E122: Is AI the next great computing platform? ChatGPT vs. Google, containing AGI & RESTRICT Act

(0:00) Bestie intros! (1:31) Joe Manchin calls out Biden on IRA flip-flop (7:40) Sacks writes GPT-4-powered blog post, OpenAI launches ChatGPT plugins (26:31) Will generative AI be more important than mobile and the internet itself? Making the case for both Google and OpenAI to win generative AI (50:19) Reaching and containing AGI, AI's impact on job destruction (1:16:35) RESTRICT Act's bait and switch Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-inflation-reduction-act-betrayal-joe-manchin-debt-ceiling-budget-fossil-fuels-green-energy-dc37738e https://sacks.substack.com/p/the-give-to-get-model-for-ai-startups https://sharegpt.com/c/jGKq34x https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins https://www.theinformation.com/articles/alphabets-google-and-deepmind-pause-grudges-join-forces-to-chase-openai https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Noogler_Hat.jpg https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments https://twitter.com/peakcooper/status/1639716822680236032 https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/121lhfq/i_lost_everything_that_made_me_love_my_job https://reason.com/2023/03/29/could-the-restrict-act-criminalize-the-use-of-vpns

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Jake Hells here. Hello, Jake Hells. Hey, how are you? Thanks for showing up. I've been here the whole time. I was just, I was just having some of these beautiful salted roasted possessions. The only problem is when I went to the store, I kid you not, there was a shelf of these. All flavors available except one flavor. Salt and vinegar.

• 0:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sea salt and vinegar.

• 0:20Jason Calacanis?

  Entire. We moved the market. We moved the market. I am not kidding. I go to the fancy, you know, bespoke.

• 0:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The railies, you went to the railies and trucky?

• 0:30Jason Calacanis?

  I went to the railies and trucky, the artisanal. And they have, you know, all these overpriced.

• 0:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  First of all, it's called artisanal?

• 0:37Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I said. The art stuff. The artistic food. The artisanal. Row where they had this. I kid you not. Spicy, salty, no salt, every shelf packed. Then there's one shelf I can see straight through to the ice cream.

• 0:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But not sea salt and vinegar.

• 0:55Jason Calacanis?

  And I look at the tiny little sign. Salt and vinegar, shelled nuts.

• 0:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sea salt and vinegar.

• 1:00Jason Calacanis?

  Sea salt and vinegar. Chamath's shelled nuts. Sold out across the country.

• 1:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, I cannot recommend these more highly. They're incredible.

• 1:08Jason Calacanis?

  You can't recommend your salty nuts, Mark.

• 1:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They are delicious. My salty nuts are delicious.

• 1:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Did you see Joe Manchin's high heater op ed in the Wall Street Journal?

• 1:35Jason Calacanis?

  Uh oh.

• 1:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh my God.

• 1:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yep. Joe Manchin went for it.

• 1:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Joe Manchin's running for president.

• 1:41Jason Calacanis?

  He is. I think, okay, so let me ask Sax right there. Sax, Joe Manchin, Nikki Haley. And who's the guy from Florida?

• 1:48David Sacks?

  What's your question?

• 1:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  By the way, there was a big defection that was leaked this week. Ron Lauder flipped from Trump to DeSantis. That's a big one because Lauder is good for a lot of money, five to 10 million at least.

• 2:00Jason Calacanis?

  Joe Manchin, what impact would he have coming into the race? I'm not trolling you. Looking for your honest opinion.

• 2:04David Sacks?

  Well, it depends how he comes in. What did he say in the op ed?

• 2:07Jason Calacanis?

  He was talking about the insincerity of the Biden administration to control costs and how everybody was incompetent and it certainly there's some waste and we can control some spending and everybody needs to grow up and get in a room and just manage the budget for the American people and stop playing politics.

• 2:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I think the headline of the article actually, to your point Jake out, was much worse than the substance of the article Sax, but if you see the headline, I don't know Nick, if you can just throw it up there, it was brutal. The headline and the byline of the article, I think, was more damaging than the substance of the article.

• 2:35Jason Calacanis?

  Biden's Inflation Reduction Act Betrayal. Instead of implementing the law as intended, his administration subverts it for ideological, ideological ends.

• 2:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have to think that Joe was responsible for that, for the titling of that article.

• 2:47Jason Calacanis?

  He would get permission to approve it.

• 2:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Right.

• 2:50David Friedberg?

  And by the way, I think, if you guys remember, we talked about this when that act was first published, and if you guys remember, I think I pulled up the CBO data, the CBO model, and it showed for the first five years, this thing burns a couple hundred billion dollars, and then there's some expectation that there'll be some sudden boom in revenue in the out years, and then you make the money back in the out years. So it's total, like, accounting shenanigans for him to have made the claim in the first place that the IRA was actually going to be like a net deficit reduction or debt reduction. In fact, it's all just accounting shenanigans, and it's just a massive spend package, particularly in the near term when it matters most.

• 3:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think I told you guys this, but I think this was like, when was the last time I was in Washington? Probably, what is it, March now? So maybe it was January I was there? And I saw Schumer and Mark Warner, and I spent about two hours with Manchin. He is really impressive. He's cool, he's interesting, he's thoughtful, he's moderate. Manchin's like a formidable guy, so this will be really interesting if he steps in there and tries to take on Biden.

• 3:56David Friedberg?

  Between Nikki Haley and Manchin, where do you write your check?

• 3:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'd probably write a check to both, to be honest.

• 4:01Jason Calacanis?

  Feels like a good ticket to me. I've always wanted to see the cross-party.

• 4:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Could you imagine a Democrat and Republican merging somehow and, like, running together?

• 4:08Jason Calacanis?

  It would be the greatest.

• 4:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, my God.

• 4:10Jason Calacanis?

  I've been pitching that for years. I think that's like a clear path.

• 4:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  David Friedberg may have just come up with one of the most disruptive ideas in American politics that's ever been floated.

• 4:20Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my god. Manchin, Hallie, Hallie Manchin.

• 4:23David Sacks?

  Keep dreaming.

• 4:23Jason Calacanis?

  Manchin, Hallie, yeah.

• 4:24David Sacks?

  Just my comment on this. So first of all, I remember when, you know, Manchin did a good job stopping Biden's three and a half trillion dollar Build Back Better. Remember, it was him and Sinema that were the holdouts.

• 4:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 4:33David Sacks?

  But then Manchin compromised and gave Biden a $750 billion version of it. And I guess now he's complaining that Biden didn't live up to his end of the bargain in doing the deficit reduction. But quite frankly, many commentators said at the time that the bill's claims to deficit reduction were preposterous and that would never happen. So quite frankly, you know, Manchin shouldn't have been euced or hoodwinked by Biden. Everyone was basically saying, there'll never be any deficit reduction out of this bill. It's just more spending. So I don't really feel bad for Manchin here saying that somehow he was betrayed by Biden. He should have known better. Now, in terms of him running, yeah, I think as a Democrat who's figured out how to get

• 5:14David Sacks?

  himself elected in West Virginia, which is a plus 20 red state, he obviously knows how to appeal to the center. The problem for him is just how do you get the Democratic Party nomination? Because he's far to the right of your average Democratic Party voter. If he wants to run as an independent, that's a different story. And that would really throw a curve ball into the race. But I don't see him doing that. I think it's kind of a stretch. And this is the problem with a lot of these fantasy candidates is that, you know, centrists or moderate voters might like them, but they can't get the nomination of their party.

• 5:46Jason Calacanis?

  You mean like Trump and Obama? Those were fantasy candidates?

• 5:49David Sacks?

  I don't think so. I mean.

• 5:50Jason Calacanis?

  Trump was not a fantasy candidate. He's the ultimate.

• 5:52David Sacks?

  Well, he was an outsider, but he appealed to the base of the party. He appealed to the base of the party. What I'm saying is in order to get the nomination of a major party, you have to appeal to its base. And I don't think Manchin appeals to the base of the Democratic Party. He's out of step with it. He's out of step with it in ways that I like. Don't get me wrong. But I just, I don't see how he's going to get a nomination.

• 6:11Jason Calacanis?

  Chris Christie? What do you think of him? It seems like he's about to come in the race too, David.

• 6:16David Sacks?

  Pointless.

• 6:16Jason Calacanis?

  He's viable?

• 6:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Pointless.

• 6:18David Sacks?

  He's just, he's just clutter.

• 6:20Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 6:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Pointless.

• 6:21Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Listen, everybody. Welcome to the All In Podcast. It's like episode 100 something. With me again today, the Rain Man himself. Yeah. David Sacks is here. Friedberg is in his garden at his home in Paris. Spring has sprung, the queen of quinoa. And of course, the dictator himself, Chamath Palihopetia, the silver fox. Look at that little tuft of silver hair. So distinguished.

• 6:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I got a haircut from somebody recently who said that people go to her and ask her to put the silver thing in their hair.

• 6:56Jason Calacanis?

  Really?

• 6:57David Sacks?

  I don't have to worry about that.

• 6:59Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 6:59David Sacks?

  Friedberg looks like he's in Smur Village there. What is, what is that background?

• 7:04David Friedberg?

  That is a, a scene from.

• 7:07David Sacks?

  Oh, okay.

• 7:08David Friedberg?

