experts, build this community of people with particular philosophy? There's like, a whole bunch of different ways I could see it evolving. And I'm wondering if you have any particular direction.

• 1:15:40Speaker 05

  The Mag7, I feel pretty good about.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Speaker 05

  You're on that track, for sure. Yeah, I feel great about it. I always love the like, I love, I love putting the people at the top with the people who are up and comers, is what I do.

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:53Speaker 05

  So, I've got Toon from Base10 on next week.

• 1:15:56John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:15:57Speaker 05

  Like.

• 1:15:57Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 1:15:57Speaker 05

  Legend, incredible company.

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:00Speaker 05

  He's incredible. And, you know, he's, he's obviously crushing. He's, he's huge. But like, he's not, he's not Zuck yet.

• 1:16:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:07Speaker 05

  So, but I, I want to bridge that world, because like, this is all one world we're in. Like, everyone talks, like, the Zucks want to know what the Toons think, vice versa. They want to learn from each other. So I like, I like building that cinematic universe.

• 1:16:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:20Speaker 05

  And it's like, my taste, it's like, I wanted to have that convo with Toon, which is coming out next week, because like, inference is just so important right now.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Speaker 05

  And it's like, everyone's trying to figure it out.

• 1:16:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Speaker 05

  And so you're also getting my POV of what I think is interesting with my guests, and I'm booking everything myself.

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:37Speaker 05

  And I think that's only gonna get better, because, again, like, sources is separate. I mean, obviously, I'm with Guy and with Sound, but, you know, we'll have, I'll have people on the pod that, you know, are, we're not investors in, I'll have, I'll have other VCs on. It's about the ecosystem.

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:55Speaker 05

  And I, I think the brand is important. Like, I want to invest in the brand.

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  What's the future of the writing newsletter? I imagine that you're not gonna be able to put the pen down forever.

• 1:17:05Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, it's interesting. Like, there's gonna be times when you just want to get something out. Yeah. I think, I think, you know, I, I want to use the newsletter, which has just an incredible audience, to, to share what I'm seeing. And it's really like, you're getting like, an even deeper sense of what I'm seeing, because now I'm like, in the room, in a way that I was kind of in. But I was always like, when you're a journalist and you're in the room, you like, get brought into the room and then escorted right back out. And now it's like, I get to hang out in the room. And so you're, I'm like, I'm sitting with it and I'm marinating on it. And so when I write like, a piece, like, I'm thinking on something on personal agents, actually, right now.

• 1:17:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Speaker 05

  It's informed by a lot of conversations. I'm not gonna share all those, right? Like, obviously confidentiality is very important. But I think it's gonna make the perspectives I'm sharing a lot better. But look, I, you, you started this, like, hanging up the, the capital J journalism hat, right? There is a sense of like, journalism in the traditional sense.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, breaking schools.

• 1:17:59Speaker 05

  And we, we were talking about this when I was on the show before, like, the leaks and all the things that I've been known for over the years. Like, obviously, I'm not gonna do that.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:05Speaker 05

  But, but you know what? Like, I've done that. I did it for 10 years.

• 1:18:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you have, like, I'm very excited to read this take on personal agents. I think a lot of people have been thinking about the, the way this category evolves. Do you have any interest in turning that into a video essay, direct to camera, talking to the camera, putting it on the same feeds, like what Dorkesh does when he writes an essay? He also has a video version.

• 1:18:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  Could just be a good product, but also reach more people, maybe?

• 1:18:32Speaker 05

  People have asked me to do that.

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Speaker 05

  I have another job.

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  I don't know if that makes sense for like, some of your other reports, where it's like, here's, here's some facts.

• 1:18:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39John Coogan?

  It's more of a quick hit.

• 1:18:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40John Coogan?

  But if I'm like, getting like, a quarterly thesis from you, like, maybe it's a 20-minute video, I, I would watch that.

• 1:18:47Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  And it just gives me more optionality to like, I can browse it in the email. I can, like, with Dorkesh, I get his emails. I also see him on YouTube, and then I get it in the podcast feed. And sometimes I'll be in the video mood, sometimes, and I'm, I'm multi-platform with a lot of these creators and so.