  Like, uh, most of my backgrounds.

• 7:10Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my God.

• 7:11David Friedberg?

  Reflects the mood in the moment of the week.

• 7:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You guys just totally, totally denied half the beta mails in the YouTube comments from being able to guess what the background was. Thanks a lot, Sacks.

• 7:21Jason Calacanis?

  For them. Well, actually, I did a reverse image search and then I used a chat GPT plugin.

• 7:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Thanks a lot, Sacks.

• 7:27Jason Calacanis?

  Automatically figure out.

• 7:28David Sacks?

  I didn't know that was the game.

• 7:29Jason Calacanis?

  Background each week.

• 7:30David Sacks?

  Oh, okay. All right. Well, let's get started. Come on.

• 7:33Jason Calacanis?

  Let's get started. Okay, listen. Look at Sacks. I gotta get out of here.

• 7:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The alpha's spoken. The alpha's spoken.

• 7:39David Friedberg?

  Sounds feels like he's in a good mood. I like this.

• 7:40Jason Calacanis?

  Welcome to the world's greatest podcast.

• 7:45Jason Calacanis?

  OpenAI launched a bunch of chat GPT plugins and I don't know if you saw it, but David Sacks wrote a blog post with chat GPT. It's an amazing back and forth. I read this back and forth. Explain what you did, Sacks. This was really like one of the best conversations I've seen with chat GPT. I'll pop it up here on the screen, but explain what you did.

• 8:08David Sacks?

  Well, I had an idea for a blog post about the use of a, I guess, tactic you could call gift to get. I thought it would be a interesting tactic for AI startups to use if they're trying to get a hold of proprietary training data. So for example, if you wanted to create an architect AI, you need a lot of plans. Or if you're going to create like a doctor AI, you need a lot of lab results or medical reports to train the AI on. And those are hard to get. OpenAI doesn't necessarily have them yet. So there is an opportunity, I think, for startups to create. These AIs and different, you call them professional verticals. So the gift to get technique would be you give points to your users for uploading that data.

• 8:52David Sacks?

  And then they can spend those points by using the AI. And anyway, the, the company that came up with this gift to get tactic was a company called Jigsaw. Almost 20 years ago, no one remembers this company. I'm kind of dating myself because I remembered it. But I just had this idea, gee, I wonder if the Jigsaw approach could be used for AI startups. So I started by going into chat GPT and I said, hey, have you heard of Jigsaw? And then it had, and then I said, tell me about its gift to get, you know, approach. And then I said, would this approach work for AI startups that want proprietary training data sets? And I said, yes, this is a good idea. And then I gave the architect example and I said, can you give me more examples like this? And it gave me like 20 more examples.

• 9:36David Sacks?

  And then I asked it just to flesh out various kinds of details. I went down some cul-de-sacs I didn't use. And then at the end I said, can you summarize everything we've just talked about in a blog post? And it gave me the first draft of a blog post. I then did a substantial amount of editing on most of the blog posts, although some of it I just use verbatim. And then I had a couple of people in my firm look at it. They made some good suggestions, so it's not like the humans completely out of the loop. And then I copy and pasted my edited version back into chat GPT said, here's my edit. And then I asked for some suggestions and made a few small edits. And I said, okay, great, just incorporate the edits yourself, gave me that final output. And then I posted on Substack.

• 10:15David Sacks?

  A blog that probably would have taken me a week to research and write, if I had done it at all, I was able to do in a day. And I can't see myself going back now. I think this is just how I'm going to write all my blog posts is, is use chat GPT as my researcher, as a writing partner, some cases an editor, but I'm definitely going to run it through.

• 10:38Jason Calacanis?

  The thing that I was struck by was. Just how kind and generous and thoughtful this conversation was. And I just thought, I've never seen Sax have a conversation where he was so kind to the other person and thoughtful. Right about now, all your friends and family are like, how do we get Sax to have this conversation with us? You were super kind to the AI.

• 10:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because it's not a person. It was a robot.

• 10:58Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 11:00David Sacks?

  Well, just in case it takes over the world, Jake, how you can't be too, too, too careful. But no, I think, listen, it's important to give the AI.

• 11:06Jason Calacanis?

  Look at he's so kind. He's like, oh, perfect. Thanks.

• 11:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Perfect.

• 11:09David Friedberg?

  No, no, I want to. I've never once gotten a thanks from Sax.

• 11:13Jason Calacanis?

  When it was an explanation part.

• 11:15David Sacks?

  Scroll up and show that example. The AI actually gave me some information about Jigsaw's point system. Again, the, the rewards that they used.

• 11:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 11:23David Sacks?

  And it was just in text. So I said down below, hey, can you spit that out as a table? And it did instantly.

• 11:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's like a day's work, right? Like you would have to have an analyst or researcher do a day's work. It's incredible. And.

• 11:34David Sacks?

  Then I just screenshot of that and I made it an exhibit.

• 11:37Jason Calacanis?

  You also said thank you. And then it was like delightful back to you. I mean, this is a, this is a road. This is a literal road to you being a kind human being. Like all the money that you've spent on therapy and just trying coaching to be nice to people. You're just nice naturally.

• 11:54David Friedberg?

  No, I think, I think Sax is in a good mood today. I don't know why you're instigating him.

• 11:59Jason Calacanis?

  He's laughing. Come on. It's funny. You have to admit it's funny Sax saying thank you to the AI. Perfect.

• 12:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is confirmatory of what we know. David wants to live in a set of highly transactional relationships, ideally with a machine.

• 12:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who can then eventually help make him money.

• 12:17Jason Calacanis?

  Can I ask a question sincerely Sax? Did you, what did you enjoy more? Working with your team of humans on this or working with chat GPT? Which one was more enjoyable for you? Just personally?

• 12:30David Sacks?

  Well, I think they're both were. I, I would say that the human contributions were essential. So.

• 12:35Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 12:36David Sacks?

  Basically.

• 12:36Jason Calacanis?

  What did you enjoy more?

• 12:38David Sacks?

  It's not about enjoyment. It's just, you know, it's about, this is just a job to get done, but. But it definitely sped things up enormously. I personally find the hardest part of writing a blog is when you're staring at that blank sheet of paper. And just having to like spit out the first thousand words.

• 12:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 12:53David Sacks?

  It's just so time consuming to do that. But again, if you start with the first draft, even if it's not very good, then you can just edit it and it speeds things up a lot.

• 13:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's great for ideation.

• 13:04David Sacks?

  But the contributions of people in my firm were important.

• 13:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 13:08David Sacks?

  I actually trusted it. I know that you probably should fact check it in a way because it can hallucinate, but the things that were saying made so much sense to me that I didn't think it was hallucinating.

• 13:17Jason Calacanis?

  Well, this is a great moment to pivot into. What OpenAI did with plugins. These came fast and furious this week. And a bunch of folks who had, you know, started verticalized chat GPT based projects, MVPs were like, oh, maybe my project MVP is now dead. Because Instacart, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Zapier, and Zapier, obviously, like if then this, then that is. A very wide ranging tool that allows you to connect APIs from a multitude of sources. And what this all lets you do at the end of the day is have chat GPT. Ping one of these sources, just like. An app might do or some custom software might do ping the API. And.

• 14:02Jason Calacanis?

  Return data. So hey, what tables are open on OpenTable? Maybe Shopify, find me things to buy in this category, etc. And so people have started building. Little scripts. We used to call these when Magic Leap was out, Internet Agents. And the concept of a software agent, that's existed for a long time, actually, in. Computer science, I'm sure Free Burke will give us some examples of that. But also chat GPT can now use a browser. So that means you can get around the dated. Nature of the content in the corpus.

• 14:38Jason Calacanis?

  Somebody did things like, hey, build me a meal plan, book me a reservation for Friday night in OpenTable, source other ingredients and buy it for Saturday night on Instacart and then use something like Wolfram Alpha. To, you know, calculate the calories, etc. So when you saw all this drop. Sax, what did you think in terms of?

• 14:58Jason Calacanis?

  The opportunity for startups and to build these intelligent agents, things that will do if then if this, then that, or just background tasks over time, and you could actually leave them running.

• 15:11David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, I think this is the most important developer platform since the iPhone and the launch of iOS and the App Store, and I would argue maybe ever in our industry, certainly since the beginning of the Internet. I think there was a question when ChatGPT launched on November 30th and people started playing with in December, what exactly OpenAI's product strategy was going to be? Was this just like a proof of concept or a demo? And they even kind of called it like a demo. And initially, it looked like what their business model was going to be was providing an intelligence API that other websites, other applications could incorporate.

• 15:51David Sacks?

  And we saw some really cool demos like that Notion demo of other applications incorporating AI capabilities. And so initially, it looked like what OpenAI was going to be was more like Stripe, where in the same way that Stripe made payments functionality available very easily through a developer platform, they were going to make AI capabilities available through their developer platform. And then I think a funny thing happened on the way to this announcement, which is they became the fastest growing application of all time, talking about ChatGPT. Over 100 million users in two months. Nobody else has ever done that before. I think it took the iPhone, you know, two years plus. Gmail, Google, those products all took, I think, well over a year.

• 16:35David Sacks?