• 1:19:02Speaker 05

  I need AI to help me with this, guys. I'm gonna be honest.

• 1:19:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Speaker 05

  But, but you want the rawness of the person, which of course, but like, I think the pod is conversations for now.

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:12Speaker 05

  And maybe I, maybe I branch it out. Maybe it's more things.

• 1:19:14John Coogan?

  I just think a lot of the platforms are very receptive to multi-product feeds, like, having multiple media products within a feed.

• 1:19:23Speaker 05

  I've thought a lot about this.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  I've been surprised that we've been able to do it with a 20-minute version of the show and a three-hour version of the show, dropping in the same feed every single day.

• 1:19:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:19:31John Coogan?

  And it hasn't been bad.

• 1:19:32Speaker 05

  People don't care.

• 1:19:32John Coogan?

  No. People just pick whatever they want. And then if there's a hero interview, we get a, you know, big interview with someone, that goes out as another one.

• 1:19:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  And that's its own thing.

• 1:19:39Speaker 05

  This is maybe a phase two thing. I mean, I have, I have eight, eight incredible guests lined up.

• 1:19:45John Coogan?

  Yes, you want to really hit the guests.

• 1:19:46Speaker 05

  Over the next few weeks. So it's like, I gotta get those out.

• 1:19:48John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:19:48Speaker 05

  And I'm in S up with Guy next week, doing some. I'm doing four next week. So I want to get all those out. And then, and then, yeah, if maybe like, the personal agents, then maybe that's like, a thing they can.

• 1:19:58John Coogan?

  Has the lens changed? When, if you think about a Mag7 CEO, there's the, the getting the scoop in the interview, the capital J journalist interview in that conversation. And I think that you can, there's a bunch of different ways to do that. But then there's also, the, you know, what is, what will the next generation of great founders get out of this particular conversation with this Mag7 CEO? Are you starting to put on that hat of like?

• 1:20:25Speaker 05

  I don't really think of it that way. I think about like, what do I want to know? And, and I really care about strategy. I really care about connecting the dots. Like, getting them to say something they've never said, which you saw with, you know, the last two pods.

• 1:20:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 05

  And that's still gonna be the thing.

• 1:20:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:20:42Speaker 05

  And that's, that is journalism. Like, that, that, I mean, you're getting interesting and facts out in the world.

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  It's just good content. If you shake someone off the talking points.

• 1:20:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. And like, you know, these people are, are doing a lot. And so it's like, they're, they're out there, but like, I, I don't know. I think I get a lot out of my conversations with them.

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Speaker 05

  And I don't, I don't think I'm gonna change much.

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:21:01Speaker 05

  I mean, I think the only thing is like, yeah, I'm not gonna be like, leaking memos anymore. I used to do leaks about one companies worrying about leaks.

• 1:21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:10Speaker 05

  And that was one of my favorite kinds of stories. I'm not gonna do that anymore.

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  Just one more leak in 2020 something, you get a good one.

• 1:21:17Speaker 05

  No, a decade of that and I'm good.

• 1:21:19John Coogan?

  You're hanging it up.

• 1:21:21Jordi Hays?

  Is the is now a good time to become the next Alex Heath? Somebody's like 20, 20, 22.

• 1:21:28Speaker 05

  I think that's great. Yeah. I mean, I think it's really hard right now if you're early because it's just that the media, the traditional media environment is so challenged structurally and places aren't hiring.

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  Business was doing really well. I feel like I feel like the the ads product, the sponsorship product.

• 1:21:46Jordi Hays?

  He's saying traditional.

• 1:21:46Speaker 05

  No, I'm saying traditional.

• 1:21:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, but like, oh, okay. So like newsroom. He would start in the newsroom.

• 1:21:51Speaker 05

  How would you start? How would you? How would you? How would you? You know, I've been fortunate. People care because I've broken a lot of big stories and I've gotten a lot of big interviews.