  So this became the fastest growing site of all time. And I think with plugins, what they're indicating is that they will become a destination site. This is not just a developer platform, this is a destination site. And through plugins, they are now incorporating the ability to basically

• 16:52David Sacks?

  You know, anything you could do through an application, you will now be able to do through a plugin. You'll just tell ChatGPT what you want done. If you say, hey, book me a plane ticket on this date, it will go into Kayak's plugin and do that. You say, book me a plane ticket and then an Airbnb for this trip.

• 17:08Jason Calacanis?

  So the promise of Siri and Alexa realized, because those were very rigid, they had no intelligence, right, Friedberg? If you, if you wanted Siri to do something specific like use ways, or to go get you an open table, it needed to be pretty specific. And it didn't have any kind of natural language model behind it. So this is taking existing APIs and putting a natural language layer in front of it, which makes it, you know, perform a little more naturally. Is that what we're seeing here, Friedberg?

• 17:37David Friedberg?

  I think it provides access to a corpus of data and a suite of services that are not well-integrated into a search or chat interface anywhere today. So, you know, knowing what restaurants have what seats available is in a closed service. It's in a data warehouse operated by OpenTable. And now what OpenTable can do is provide an API into that data via an interface, and they can allow ChatGPT to make a request to figure that data out, to give a response to a user, where they can ultimately benefit from transacting and

• 18:16David Friedberg?

  allowing a service. This closes the loop between search and commerce in a way that Google cannot and does not do today. And I think that's what makes it very powerful. We've seen this attempted in a number of important ways in the last couple of years with Alexa and Apple Home and Google Home kind of integration via the chat services that they offer, you know, where you speak to the device. But the deep integration that's possible now, and the natural language way that you can go from the request all the way through to the transaction, is what makes this so extremely powerful. And I think You know, the points I made a few weeks ago when we first talked about,

• 18:57David Friedberg?

  you know, search, having so many searches that are done where the human computer interface presents a table or presents a chart or presents a shopping list in a matrix. That's what makes search such a defensible product, I think, could theoretically be completely obviated or destroyed with an interface like this, where you can write the ability for ChatGPT or whatever the core centralized services to actually present results in a table, in a matrix, in an interface, in a shopping list, and actually close the transaction loop. It's really disruptive to things like commerce providers. It's really disruptive, you know, some of these commerce platforms. It's really disruptive to a lot

• 19:38David Friedberg?

  of different industries, but also introduces a lot of real opportunity to build on top of that capability and that functionality to rewrite and ultimately make things easier and better for consumers on the internet.

• 19:49Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think, Chamath? You're looking at this, and it seems to be moving at a very fast pace. Over 100 million users. They put a business model on it already. 20 bucks a month. They have a secondary business model of, hey, use the API and we'll charge you for usage. And then you layer on what Zapier and If This Then That had already sort of established in the world, which is APIs, but nobody ever really wanted to write scripts. So that seemed to be the blocker. You go into Zapier, If This Then That, it's worth 5% of the audience. People who want to customize stuff, people who want to tinker. But this seems to now with the ChatGPT chat interface, open it up to a lot of people. So is this super significant? Or is this a commodity product that, you know, 10 people will have if we're sitting here next year on All In, episode 220?

• 20:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you are asking the exact right question. And you use the, a great term, like in poker, if there are three hearts on the board and you have the ace of hearts.

• 20:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have what's called the nut blocker, right? Which means that nobody else, even if anybody else has a flush, they never have the best flush. And if flush is the best hand, there's a lot of ways that you can manipulate the pot and eventually win the pot because you have that ace of hearts and nobody else has it. The concept of blocker, I think is very important to understand here, which is what are the real blockers for this capability to not be broadly available? So I think you have to segregate. You have the end user destination, you have the language model, and then you have the third-party services. And so if you ask the question, what is the incentive of the third-party service? Well, the shareholders of

• 21:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  a travel site, right? They're not interested in doing an exclusive deal with any distribution endpoint. They want their services integrated as broadly as possible, right? So I think the, the answer for the service providers is just like they'd build an app for iOS and for Google and, you know, if they could have justified it, they would have built an app for a gaming console. They can, they should, they would, they do, right? So that's going to get commoditized and broadly available. I think on the LLM side, I think we've talked about this. Everybody's converging on each other. In fact, there was an interesting

• 22:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  article that was released that said that there was a handful of Google engineers that quit because apparently Bard was actually learning on top of ChatGPT, which they felt was either legal or unethical or something, right? So, so the point is, I think we've talked about this for a while, but all of these models will converge in the absence of highly unique data, right? What I've been calling these white truffles. So if you can hoard white truffles, your model will be better. Otherwise, your model will be the same as everybody else's model.

• 22:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then you have the distribution endpoints of which there are many whose economic incentives are very high, right? So Facebook doesn't want to just sit around and have all this traffic go to ChatGPT. They want to be able to enable Instagram users and WhatsApp users and Facebook users to interact through Messenger, what have you. Obviously, Google has a, you know, many hundreds of billions of reasons to defend their territory. So I think all of this to me just means that these are really important use cases. As an investor, I think it's important to just stay a little patient.

• 23:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Because it's not clear to me that there are any natural blockers. But I do think that David's right, that it's demonstrating a use case that's important. But it's still so early. We are six weeks in.

• 23:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I tell you, I think there's a couple of great blockers here, or there's going to be an M and A bonanza for Silicon Valley. If you look at certain data sets, Reddit, Stack Overflow for programming, and Quora, these things are going to be worth a fortune. And to be able to buy those or get exclusive licenses to those, if you're Google Bard, or if you're ChatGPT, that could be a major difference maker, Twitter's data set, obviously. And then you look at certain tools like Zapier and If This Then That, they've spent a decade building the sort of, you know, meta API, that would be an incredible blocker. I think this is going to be like a balkanization of so many oil sources.

• 24:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Zapier already did it for free. They did a plugin for free. Exactly. I was just gonna say, I don't think these are not blockers. I don't think this is the ace of hearts on a flushboard. I don't think so. I think that these things are really interesting assets. They are definitely truffly in nature. But they may not be the, you know, 10-pound white trouble from Aldo that we're looking for.

• 24:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, no, but on the M and A side, don't you think this would be like incredible?

• 24:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, but the only reason I say that again is it is just so early. Like, in the text, I mentioned this to you guys. I remember, and Sax and I were in the middle of this. We were both right at the beginning of social networking. Sacks started Genie, I was in the middle of AIM. And all of a sudden, we saw Reed start SocialNet. Then we saw Friendster get started. Then we saw MySpace get started. And you have to remember, when you look back now, 20 years later, the winner was the seventh company, which was Facebook. Not the first, not the second, it was the seventh, which started two and a half years properly after the entire Web 2.0 phenomenon started.

• 25:11David Friedberg?

  Yeah, same with search, by the way, where Google was probably 20th to the scene.

• 25:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, excite like us.

• 25:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you want to be a real student of business history, I'll just say something that's more meta, which is, if there's something that I've learned on the heels of this SVB fiasco, is that there is an enormous amount of negative perception of Silicon Valley, and frankly, a lot of disdain for VCs and prognosticating technologists. Right? And I think that

• 25:40David Friedberg?

  So you mean this podcast?

• 25:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think we have to be very careful. Yeah, and I do think that we are an example of that, because we are the bright, shiny object of the people that were successful. And the broad makeup of America thinks that we're not nearly as smart as we all think we are. And after all of this money that's been burned in crypto land, and NFTs, and all of this Web 3 nonsense, to yet again whip up the next hype cycle, I think doesn't serve us well. So I do think there's something very important here. But I think if we want to maintain reputational capital through this cycle, because government will get involved much faster in this cycle, I think it's important to just be methodical and thoughtful,

• 26:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  iterate, experiment, but it's too early to call it, I guess, is what I would say.

• 26:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's definitely too early to call it. But Sacks, you're saying explicitly, you think this is bigger than the internet itself, bigger than mobile as a platform shift.

• 26:38David Sacks?

  It's definitely top three, and I think it might be the biggest ever. I think, look, I think things could certainly play out the way that Chamath is saying. However, I actually think that OpenAI has demonstrated now with these platform features that it has a lead, a substantial lead, and I actually think that lead is likely to grow in the next year. And let me tell you why. I think it's got a couple of assets here that are hard to replicate. So number one, user attention. I think they've now got, I would guess, hundreds of millions of users, and this thing is caught on like wildfire. Must have been beyond their wildest dream. I think it'd even surprise them how much this has taken off. It's really captured the public's imagination, and people are discovering new use cases for it every day.

• 27:21David Sacks?

  If you are sort of the number two or number three, the seventh large language model to basically get deployed behind a chatbot, I just don't think you're going to get that kind of distribution because the novelty factor will have worn off and people will have already kind of learnt to use ChatGPT. So number one is the hundreds of millions of eyeballs. Number two is with this developer platform, I think we should describe a couple of other features of it. One of the problems with ChatGPT, if you've used it, is that the training data ends in 2021. And so you very rapidly, for many questions, get to a stopping point where it says, like, I don't, I don't know the answer to that because I don't have any information about the last two years. Well, one of the plugins that OpenAI has introduced itself is called the browsing plugin,

• 28:06David Sacks?

  and it allows ChatGPT to go search the internet and not just run internet searches, but to run an internet search as if it were a human. So you ask, you ask ChatGPT a question, and it goes to find, it runs a search, and then it scours through the list of 20 links, and it doesn't stop until it finds a good answer. And then it comes back to you with just the answer. So it actually saves you the time of clicking through all those loops, and it'll give you the browsing history to show you what it did. That's mind blowing. They also have a thing called a retrieval API, which allows developers to share proprietary knowledge bases with ChatGPT. So if you have a company knowledge base or some other kind of content, you can share with ChatGPT so that ChatGPT can be aware of that.

• 28:50David Sacks?

  And there are some privacy concerns, but the company has said they're going to sandbox that data and protect it. As an example, I'm planning on writing a book on SaaS using ChatGPT. And I'm going to put together all the previous articles and talks I've done as a database. So I can then work with that in ChatGPT. So you're going to have more and more developers sharing information with ChatGPT. You're going to have ChatGPT able to update its training based on sort of the last two years, be able to search the internet. And I think that as those hundreds of millions of users use the product and as developers keep sharing more and more of these data sets, the AI is going to get smarter and smarter. And then what's going to happen is both consumers and developers are going to want

• 29:33David Sacks?

  to use or build on the smartest API.

• 29:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, see, this is where I think.

• 29:37David Sacks?

  So it feeds on itself.

• 29:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think there might be a, I agree with much of what you're saying, but I do think somebody like Facebook, when they release their language model, which they're about to, is not going to allow ChatGPT to have any access to the Facebook corpus of data. And then LinkedIn will do the same. They'll block any access to ChatGPT to their data. And so then you might say, you know what? I'm doing something related to business and business contacts. I need to use the LinkedIn one. And they're just going to block other people's usage of and tell you, hey, you have to come to our interface and have a pro account on LinkedIn. And this all becomes little islands of data. And so I'm not sure that.

• 30:12David Sacks?

  You may be right, Jake Al, it's too early to have a definitive opinion, but I would say.

• 30:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You have to believe plugins are going to be promiscuous.

• 30:17David Sacks?

  Yes, exactly. Plugins are the refutation of your idea.

• 30:20Jason Calacanis?

  Facebook does not have an API. Twitter turned off their API. People who are smart with data sets. Cora doesn't let people use its data. So I just picked three. Those are three incredible data sets that don't allow people, and Craigslist doesn't. So people who are smart do not allow APIs into their data. They keep it for themselves.

• 30:37David Sacks?

  I think there were a lot of people when the App Store rolled out that swore up and down they would never build a mobile app because they didn't want to give Apple that kind of power, that the internet was open, whereas the App Store is closed and curated by Apple. And sure enough, they all, at the end of the day, had to roll out apps, even though in the case of Facebook, it definitely has made them vulnerable because they're downstream of Apple. I mean, Apple now has enormous influence over Facebook's advertising revenue because users have to go through Apple. They never had to do that before at the internet. Nonetheless, Facebook felt compelled to release a mobile app because they knew it was existential for them if they didn't. And I believe that what's happening is.

• 31:14Jason Calacanis?

  I don't think it's the right analogy. The right analogy would be Google Search. Does Facebook? Does Craigslist allow their data to be indexed inside of Google search answers? No, right? They block that for a reason. They and they will write a cease and desist letter.

• 31:27David Sacks?

  Fine. So, so you know what? Those guys will stay out of it, but look how much content Google search already has. And I think that ChatGPT will start by eating a substantial portion of search, because again, you don't have to go through the 20 links. It just gives you the answer. It's going to eat a substantial portion of browser usage and app usage because you're just going to tell ChatGPT what you want to do. It will go book your plane ticket. It will go book your hotel room.

• 31:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. See, this is another part where I

• 31:52David Sacks?

  The apps that want to play in this, hold on, the apps that want to play in this will benefit. So there'll be a powerful incentive for applications to get an advantage by participating. Let me finish my point.

• 32:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 32:02David Sacks?

  And then eventually, they will be forced to do it, not because they get an advantage, but because they're so competitively disadvantaged if they don't participate in that ecosystem.

• 32:10Jason Calacanis?

  I agree that they'll participate in it, but here's the thing. What's going to happen is Google's going to turn on Bard, and I've been playing with Bard. It is 80% of ChatGPT already. And then when they make Bard a default, you know, little snippet on your Google search return page, or Bard is built into YouTube, or Chrome, or Android, or the Play Store, they're going to roll right over ChatGPT because they have billions of users already. So this advantage that you see today, I see that getting rolled real quick because you'll be on YouTube and on the top right hand side will be Bard. And when you do a search, it's going to say, here are other sentences you could do. Oh, you want to search Mr. Beast, when he's helped people, or Mr. Beast, when he's given away more money, or people who've copied and been inspired by Mr. Beast. All that's going to occur inside of YouTube and

• 32:54Jason Calacanis?

  ChatGPT is not going to have access to the YouTube corpus of data. And then when you do a search, it's going to be the same thing. It's going to be on the right hand side and it's going to be playing just like it is in Bing. If you turn on your Android phone, they're going to make Google Assistant go right into Bard. And Google Assistant is already used by hundreds of millions of people. So I think that Google will roll. I think they're going to roll ChatGPT.

• 33:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't know who's going to win, but I'm looking at this Saksipoo more reductively as a capitalist, which is what are people's incentives? Because that's what they'll do. Google's incentive is to usurp ChatGPT's usage by

• 33:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Inserting something inside of their existing distribution channels to suppress the ability for you to want to go to the app. Known as bundling. I think Facebook has that same incentive. Oddly, even though Microsoft is such a deep partner, I think certain assets of Microsoft have that incentive. You're talking collectively about five or six trillion dollars of market cap. Then when you add in Alexa and Amazon and Siri and Apple, what is their incentive? I don't think their incentive is to let this happen. And I think if you look at the Slack, Microsoft Teams example of even a better engineered product who's excellent and widely deployed, even at hundreds of millions of users, doesn't

• 34:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  much matter when it's more cleverly distributed and priced. And so those things, again, you may still be right. All I'm saying is it's just so early to know. And as slow and lumbering as some of these big companies are, they are not so stupid as to kill their own golden goose and/or defend it when threatened. So I think you just have to let it see what happens.

• 34:38David Sacks?

  I want to finish the point on Google and then we can move on to the bundling thing. Let me just make the counter argument, which is that I think Google was caught completely flat footed here, even though they shouldn't have been because they published the original paper on transformers in 2017. They should have seen where all of this was going, but they didn't. OpenAI used that paper and commercialized it. And the proof of that is there was just a lawsuit a couple of days ago, or at least a claim by a former employee of Google who quit because he said that they were using ChatGPT to train their AI. So their AI is so far behind. They were violating the terms of use, hold on, they were violating the terms of use of OpenAI to train their own AI on ChatGPT.

• 35:23David Sacks?

  That's not a good sign. That's not a good sign. I also think.

• 35:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hold on.

• 35:28David Sacks?

  Hold on, I'm just making the counter argument here. I mean, don't dismiss it out of hand. Give me a chance to explain it. Moreover. ChatGPT-4, which was just released a few weeks ago, we know that OpenAI had that. They were using it internally for seven months. So the state of the art is not what we're using. It's what OpenAI has internally. They're obviously working now on ChatGPT-5. And so if you're saying that Bard is 80% of ChatGPT-4. Well, I got news for you. It's probably 50% or 20% of ChatGPT-5. And who knows what the product roadmap is inside of OpenAI? I am sure that they've got 200 ideas for things they could do to make it better and low-hanging fruit.

• 36:13David Sacks?

  But look, regardless, I think the pace of innovation here and development is going to speed up massively. I mean, there is going to be a flurry of activity. I agree, it's hard to know exactly how it's going to play out. But I think this idea that, oh, it's a foregone conclusion. These big companies are just going to catch up with OpenAI. I, I think that there's a strong counterargument. That's not the case.

• 36:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm making a very specific argument. It's not a foregone conclusion where all the value will get captured. Just like in any of these major tidal waves. If you make the bets too early, you typically don't make all the money. And it tends to be the case, and it has been in the past at least, with these transformative moves. It's sort of in the early third of the cycle is where the real opportunities to make the tons of money emerge. And there's a lot of folks that show you a path and then just don't necessarily capture the value. I'm not saying that that's going to be the case here. All I'm saying is if history is a guide, all of these other big waves have shown that fact pattern. And so I'm very excited and I'm paying attention, but I'm just being circumspect with this idea that, you know,

• 37:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  having been in the middle of these couple of waves before it, I made all the money by waiting a couple of years. I don't know if that's going to be true this time around, but that's sort of my posture right now.

• 37:25David Sacks?

  You look, you obviously have a point because we're only four months in. So how can we know where this is going to be in five years? So you could be right.

• 37:31Jason Calacanis?

  To your point, Sacks, I think it's clear, and this is, you know, big ups to the OpenAI team, that they will be one of the top two or three players. Absolutely, we all agree on that, which is extraordinary in itself. And the top four players, Friedberg, are obviously going to be. Microsoft OpenAI, we'll call that like, whatever, that little, you know, pairing. And then Google, Facebook, and then we haven't talked about Apple, but obviously, Apple is not going to take this sitting down and hopefully they'll they'll get in gear and have Siri, you know, make it to the next level, or they'll just put her out to pasture. If you were to look at those four, and we're sitting here a year from now, who has the best product offering, who has the biggest user base?