• 1:22:00John Coogan?

  When you left.

• 1:22:00Speaker 05

  And I would came up in an environment where like I was in a newsroom, learning from incredible people who've gone on to do incredible things and run now many of these newsrooms. So I don't know how you do that now. Like a lot of places aren't hiring. Their traffic's declining. They haven't made the pivot to like what we're doing. This direct thing, like subscriptions, like streaming. I it's really tough. I've thought about it. I don't know how you would break out right now unless you just kind of are like.

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  You gotta start.

• 1:22:23Speaker 05

  You maniacally focus on one thing and become the best in the world at that, which is how I started. Which is like, I'm going to be the best in the world at social media, covering Snap back in the day during the IPO. And then I was breaking a ton of news on Snap.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Speaker 05

  And then I got noticed and then I was like, I can shift this into other companies and keep shifting it and shifting it.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:40Speaker 05

  So I would still say that's it. You have to maniacally focus on one thing that matters.

• 1:22:45John Coogan?

  Niche and beat reporting.

• 1:22:46Speaker 05

  But it's the intersection of niche and matters. It can't be.

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. You gotta catch.

• 1:22:50Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about the possibility of Instinct having a bigger valuation than Snap?

• 1:22:59Speaker 05

  I think, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised. I it's crazy out there, guys.

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  It's also a new category and.

• 1:23:06Speaker 05

  What do you guys think about Instinct?

• 1:23:09John Coogan?

  I think that they're in a unique position because they're a startup so they can do it. Like if there's like rough edges, like those can get, those can get ironed out and there's more forgiveness, I think, as opposed to.

• 1:23:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, if you're a startup.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, as opposed to like the muse agent is going to be like congressional hearing if something goes poorly. Whereas Instinct's gonna be like, look, it's a startup. You knew you were you were an early adopter. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt here.

• 1:23:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, the most interesting dynamic right now is because of the people's fear around AI, there's like way greater willingness to try new products because you don't want to be left behind, right? And so you may, somebody may have been trying and being a daily active user of a variety of AI products for years now, and still they're like, they want to try the new thing because, one, the space is progressing. There's so much room for new products and new categories. But then there's also this fear in the back of your mind of like, if I don't try the new thing, then like, you know, the the permanent underclass meme. And that's just consistently created this sort of second mover advantage, third mover advantage.

• 1:24:21Jordi Hays?

  And then AI brands, once they're big, they accumulate, they've been accumulating baggage, right? And so people are like, you know, maybe they have some, maybe they're just like, they're excited to share and talk about the new thing in a way that that they wouldn't be even products that they're using day to day. So I think it creates a big opportunity for for startups. But I think that we're, I'm very interested to see how the personal agents market ends up comparing to just like the frontier model inference market. Because it seems like every company is going to build a personal agent. Many of them already have, especially if you count LLMs, which do have agentic,

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  or just like chat apps, which do have agentic capabilities. But it's going to be an absolute, it's going to be an absolute bloodbath.

• 1:25:12John Coogan?

  If you get to network effect and you get to some sort of take rate on agentic commerce, like you buy your car through it and they make 500 bucks, like that's a very, very good.

• 1:25:19Speaker 05

  Which Zach told me will be the business for Muse is a take rate business.

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  And he has the network effect he's bringing to it. So Instinct's certainly a challenger.

• 1:25:26Speaker 05

  There are, I'm really interested in the idea of network effects with agents.

• 1:25:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:29Speaker 05

  And since Instinct's doing it, Town is doing it, Met is gonna do it.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:34Speaker 05

  And maybe that is the next.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  At the same time, it's tricky if you can point an agent and say like, get me off of this thing.

• 1:25:41Speaker 05

  Right. Well, they're not people. So it's like, do you care? Do you care if your agents are in a network if it's?

• 1:25:46John Coogan?

  But if you're like, this one is the one that's never had a leak or never had a crash or never had a hack.

• 1:25:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  Then you do stick around.