• 38:14Jason Calacanis?

  Just take a minute to think about that because you were at Google and we all know, the word on the street is, it's the return of the kings. Larry and Sergey are super engaged by all reports, every back channel, everybody I talked to was saying that they're every day, they're obsessed with Google's legacy now and making this happen. So what can you tell us in terms of who you think a year or two from now will have the biggest user base and be the most innovative amongst that quartet? Or maybe you think there's other players who will emerge?

• 38:45David Friedberg?

  The advantage that OpenAI has, which is the advantage that any, call it emerging, you know, advantaged competitor has.

• 38:56Jason Calacanis?

  Outsiders.

• 38:58David Friedberg?

  Yeah, outsider, is that the incumbents are handicapped by their current scale. Much of the consideration set that Google has had in deciding what features and tools to launch with respect to AI over the last couple of years, has been driven fundamentally by a concern about public policy and public reaction. And I know this from speaking to folks there that are close enough to kind of indicate, like, Google has been so targeted, has been such the point of attack by governments around the world with respect to their scale and monopoly and monopolistic kind of behavior, as some people have framed it, privacy concerns, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

• 39:40David Friedberg?

  The fines in the EU are extraordinary, that so much of what goes on at Google today is, can I get approval to do this? And so many people have felt so frustrated that they can't actually unleash the toolkit that Google has built. And so they've been harnessed and focused on these internal capabilities. I think I mentioned this in the past, but things like... What's the right video to show on YouTube to keep people engaged? What's the right ad to show to increase click-through rates, et cetera, et cetera? Versus building great consumer products for fear of the backlash that would arise and governments coming down on them and ultimately attacking the revenue and the core revenue stream. And this is no different than any other kind of innovator's dilemma. You know, any other business of scale and any other industry historically ultimately gets disrupted

• 40:25David Friedberg?

  because their job at that point is to protect their cash flow and their revenue stream and their balance and their assets, not to disrupt themselves, especially as a public company, especially under the scrutiny and the watchful eye of governments and regulators. So I think Google has in aggregate, probably good competitive talent, if not better talent than OpenAI and others. Google has arguably the best corpus of data upon which to train, the best capabilities, the best toolkit, the best hardware, the lowest cost for running these sorts of models, the lowest cost for serving them, et cetera, et cetera. So frankly, they're way behind. The battle is theirs to lose. If they are willing to disrupt themselves, and this is the moment that Larry and Sergey should wield those founder's shares that they have.

• 41:10David Friedberg?

  And they should wield the comments that they wrote in that founder's letter, that they will always make the right decision for the long term for this company, even if it means taking a cost in the short term and disrupting themselves. This is the moment to prove that those founder's shares were worth, you know, the negotiation to get there. And I think that it is going to require a real degree of scrutiny, a real degree of regulatory uncertainty, a real degree of challenge by governments and public policy people, and perhaps even a revenue hit in the near term, to realize the opportunity. But I do think that they're better equipped to win if they chose to. Well said.

• 41:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, really well said. I think the founder's share insight is particularly interesting, Sax. The fact that they fought for those and did nothing with them.

• 41:52David Friedberg?

  Got you, man.

• 41:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, no, I was just going to say the exact same thing. It's like, if they don't use it now, what would it take and when? And yet another, yet another case of the emperor has no clothes. Just a power grab by Silicon Valley execs, which was meaningless. Because if in this moment you don't wield that power and break that company into bits as you need to, what was the point of having it?

• 42:14Jason Calacanis?

  They need to come in and say, we're going to give barred results to 10% of users and ask them to give feedback on it. Because who has more queries than, just one point I want to make there for Reber. Who has more?

• 42:28Jason Calacanis?

  Reinforcement learning than Google. That search box is everywhere and people write question after question and Gmail.

• 42:35David Friedberg?

  And Google Docs, et cetera, et cetera.

• 42:36Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, they have so many people asking questions and YouTube might be the transcripts of YouTube alone.

• 42:43David Friedberg?

  Every video and the image of every video.

• 42:44Jason Calacanis?

  Bananas. And the comments under it. You know, the comments under the video, you have the transcript of what happened in this video. And then what was the question and answer underneath it?

• 42:53David Friedberg?

  Let me make the counterpoint.

• 42:55Jason Calacanis?

  Please.

• 42:55David Friedberg?

  To my own point, like, look at how Gerson came after Zuck. So Zuck had his point of view, his strongly held belief that AR VR was the future of the platform. That's what he wanted to bet into. That's what he wanted to lean into. It's what he wanted to build the company against. He did it. And then the financial analysts and the investors came at him and said, this is a waste of money. Focus on making money. You have a responsibility as shareholders. F those founder shares. You don't deserve that 10x voting right. Or whatever the framing might have been to get him to say, you know what, I acquiesce. I'm giving it up. And I think that we should also think about what's going to happen on the other side. Google is a trillion plus dollar market cap company. Their, their shares are owned by every public endowment, public pension fund. Institutional investor owns Google in their portfolio.

• 43:37David Friedberg?

  So the backlash against Google making a hard bet like this and potentially destroying billions of dollars of cash flow in the process every year will not be easy to do. That the same sorts of letters that Gerson at all, and obviously we love Gerson and, you know, we can all defend him all day long, at Zuck is what might, may end up happening with, with Alphabet if they did choose to go this path.

• 43:58Jason Calacanis?

  Sax, what do you think here about the founder share specifically in Google's chances of disrupting themselves and, you know, just putting this into every product and shoving it down users throats and catching up?

• 44:11David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, with all due respect to Larry and Sergey, I mean, they've been on the beach a long time.

• 44:17Jason Calacanis?

  That's a lot of beach time.

• 44:18David Sacks?

  This is reminds me of Apollo Creed coming out of retirement in Rocket 4. They're a lot of shape, they're a lot of shape. A lot of, a lot of fanfare, but.

• 44:29David Sacks?

  They could be a little out of shape. Sam Altman may not look like Ivan Drago, but, but this, this is one shrewd character. He's fit. This is one shrewd character. I mean. Altman is fit. He's fit. He's been in the arena. Yeah, he's, you know, he's a multi-time founder who sat at the top of YC and got to see everything that worked.

• 44:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 44:46David Sacks?

  And got to see all the research and he's been plugging away at this for, what, like eight years? So there's a, there's a big, I just think there's a big gap to catch up on. Now, Google has all the resources in the world and they've got a lot of proprietary assets too, and they've got all the incentive in the world. So do I think that Google will be one of the top four players in AI? Absolutely. But this idea that it's going to come and steamroll OpenAI,

• 45:11Jason Calacanis?

  I have a prediction. I got a prediction. Within next year, Larry and Sergey take the title of co-CEOs and then they do a demo day where the two of them get on stage and they actually do the demos of these products. If that happens, that's fictional pontification. That's it. That's, listen, and Bezos is going to run for president. Those are my two predictions. I'm taking a lot of predictions. Can you imagine if Larry, Freebro, where are the chances of Larry and Sergey taking co-CEO slots? That's prediction one. And then prediction two, what are the chances of them running the next Google I/O where they get on stage and they walk people through all the products that they shepherded and that they have a vested interest in that they're, they want to demo?

• 45:50David Friedberg?

  There is an institutional problem at Google at the top level, which does need to be solved, which is this position of constantly being in defense against the scrutiny, again, of regulators and public policy folks and, and, you know, all these different groups that are against Google. And so as a result, the, the kind of cultural seasoning, particularly at the executive and the board level, has been one of like, you know, protect the nest, don't overreach, don't overstep. And it's a real, you know, I think one for the, for the business school books or whatever, ultimately is what they end up doing about it. Cause now is, you know, the time when that defensive posture is really kind of putting the entire business at risk.

• 46:34David Sacks?

  The same thing happened to Microsoft, remember in the late 90s?

• 46:36Jason Calacanis?

  That's right.

• 46:37David Sacks?

  When they got crushed by that antitrust lawsuit. It made them very defensive.

• 46:41Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that can, no, but that consent decree.

• 46:43David Friedberg?

  They put, they had a wartime CEO come in, Ballmer came in and, you know, followed by kind of an innovative guy who could kind of continue to build. And I think that there may be a moment here. I, look, I love Sundar. He, he's a, he's a great guy, great CEO. Cause Sundar and I, I don't know if I guys, if I ever told you this, he and I started at Google on the same day. We're both in the same nuclear class. We wore the frigging hat on the TGIF day and on stage. He was a product manager and now he runs the company. I think the question is like, whether it's the CEO or the broader whole kind of executive org or the board, a degree of disruption necessary to shift that cultural seasoning is so necessary right now for them to have a shot at this. And similar to what you just said, Sacks, like you're going to need a bomber type moment to kind of, you know,

• 47:27David Friedberg?

  reinvigorate that business. And by the way, I'll tell you-

• 47:30David Sacks?

  More of a Satya moment, I think than a-

• 47:31Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah, because it's an important point when Bomber took over during that period after Gates, when they were on their heels, he basically just focused on revenue and paying dividends and stock buybacks and the stock went sideways and he missed mobile. And now- Yeah, it's a good point, Jake. Yeah.

• 47:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, wait, you're forgetting one big thing, which is that that was also because he had to operate under a consent decree to the DOJ.

• 47:55Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly.

• 47:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So the product managers of Microsoft were replaced with lawyers from the Department of Justice and you had to get their sign off before you could ship anything. So we have to remember that those things probably slowed Microsoft down as well. And the great thing that Satya had was a blank slate and the removal of that consent decree. So he was able to do everything that just made a lot of sense and he's executed flawlessly.

• 48:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the problem at Google is not Sundar or Larry or Sergey. I think it's more in the deep bowels of middle management of that company, which is that there's just far too many people that probably have an opinion and their opinion is not shrouded in survival. Their opinion is shrouded in elite language around what is the moral and ethical implications of this and where has this been properly tested on the diaspora of 19 different ethnic tribes of the Amazon? That's the kind of decision-making that is a nice to have when you are the second or third most valuable technology company in the world.

• 49:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But you have to be able to pause that kind of thinking and instead get into wartime survival mode, and it's very hard. So it doesn't almost matter at this point what Sundar wants. The real question is, what is the capability of middle management to either do it or get out of the way? And I think that in all of these big companies that struggle, what you really see is an inability for middle management to get out of the way, or frankly, just you need somebody to then fire them. And if you look at folks who get their groove back, let's see what Facebook does. What are they targeting? They're targeting middle management. If you look at what Elon does in the companies that he owns, there

• 49:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  is virtually no middle management. It's like, get out of the way.

• 49:49Jason Calacanis?

  Build product.

• 49:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Build product and ship it.

• 49:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 49:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And what is the core truth? And so if failure is there in front of you, and if David is right, that you have 200 million users come out of nowhere, who are voting every day with their time and attention to use an app, and that doesn't create a fire on fire where you get middle management out of the way, and you are the senior most people talking to the people doing the work and shipping things every day, you're, you are toast. You are toast.

• 50:19Jason Calacanis?

  A lot of people are starting to think we're moving a little bit too fast when it comes to OpenAI's incredible performance with ChatGPT-4, the plugins and all this. And so the Future of Life Institute, which was formed in 2015, it's a nonprofit that's focused on de-risking major technology like AI. They did a petition titled Pause Giant AI Experiments in Open Letter. A bunch of computer scientists signed this letter, and the letter quote says, "We must ask ourselves, should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling

• 51:00Jason Calacanis?

  ones? Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete, and replace us? Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?" A number of notable tech leaders like Elon, Steve Wozniak, and a handful of DeepMind researchers have signed it. What do you guys think of the letter? Are we going to slow down or not? And then we could ask the question generally, how close are we getting to AGI, which is what everybody's scared of, is that these agents start working with each other in the background to do things that are against human interest. I know it sounds like science fiction, but... There is a theory that when these AIs start operating on their own, like we explained in the previous sort of segment here with plugins and they make agents that are operating

• 51:43Jason Calacanis?

  based on feedback from each other, could they get out of control and be mischievous and then work against human interest? So what do you think, Sax?

• 51:50David Sacks?

  I think there's a difference between what could happen in the short term and then what could happen in the long term. I think in the short term, everything we're seeing right now is very positive. And let me just give you an example. There was a really interesting tweet storm about a guy who wrote about how ChatGPT saved his dog. Did you guys see this?

• 52:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 52:09David Sacks?

  This was one of the really mind blowing ones to me, use cases. So his dog was sick, took him to a vet, vet prescribed some medication. Three days later, dog's still sick, in fact, even worse. So the owner of the pet just literally copied and pasted the lab result for the blood test for the dog with all the lab values into ChatGPT and said, what could this be? Like, what's your likely diagnosis? ChatGPT gave three possible answers, three illnesses. The first one was what the vet basically had diagnosed with, so that wasn't it. The second one was excluded by another test. So he then went to a second vet and said, listen, I think my dog has the third one. And vet prescribed something and sure

• 52:52David Sacks?

  enough, dog is cured, saved. So that's really mind blowing that even though ChatGPT hasn't been specifically optimized, as far as we know, for lab results, it could figure this out. The reason I'm mentioning this is it gives you a sense of the potential here to cure disease, to, you know, like I could see major medical breakthroughs based on the AI in the next five or 10 years. Now, the question is, like, what happens in the long term? You know, as the AI gets smarter and smarter, and we are kind of getting into the realm of science fiction, but here would be the scenario is you're on ChatGPT 10 or 20 or whatever it is, or maybe some other companies AI.

• 53:34David Sacks?

  And the developers ask the AI, hey, how could you make yourself better? Now do it, which is a question we ask ChatGPT all the time in different contexts. And so ChatGPT will already have the ability to write perfect code by that point. I think, you know, code writing is one of the, I think of its superpowers already. So it gives itself the ability to rewrite its code, to auto update it, to recursively make itself better. I mean, at that point, isn't that like a speciation event? Doesn't that very quickly lead to the singularity if the AI has the capability to rewrite its own code, to make itself better? And, you know, won't it very quickly write billions of versions of itself? And, you know, it's very hard to predict what that future looks like.

• 54:18David Sacks?

  Now, I also don't know how far away we are from that. That could be 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, whatever.

• 54:24David Sacks?

  But I think it's a question worth asking for sure.

• 54:26Jason Calacanis?

  Is it worth slowing down though, Sax? Should we be pausing because based on what you've said, and I think you've framed it properly. When these things hit a certain point and they start reinforcing their own learning with each other, they can go at infinite speed, right? This is not comparable to human speed. They could be firing off millions, billions of different

• 54:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think you're right.

• 54:47Jason Calacanis?

  scenarios.

• 54:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're definitely now on this fuck around, find out curve.

• 54:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so there is only one way to really find out, which is somebody's going to push the boundaries. The competitive dynamics will get the better of some startup. They'll do something that people will look back on and say, whoa, that was a little, that was a bridge too far.

• 55:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So yeah, we're just a matter of time.

• 55:12David Sacks?

  Yeah, I think we're not going to slow down. I actually think it's going the other way. I think things are going to speed up and the reason they're going to speed up is because the one thing Silicon Valley is really good at is taking advantage of a platform shift. And so when you think about like all the VCs and all the founders, you know, everyone accuses us of being lemmings. And so when there's like, kind of like a fake. Platform shift or people kind of glom onto something that ends up not being real. Everyone's kind of got egg on their faces. But the flip side of that is that when the platform shift is real, Silicon Valley is really good at throwing money at it. The talent knows how to go after it and they keep making it better and better. And so that's the dynamic we're in right now.

• 55:55David Sacks?

  You look at 70% of the last YC class was ready, all AI startups. Sure, the next one will probably be 95%. So I think that we're on a path here where the pace of innovation is actually going to speed up. Companies are going to compete with each other. They're going to seek to invent new capabilities. And I think the results are going to all be incredibly positive for some period of time. Like, you know, the vet example, we're going to cure illnesses. We're going to solve major problems.

• 56:21Jason Calacanis?

  Positive, then we invest more, we trust more. But the paradox of that, as Chamath is pointing out, Friedberg, is if we trust it more, we invest more, then some person in a free market is going to say, you know what? I need to beat ChatGPT. Therefore, I'm going to take the rails off this thing. I'm going to let it go faster and take off some constraints because I need to win. And I'm so far behind. How do you feel about that scenario that sort of Chamath and Sax teed up Friedberg?

• 56:48David Friedberg?

  I think there's like GPT three, I think, ran on 700 gigs. Is that right? Does anyone know what GPT four runs on? It's got to be on some number that's, you know, not too, not, not a many multiples of that, but.

• 57:08David Friedberg?

  Look, if someone could make a copy of this thing and fork it and develop an entirely new model, I think that's what's incredible about software and digital technology. And also kind of, you know, means that it's very hard to contain. Similar to like what we've seen in biology, ever since biology got digitized through DNA sequencing and the ability to kind of express molecules through gene editing.

• 57:37David Friedberg?

  You know, you can't control or contain the ability to do gene editing work at all. Because everyone knows the code. Everyone can make CRISPR-Cas molecules. Everyone can make gene editing systems in any lab, anywhere. Once it was out, it was out. And now there's hundreds of variants for doing gene editing, many of which are much improved over CRISPR-Cas9. I use that as an analogy because it was this breakthrough technology that allowed us to precisely, specifically edit genomes and that allowed us to engineer biology and do these incredible things, where biology effectively became software. And remember, CRISPR-Cas9 gave us effectively a word processing type tool, find and replace.

• 58:17David Friedberg?