• 1:25:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  In theory, like the time to build a new social network would be today because you could say like, go through, open up my Snap account or LinkedIn and scrape out every single person I have. They don't get a say in it and go add them on this new network, right? Because like that, that was like, export the contact book was like arbitrage, they closed.

• 1:26:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  And it's kind of opening back up.

• 1:26:15Speaker 05

  You think?

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:26:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm I'm waiting for, you know, the the criticism of social media was always like, we created social media to be social and it's made us less social than ever. And with personal agents, it's like, it's like less, well, less like personal. Like we don't have, we're not going to have personal relationships with like service providers and and variety of things. Because it's like, even even people, some of these new functionalities were just like, sorry, grandma, I don't want to talk about the road trip that we're going on. Just talk to my agent, you know? And and so the new criticism will be like, we're not, we're, no one's talking to each other. It's only agents talking, you know, we're communicating through like, you know, can on a string or whatever.

• 1:26:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. We we gotta hop on with Mitesh from Positron.

• 1:27:03Jordi Hays?

  This was great. I'm super excited for you guys.

• 1:27:05Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:27:05Jordi Hays?

  Big, big fan of both of you.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  We'll let you, we'll let you hop.

• 1:27:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, sounds good.

• 1:27:09Jordi Hays?

  You guys are gonna absolutely cook together.

• 1:27:12Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:27:12John Coogan?

  Thank you. Thanks so much. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We are joined by Mitesh Agarwal from Positron AI, building a new chip for the AI era.

• 1:27:37Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 1:27:39Speaker 06

  Hey, John, Jordy. Pretty good. How are you guys?

• 1:27:41John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on the show.

• 1:27:43Jordi Hays?

  Pretty good.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Uh, great to have you here.

• 1:27:45Speaker 06

  I just want to start by saying I've been in the background of Steven doing this multiple times now. And Steven, Steven Balavan from Lambda.

• 1:27:53John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:27:54Speaker 06

  He loves you guys. So this is my first time on, so thanks for, thanks for having me.

• 1:27:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. How how direct is the lineage from from Lambda? You're working at effectively NeoCloud. You see the problem. You go solve the problem externally with a new startup. Is is the story that simple?

• 1:28:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, fairly. I mean, for me, I mean, like, look, I didn't found Positron, right? Positron was co-founded by Thomas Summers and Edward Komet.

• 1:28:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:28:17Speaker 06

  Another lineage, Grok lineage from from from before. And and, you know, they had, they designed the actual silicon and and the system setup. And a part of it is just like, great luck. You know, I've known both Steven and Thomas for over a decade. I've been close friends with both of them. I've worked with them, been roommates, everything, all of all those things. And Thomas has been wanting me to join Positron since day one, since he started the company in 2023.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:42Speaker 06

  But Lambda was just starting on its acoustic growth then. And I was like, look, I'm not leaving Lambda. Started the company with Steven there and Lambda Cloud. But early 2025, man, like late 24, you know, reasoning models had come out. Owen just started to to to get in the zeitgeist and then video generation. You know, Sora, first Sora came out. Not a lot of people saw it, but I got to see a little bit behind the scenes on on the video generation models, the amount of memory. I remember looking at the Google VO model back then, you know, it really needed four H100s to run like a 10 second clip.

• 1:29:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Speaker 06

  It's completely memory bound on bandwidth and capacity and knew what Thomas was building. I was like, hmm, this is actually very interesting. Memory is gonna get a big part of the story for inference. Someone is building something about it. Let me go get and and and work at the, at actually the fundamental technology there, like Lambda builds technology on the cloud and and services. You know, and I'm chemical engineering, studied fabrication, never used it ever. So I was like, all right, I'm gonna go back a little bit to my roots and then come back to it.

• 1:29:48Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:29:48John Coogan?

  How much is AI actually accelerating semiconductor design, semiconductor fabrication? We saw one of your investors, Dylan Patel at Semi Analysis, talking about that the OpenAI jalapeno chip seemed like well ahead of schedule or very, very quick. For a long time, we've been hearing, oh, new chip, that's three years, that's five years. Feels like it's 18 months now. What are you actually feeling? What are you seeing?