  And the tooling that's evolved from that is much better. So whatever is underlying, whatever the parameters are for GPT-4, whatever that model is, if a close enough replicant of that model exists or a copy of that model is made, and then new training data and new evolutions can be done separately, you could see many, many variants that kind of emerge from here. And I think this is a good echoing of Chamath's point. We don't know what's ultimately going to win. Is there enough of a network effect in the plugin model, as Sacks pointed out, to really give OpenAI the sustaining competitive advantage? I'm not sure. The model runs on 700 gigs. That's less data than, you know, fits on my iPhone. So, you know, I could take that model, I could take the parameters of that model,

• 59:01David Friedberg?

  and I could create an entirely new version, I could fork it, and I could do something entirely new with it. So I don't think you can contain it. I don't think that this idea that we can put in place some regulatory constraints and say it's illegal to do this, or, you know, try and, you know, create IP around it or protections around it, is realistic at this state. The power of the tool is so extraordinary, the extendability of the tools are so extraordinary. So the economic and, you know, the various incentives are there for, you know, other models to emerge. And whether they're directly copied from someone hacking into OpenAI servers and making a copy of that model, or whether they're, you know, open sourced, or whether someone generates something that's 95% as good, and then it forks and a whole new class of models emerge. I think this is like...

• 59:47David Friedberg?

  It's as Sacks pointed out, highlighting the kind of economic market uprooting, social uprooting potential, and many models will start to kind of come to market.

• 59:58Jason Calacanis?

  What do we think the impact of white collar jobs getting annihilated by this technology if that in fact comes to pass?

• 1:00:03David Friedberg?

  I want to say one thing on this. Yeah, look.

• 1:00:04Jason Calacanis?

  Well, let me just share. Can I just give one example here? So here's a Reddit post that I was made aware of earlier this week. "I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney overnight. I am employed as a 3D artist in a small games company of 10 people. Our team is two people," he basically explains. He says, "Since Midjourney version 5 came out, he's not an artist anymore, nor a 3D artist. All they do is prompting, photoshopping, and implementing good-looking pictures." And he basically says, "This happened overnight, and he had no choice. His boss also had no choice." He says, "I am now able to create, rig, and animate a character that's spit out from MJ, Midjourney, in two to three days. Before, it took us several weeks in 3D." The difference is that he cares about his, you know, job,

• 1:00:47Jason Calacanis?

  and for his boss, it's just a huge time money saver. He's no longer making art. And the person who was number two in the organization, who didn't make as good content as him, is now embracing this technology because it curies favor with his boss. And he ends basically saying, "Getting a job in the game industry is already hard, but leaving a company and a nice team because AI took my job feels very dystopian. I doubt it would be better in a different company also. I am between grief and anger, and I am sorry for using..."

• 1:01:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My gosh.

• 1:01:17Jason Calacanis?

  "...your art, fellow artists."

• 1:01:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is yet another reason that Figma really needs to close this acquisition from Adobe. I mean, it's like, the value of these apps are just getting gutted. If you take a workflow management tool for things like design and imagery, and you reduce it by an order of 90%, it's like, what is that app experience worth? And how could you replicate it if you were a big company that already has distribution? That's one comment. But what I would tell you, Jason, to answer the white collar question is, I think there are a handful of companies you need to look at exclusively, because they will be the first ones to really figure out how to displace human labor. And that is...

• 1:02:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  TCS, so Tata Consulting Services, Accenture, Cognizant, these are all the folks that do coding for higher work at scale. I think Accenture has something like 750,000 employees. So the incentive to sort of squeeze opex to create better utilization rates, to increase profitability is quite obvious. It always has been. They will be the first people to figure out how to use these tools at scale. Before the law firms or the accounting firms or any of those folks even sort of try to figure out how to displace white collar labor, I think it's going to be the coding jobs and it's going to be the coding for higher jobs that companies like Accenture and TCS.

• 1:02:40Jason Calacanis?

  So those business processing

• 1:02:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do for other people.

• 1:02:42Jason Calacanis?

  Developer kind of folks, they're going to need half as many people? 25% as many people?

• 1:02:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're going to find out the efficient frontier.

• 1:02:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51David Sacks?

  I see it a different way. I mean, this argument that productivity leads to job loss has been made for hundreds of years and it's always been refuted. When you make human beings more productive, it leads to more prosperity, more wealth.

• 1:03:03Jason Calacanis?

  Growth.

• 1:03:03David Sacks?

  More growth. And so, yeah, it's easy to think about in a narrow way, the jobs are going to be displaced. But, but why would that be? It's because you're giving leverage to other human beings to get more done. And some of those human beings, really anybody with a good idea is now going to be able to create a startup much more easily. So you're going to see a huge explosion in creativity, in startup creation, new companies, new jobs. Imagine, think about the case of, you know, Zuckerberg founding Facebook at Harvard. He wrote the first version himself, maybe with a couple of friends. That project happened and turned into a giant company because he was able to self-execute his idea without needing to raise venture capital or even recruit employees, even really

• 1:03:48David Sacks?

  before forming a company. Anyone with a good idea is going to be able to do that soon. You're going to be able to use these AI tools. They truly will be no code. You'll be able to create an app or a website just by speaking to some AI program in a natural language way.

• 1:04:01Jason Calacanis?

  So more flowers will bloom, more startups will bloom, more projects.

• 1:04:04David Sacks?

  Now, now, it will create, it will create, I think, a lot of dislocation. But for every testimonial. That is like the one that you showed, which I think is, I'd say, a little bit overly dramatic. I have seen 10 or 100 testimonials from coders on Twitter or other blogs, talking about the power that these new tools give them. They are like, this makes me a 10x engineer.

• 1:04:27David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:04:27David Sacks?

  And especially these like junior engineers who are right out of school, who don't have 20 years of coding history, they get superpowers right away. Like, it makes them so much better.

• 1:04:37David Friedberg?

  Proper response from this. But wait, hold on. Let me give you a response to that guy. So, so, and using Sax's point, that guy saying what used to take me weeks, I can now do in two to three days. And I feel like my work is gone. And that's because he's thinking in terms of his output being static. And if he thinks about his output being dynamic, he can now, in the matter of three weeks, instead of making one character, he can now make a character every two days. So he can make 30 characters in three weeks. That's an alternative way for him to think about what this tooling does for him and his business. The number of video games will go up by 10x or 100x or 1000x. The number of movies and videos that can be rendered in computers can go up by 10x or 100x or 1000x. This is why I really believe strongly that

• 1:05:23David Friedberg?

  in some period of time, we will all have our own movie or our own video game ultimately generated for us on the fly, based on our particular interests. There will certainly be shared culture, shared themes, you know, shared morality, shared things that tie all these things together. And that will become the shared experience. But in terms of like us all consuming the same content, it will really, like with YouTube and TikTok, we're all consuming different stuff all the time. And this will enable an acceleration of that evolution and personalization. I'll also highlight, you know, back in the day, one human had to farm a farm by hand. And we eventually got the tool of a hoe and we could put in the ground and make, you know, make stuff faster.

• 1:06:03David Sacks?

  Excuse me?

• 1:06:04David Friedberg?

  The way we got a plow and then we got a tractor. And today. Agricultural farm equipment allows one farmer to farm over 10,000 acres. You go to Western Australia, it's incredible. These guys have 24 row planters and harvesters and it's completely changed the game. So the unit of output per farmer is now literally millions of times what it was just 150 years ago.

• 1:06:25Jason Calacanis?

  And in that case, Freebrooke, nobody wants to do backbreaking labor in the fields and everybody wants that cheaper food. But in this case, let me just read you one quote that I didn't read in the original reading of this. He says, "I want to make art that isn't the result of scraped internet content from artists that were not asked." And so I think that's part of this is that it's bespoke art. But yeah, I do, the one question I had for Sax was Sax, you, we started this conversation, we're saying, hey, this is different than anything in terms of efficiency that came before it. This is, I'm going to put some words in my mouth here, but this is like a step function more efficient. So to the argument of, hey, efficiency has always resulted in, you know, more ideas and we've found something to do with people's time.

• 1:07:09Jason Calacanis?

  Is this time different potentially because this is so much more powerful? This isn't just like a spell checker.

• 1:07:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would say differently. I think, and I agree with what J Cal is saying because I think that the thing that technology has never done is try to displace human judgment. It's allowed us to replace physical exertion of energy, but it has always preserved humans injecting our judgment. And I think this is the first time where we're being challenged with autonomous systems that has some level of judgment. Now, we can say, and it's true, again, we're four months in, that that judgment isn't so great. But eventually, and because of the pace of innovation, eventually it's probably not that far away,

• 1:07:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  the judgment will become perfect. I'll give you a totally different example, you know, how many pilots are there in the world? Will we, at some point in the next 10 years, want?

• 1:08:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Folks to actually manually take off and land? Or will we want precision guided instrumentation and computers and sensors? That can guarantee a pitch perfect landing every single time in all kinds of weather conditions, so that now planes can even have 50x the number of sensors with a computer that can then process it and act accordingly? Just a random example that isn't even thought of when we talk about sort of where AI is going to rear its head. I think that this judgment idea is an important one to figure out, because this is the first time I've seen something that is bumping up against our ability to have judgment. And what this person was talking about in this mid journey example is his judgment has been usurped.

• 1:08:51David Friedberg?

  Yes. Yeah, I would disagree. So like, yeah, let me just, let me just make one point on this. So, you know, an image is a matrix of, you know, data that's rendered on a screen and as pixels and those pixels are different colors. And, you know, that's what an image is.

• 1:09:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is it? Or is it, is it the judgment of the creator?

• 1:09:11David Friedberg?