• 1:30:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, to start from it, it was like to answer your last part about it, like, man, new chip every 12 months. Nvidia is the absolute king, and if they're coming out with a new silicon every 12 months, you better get in that game or, you know, like, you like, don't even be part of the conversation kind of thing, right? So, so that's, that's for sure. Uh, in terms of utilization of AI, I mean, look, I'll just like focus on positron itself, but you know, we're a small team. I mean, um, if we got to, we were right just now, I mean, just yesterday or today, crossed 100 people. But over 50 of that is over the last three months. So we got our first gen product out with less than 20 people. Um, and that's built on FPGA, so it's already pre-taped out silicon and we're deploying an implementing architecture. And our second gen is taking on end of this year.

• 1:31:01John Coogan?

  Those are the 50 Atlas racks you have at Oracle?

• 1:31:04Speaker 06

  Oracle, yeah.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

  Okay, so those are FPGA, interesting.

• 1:31:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, those are FPGAs, and it's kind of like harking back to a little bit of, uh, of previous times when you used to design and build silicon, you would actually test on FPGA before going into the the tape out kind of thing. So we just wanted to get a product out as quickly as possible. Like, that was the whole thing. It's like, you know, from the start of the company, we got our first shipment to a customer in 15 months and it was, you know, it was built on FPGAs, obviously, but to get the full, uh, you know, big file ready, getting it deployed, getting models running on it, it was all done in the first 15 months and then over the last 10, 12, scaled it out. Um, but yeah, I mean, like, look, we have to use a lot of the AI toolkit, especially on, uh, on, on verification.

• 1:31:47Speaker 06

  Um, design less so, I would say, I mean, look, obviously we use a lot to, to kind of interact with, like now Astro, for example, is phenomenal, right? You know, to, to interact with it, but you're still not going there and saying, hey, like, come up with this like new design yet. Although like, you know, um, Ana's coming to recursive and others, they are, they're obviously built out and then, you know, they raised a big round for, for that as well, right? So it's gonna come, you know, you're gonna see very soon. It's like one person, uh, and Astro or one person in Astro's kid taped out a chip kind of thing, but uh, we have to use it a lot. I mean, if you think about 100 people or, you know, very recent, very recently 50 people. For a company that is targeting tape out end of this year to do with like 50, 60 people, it's, it's very tiny amount in, in the silicon world.

• 1:32:29John Coogan?

  What is the demand side of the equation work? You're already working with, uh, Jump Trading, i3d.net. Uh, is this something where you, like, if you can get capacity, if you can get performance, some solid benchmarks, uh, you think that sales isn't gonna be a problem? Or are you going to have to find and work very closely with a customer to sort of co-design a solution for a particular problem within the AI stack?

• 1:32:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I don't want to trivialize or make it sound simple like, like, like that.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  Your sales guys might be listening and they're like, we work very hard, okay?

• 1:33:07Speaker 06

  But, but, well, we, we, we only have one, look, everyone is a salesperson, we only have one salesperson. You know, like, in that way, right? But, but the point I will, I'll make is, um, really around, um, the way we think about, uh, the demand curve is you're kind of, you're hitting the nail on the head in saying that, like, look, if you can make your silicon work, uh, show the performance is comparable, especially in the current ecosystem, even within the niche of, you know, doing this ag or something like that, but especially if you can make the entire inference kind of workflow, uh, have a good TCO, um, and/or, and generally people always assume it's an or that, hey, you have a good TCO or you have a great interactivity curve, but if you can do and/or, uh, you know, you're, you're gonna bound to have get demand.

• 1:33:52Speaker 06

  More importantly, you know, when we, when you step into the rooms of, like, not only just Jump Trading or, you know, head funds or, or kind of inference of service providers, but like really the big labs, the hyperscalers, kind of the two questions that it boils down to is like, hey, like, look, guys, can you fabricate this in enough quantities? Like, you know, is your supply chain and the way that you are using the technology components, is it robust enough that you can fabricate it? That we can be interested in it? And then the second thing they're asking is can we deploy it, you know, is, is your power source, like, you know, do you need this kind of liquid cool setup? And, and if so, then, you know, we don't, we might not have a data center because we've already allocated to GPUs or TPUs, or can you do something else? So, so the questions you can see there, they are asking is not that, hey, like, you know,

• 1:34:33Speaker 06

  you know, we, we, we will see, we don't, we're not sure about the demand curve. So, so from that angle, you're kind of spot on that, look, if you can make the frontier models run, you know, you're, you're bound to find kind of adoption in, into this market. And that is a really good, like, I mean, I'm so lucky, like, you know, as positron, we are so lucky to be building silicon in this environment. Uh, and that's kind of what you're seeing through the silicon companies is raising rounds, uh, right now.

• 1:34:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think $9 billion has flowed into silicon companies over just the last 12 months and.

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which we were, we were talking yesterday, which feels, feels incredibly low relative to the spend, like, the annual spending in the category.

• 1:35:10John Coogan?

  Gavin Baker, one of, another one of your investors has this quote, uh, they, where he says, I see it as a 1% market share is $100 billion opportunity. And that sounds like a crazy bold take and you, then you realize like, wait, no, Nvidia is a $5 trillion company, like, it's gonna be a $10 trillion market, like, any day now. And so, yeah, actually 1% should equal 100 billion. Uh, but yeah, anything else?

• 1:35:36Speaker 06

  No, you, you, like, he said that in a board meeting to me, like, I don't even know, like a year ago or something, where it's, it's basically like, yeah, he's, he's like, like, look, look, look, guys, like, Matej Thomas, just, just 1% of the market, you know, the 100 billion enterprise value, just focus on your architecture where you can do well. You know, like, one of the things, like, you know, people always, like, whenever a new, new chip company raises around the headline, and luckily you guys don't have that, which is like, oh, to rival Nvidia, it's like, guys, like, no, no, no one is rivaling Nvidia. Like, get to at least 10% of their revenue before, before putting the tagline on, right? But, uh, but, but like the point there is just like, look, Nvidia is everywhere. You gotta work in that ecosystem uh, to, to both work with them, but also like having a product that is differentiated enough.

• 1:36:20Speaker 06

  Like, you, you have to have technical innovation, obviously, to stand out and then show your performance TCOs and interactivity. But then you also got to prove that, like, look, in the world of HPM, COAS constraint, like for us, our big stories are, you know, like, look, HPM and then COAS bottlenecked, you have Nvidia, TPUs, AMDs ahead of you in that line, you know, how do you get around that? Well, again, you know, you, you say, okay, we are using commodity memory. Well, pro and con, no, no free lunch in silicon land. Like, you know, commodity memory is slow, how do you solve that? That's where the technical innovation comes in. And then second thing is like, okay, it's still not trivial to get commodity memory. It's not like I can just show up to Samsung and be like, or Micron, you're like, hey, can you give me LPDDR5X, you know? You have to still figure out how to, how to get that implanted, but it is more feasible to, to get it.

• 1:37:04Speaker 06

  And that becomes a story of that the company can then scale out and saying, not only we're gonna have a product, but we're gonna have a product that will scale with the requirements of hyperscalers and, and kind of the frontier labs.

• 1:37:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how, how do these, how do these customers think about like the minimum scale when, when they're, when they're working with you and they're looking at ordering, order, making orders that will be delivered in, let's say, 2028, 2029, right? You need to be able to, and, and during that same time period, right? You know, we saw Microsoft yesterday wants to add over 10, 10 gigawatt, you know, an extra 10 gigawatts, right? And so for you to be.

• 1:37:35Speaker 06

  26 gigawatts.

• 1:37:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, 26.

• 1:37:37Speaker 06

  They want to get 38 gigawatts by 2032.

• 1:37:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so, so you're sitting there and it's like, to really be worth a company at that scale is time. You need to be thinking about like, it's almost like, hey, the orders we want delivered in 2029 are like a proof of concept for like the 2032 order, which will be, you know, at, at, at some scale to actually impact and, and be able to scale the fleet in a meaningful way. But, but how are you thinking about like, that feels like the biggest challenge is like minimum viable sort of like, um, deployment.

• 1:38:08Speaker 06

  100%, I mean, like, literally you kind of circle back on like, as I said, when we walk in these meetings, and like, look, the scale depends on, like, if you're going into hyperscalers and frontier labs, and I just said, the first question they ask is like, guys, can you fabricate like this, like in, in, in enough? And the, the question there is like, in enough quantities that it's like work well to us. And, and that answer for hyperscalers and, and frontier labs, like, honestly, they will literally say gigawatt plus, like, come up to us with a proposal of a gigawatt plus, which is kind of insane, right? Like a gigawatt, like even at Nvidia scale, you're talking about 40 billion, 35 billion dollars worth of, of, of revenue for them, right? Uh, even, you know, assume ASIC cheaper, blah, blah, blah, all those things, you're still talking about tens of billions of dollars, right? But like, at least you have to show a plan of like, how do you get to hundreds of megawatts in, you know,

• 1:38:53Speaker 06

  to, to use your, like, your specific, your 2028, you know, for us, we're taping out this year, production kind of ramp up in second half of 2027. In 2028, we better have a plan of how do we get to like hundreds? And I, I don't want to just say hun, cop out by saying hundreds as in just 100 megawatt. Hundreds means truly like, you know, three, four, five and above for, for those, but.

• 1:39:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so that by the next scale up, you're in that gigawatt range.

• 1:39:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. And, but also like, I also don't want to discount the fact that you have other customers, like, you know, you have inference of service providers, obviously sovereign AI clouds, uh, you know, uh, quantitative finance, quant finance, uh, kind of spectrum. And so they have like different magnitudes of kind of requirements that, that come through with it. So. You know, we, although we do internally use kind of go big or go home as a thing, like we have to attract one of these large customers to, to really be a long-term viable company. You know, I, I don't want to just like discount the fact that like, look, you can grow the company through the ranks as well. Like you can grow the company, you know, get 200 million revenue first, 250 million, a billion, 2 billion through, through this other kind of channels as well.

• 1:39:56Speaker 06

  Right. I think that, that, that becomes a big part of it. But yeah, like if, if you really want to get to like the frontier labs and hyperscalers, you're really talking about hundreds of megawatts. And that's why like, you know, like, look, when we, you know, we, we have venture tech alliance on our kind of cap table. And when we speak with TSMC for fab capacity, they're also wanting to know kind of like, can you scale? Like, you know, do you have the, the balance sheet to do that? Like the, one of the reasons we raised, you know, 875 million is not like we need 875 million to spend tomorrow or even in the next six months. I mean, look, we raised 230 million in series B in February of this year, untouched, right? We still have all that capital. Uh, part of it is because we've been making revenue this year, but we do have plan to spend that very quickly. Thank you, George.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  I was wondering what you were in.

• 1:40:42Jordi Hays?

  Untouched, untouched, because we're making revenue.

• 1:40:46Speaker 06

  Yes. Uh, the, the, the main point that is there though is like, look, they, they want to know, like if, if you actually get a customer, you have the capital and, and even that capital is, is, that is not enough equity capital to scale out to even, you know, 200 megawatt, right? Then you have to go to the Blackstones of the world and figure out how do you, how to finance that deal? Kind of what Lambda has done, right? So.

• 1:41:07John Coogan?

  What's the software side of the equation? You're coming for Nvidia, you're challenging them, you're going to drive their market cap to zero.

• 1:41:14Speaker 06

  You have to drop that end.

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  Uh, obviously, uh, this is a market that can sustain multiple players and there's different tools for the job. But interoperability is important. And I'm interested in terms of software development. Are you going to lean more open source with the software side of the business? Or more integration with just a few buyers and co-design on the software side? To make sure the integration is really seamless? Is, is there even, do we even need to be having a software conversation in an era where AI agents can write code?

• 1:41:53Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, you definitely need the software conversation because like you, you, you have to plan around how people want to use it and people want to use it how they're currently using it and going to continue to use it, which is based on Nvidia's stack, but also primarily based on PyTorch and then, you know, your VLM, MSG, Langas. And I'm specifically focused on, on inference. Like, look, training, you know, that's such a harder challenge. Like, you know what Jensen says, like true mode around scale out and everything, right? Like, that's just, that's the only reason you have probably only TP as, as potential kind of only other silicon that can be used for train, right? So.

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:42:29Speaker 06

  Uh, but, but on the inference side of things, for sure, you have to have the conversation. I will say this, in the, in the era of agentic kind of software development, um, the, the worries around like, hey, you know, model drops, if you don't have access to it, it takes you days, weeks, months to bring it up. It's, it's going away. Like, you know, you know, we, we had Muse Glimmer drop and within our team, you know, on our app, let's first end could get it up and running within hours, right? You know? And, and that, that, yeah, exactly. Like, I had the same reaction, by the way, internally when, when we, when we had that. And, and people are, are making it even faster and more automated too. Like, you don't even have to interact. Model drops, comes in, can, can, can probably do it in, in, and that's a very near future of it. But to that point, it doesn't give you the right away, the efficiency, the optimizations.

• 1:43:13Speaker 06

  Like, you know, you, you want to extract every dollar of it. So to your question around, you know, when, when the customer is large enough, you want to work closely with them to like literally extract every single dollar. And also like, I'll, I'll be very frank, like Anthropic, OpenAI, this frontier labs, hyperscalers, they are so sophisticated. They kind of want to come in and be like, look, guys, we're, even if you don't want it, we are working with you to make sure that this is going to like, you know, this is, this is optimized to the, to the fullest, right? So you, so the answer, as always in, in this scenario, is all of the bow, uh, you know, even though it might sound like, it's like, oh, it's a very cliched answer, but it really is that way.

• 1:43:47John Coogan?

  Sounds like the mafia coming in. Oh, your software stack is an open source? So you're about to open it for me. I'm going to make some changes if I need them.

• 1:43:55Speaker 06

  The software stack is like going to be built on open source, like in the sense of like, if, if you want to make like every company to, to use us for inference, you know, you have to build it on SG Lang and VLM kind of setup, right? So, so, but you know, it's like, when you're talking to SpaceX or Anthropic or OpenAI, they're not using the generic SG Lang or VLM. They have all their optimizations built in and they're going to help you do that. Then obviously there's this ag, then within this ag, there's all the different domains that they, they do. And they're going to figure out, it's like, oh, Halpinio is good for this, Positron AI, you're good for this, you know? And then they're going to, they're going to say, okay, that's how we're going to use you guys.

• 1:44:28John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, exciting times. Uh, I want to hit the gong for you. You raised 875 million.

• 1:44:37Speaker 06

  That was a following one. Thank you.

• 1:44:38John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  And thank you so much. Great stuff. Great to meet you.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  Keep an eye out on Instagram because we're definitely dropping a, uh, Nvidia challenger slide later today.

• 1:44:50Speaker 06

  Please do not associate my photo with that, but yes.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  Well, uh, have a great rest of your day.

• 1:44:56Jordi Hays?

  Looking forward to the next appearance.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:44:58Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang.

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:44:59Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. User favorite to deploy web app servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And lastly, the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  Can see Positron over there pretty soon. Pretty soon.

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  Picking some fresh ones.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  Wonderful week.

• 1:45:25John Coogan?

  Wonderful week.

• 1:45:25Jordi Hays?

  Short week.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:27Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 1:45:28John Coogan?

  Monday, 11 AM.

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Do us a favor and go ahead and have the best weekend of your entire life.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  Have the best weekend of your entire life.

• 1:45:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. Put the pieces together, make it happen.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  We'll see you on Monday. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpm.com. Goodbye.