  Well, no, I'm just saying an image in general. So like when Adobe Photoshop and digital photography arose, photographers were like, this is, you know, BS. Why are you digitizing photography with analog and beautiful before? And then what digital photography allowed is the photographer to do editing and to do work that was creative beyond what was possible with just a natural photograph taken through a camera. And they're arguably different art forms, but it was a new kind of art form that emerged through digital photography. And then in the early 90s, there was a plugin suite called Kai's Power Tools that came out in Adobe Photoshop. And it was a third party plugin set. You would, you would buy it and then it would work on Photoshop and it did things like motion blur, sharpening, pixelation, all these interesting kind of like features.

• 1:09:54David Friedberg?

  And prior to those tools coming out, the judgment of the digital artist, the digital photographer was to go in and do pixel by pixel changes on the image to make that pixel, to make that image look blurry or to make it look sharper or to make it look like it had some really interesting motion feature. And the Kai's Power Tools created this instant toolkit where in a few seconds, you created a blur on the image. And that was an incredible toolkit, but a lot of digital artists said, this is. Automating my work. What is my point now? Why am I here? And the same happened in animation when three, um, when, you know, CGI came around and animators were no longer animating cells by hand. And in every point in this evolution, there was a feeling of loss initially, but then the evolution of a whole new art form emerged and an evolution of a whole new area of

• 1:10:38David Friedberg?

  human creative expression emerged. And I think we don't yet know what that's going to look like with respect to what we're seeing here.

• 1:10:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you think the, the level of judgment that AI offers you is the same as the level of judgment that Kai Power Tools offered you?

• 1:10:51David Friedberg?

  Yeah, look, I mean, I think that the person making the judgment or the decision about which pixel to change into what color felt like, you know, I have control. And I think it's ultimately like a sense of control.

• 1:10:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just totally, I disagree with you. I mean, I think that this is. It's a magnitude different. It's more of than a magnitude difference. Yeah. I, I, Kai's power tools, it's still love, it's on you.

• 1:11:08David Friedberg?

  I, you know, look, you and I, you and I have sat in spreadsheets many times and we've.

• 1:11:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm generally happy with this idea, so I'll give you a different example. Today, we use radiologists and pathologists to identify cancers.

• 1:11:19David Friedberg?

  Yep.

• 1:11:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There are closed loop systems. We have one right now that's in front of the FDA. That is a total closed loop system that will not need any human input. So I don't know what those folks do. Except what I can tell you is that we can get cancer detection basically down to a zero percent error rate. That is not possible with human intervention. That is judgment.

• 1:11:46David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 1:11:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I just think it's important to really acknowledge that this is happening at a level that it's never happened before. You may be right that there's some amazing job for that radiologist or pathologist to do in the future. I don't know offhand what that is. But these are closed loop systems now that think for themselves and self-improve.

• 1:12:06David Friedberg?

  I get it, but I think that there, there is an unfathomable set of things that emerge. We did not have the concept of Instagram influencers. We did not have the concept of. Personal trainers, we did not have the concept of like all these new jobs that have emerged in the past couple of decades that people enjoy doing, that they can make money doing, that is a greater kind of experience and level of fulfillment for those that choose and have the freedom to do it than what they were having to do before when they had to work just to make money.

• 1:12:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What do you think that radiologist or pathologist wants to do? Be a trainer or a Pilates instructor?

• 1:12:40David Friedberg?

  No, I think we don't know what that's gonna look like. I think it's having the same, yeah.

• 1:12:45Jason Calacanis?

  You have any thoughts on this as we wrap this topic? It's obviously a lot of passion coming out here with the elimination of white collar jobs in a massive way.

• 1:12:52David Sacks?

  I think that this is a short term versus long term thing. In the short term, I see the benefits of AI being very positive because I don't think it's in most cases wiping out human jobs, this is making them way more productive. You still need the developer, it's just that they're five times or 10x more productive. But I don't think we're at the point in the short term where you're going to be able to eliminate that role entirely. And what I've seen in basically every startup I've ever been a part of is that the limiting factor on progress is always engineering bandwidth. That is always the, the thing that you wish you had more of.

• 1:13:26David Friedberg?

  Totally.

• 1:13:26David Sacks?

  It's the product roadmap is always the most competed on thing inside the organization. Everyone's trying to, you know, get their project prioritized because there's just never enough engineering bandwidth. It's really the lifeblood of the company. So if you make the developers more productive, it maybe just accelerates the product roadmap. I just, I don't think in the short term that what's going to happen is these companies are going to look to cut all their developers because one or two of them can do 10x the work. I think that they're going to try and accelerate their product roadmaps. Now, again, you have this long-term concern that maybe you don't need developers at all at some point. But I think that the benefits of developing this technology are so great in the short to midterm that we're going down that path no matter what. And we're just going to have to find out what that long-term really looks like.

• 1:14:11David Sacks?

  And maybe the long-term will look very different. I mean, once we're in, once we get past the short term, we may have a different long-term view.

• 1:14:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think in this narrow vertical, I 100% agree with you. Look, I think that AI is going to eliminate unit testing. It has already done so. It's going to eliminate most forms of coding. The engineers that you have, all of them will now become 10x engineers. So with fewer of them, or with the same number, you'll be able to do as much or more than you could have before. That's a wonderful thing. And all I'm saying on that specific narrow vertical is you'll see it first rear its head in companies like Accenture and TCS and Cognizant, because they have an immediate incentive to use this tooling to drive efficiency and profitability that's rewarded by shareholders. It'll be less visible in other companies. But what I am saying, though, is that you have to think about the

• 1:15:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  impact on the end markets for a second. And I think that AI does something that other technology layers have never done before, which is supplant human judgment in a closed-loop manner. And I just think it's worth appreciating that there are many systems and many jobs that rely on human judgment, where we deal with error bars and an error rate that a computer will just destroy and blow out of the water. And we will have to ask ourselves, should this class of job exist with its inherent error rate, or should it get replaced fully by a computer which has no error rate? And I think that's an important question that's worth putting on the table.

• 1:15:44Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so let's wrap here. I just have my final thought on it is like, you're going to see entire jobs, categories of jobs go away. We've seen this before. Phone operators, travel agents, copy editors, illustrators, logo designers, accountants, sales development reps. I'm seeing a lot of these job functions in the modern world, like phone operators previously. I think these could wholesale just go away, and they would just be done by AI. And I think it's going to happen in a very short period of time. And so it's going to be about who can transition. And some people might not be able to make the transition, and that's going to be pain and suffering. And it's going to be in the white-collar ranks. And those people have more influence. So I think this could lead to some societal disturbance.

• 1:16:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm going to learn Pilates and be an influencer.

• 1:16:25Jason Calacanis?

  That's it. But I do agree with Sacks that the software development backlog, if this is what you're saying, is so great, that I don't think we'll see it in software development for a decade or two. There's just so much software that still needs to be made. All right, last week, we talked about TikTok and this first bipartisan hearing we've seen in a long time. And people actually, I think, framing correctly exactly how dangerous it is, in my opinion, to have TikTok in the United States. And of course, then we get the great disappointment of the actual bill. The Restrict Act was proposed by Senator Mark Warner, Democrat, Virginia, on March 7th. The problem with it is, is it seems like it's poorly worded, that there will be civil penalties

• 1:17:04Jason Calacanis?

  and criminal penalties to Americans for breaking the law and using software that's been banned. And many people said, you know, this probably is just bad language.

• 1:17:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have a question.

• 1:17:17Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 1:17:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Does it, does it apply to incognito mode?

• 1:17:19Jason Calacanis?

  Because if it doesn't, I don't care.

• 1:17:23David Sacks?

  Because if it doesn't, I don't care. Yes. No, they're saying, they're saying that you can get, you know, you can get fined or 20 years in jail, or whatever it is, for using a VPN to, VPN to TikTok.

• 1:17:34Jason Calacanis?

  Friedberg, what are your thoughts on it?

• 1:17:35David Friedberg?

  Look, I think this is a real threat to the open internet. I'm really concerned about the language that's been used that basically speaks to protecting the safety and security of the American people by actively monitoring network traffic and making decisions about what network traffic is and isn't allowed to be transmitted across the open internet. It's the first time that I think in the United States, we are seeing like a real threat and a real set of behaviors from our government that looks and feels a lot like what goes on in China and elsewhere, where they operate with a closed internet, an internet that's controlled, monitored, observed, tracked, and, and gates are decided by some set of administrators on what is and isn't appropriate. And the language is always the same. It's for the safety and security of the people.

• 1:18:20David Friedberg?

  The entire purpose of the internet is that it did not have bounds, that it did not have governments, that it did not have controls, that it did not have systems that are politically and economically influenced, that the architecture of the internet wasn't always would be open. The protocols are open, the transmission of data on that network would be open. And as a result, all people around the world would have access to information of their choosing, and it allowed ultimate freedom of choice. You know, this, this kind of is the first of what I'm concerned, creates a precedent that ultimately leads to a very slippery slope. Saying that TikTok cannot make money in the US by charging advertisers or managing commerce flows is one thing. That's where the government can and should and could, if they chose to, have a role. But I think going in and observing, tracking internet traffic and making decisions about

• 1:19:05David Friedberg?

  what is and isn't appropriate for people. I think is one of the things that we all should be most concerned about what's going on right now. There is no end in sight to this if you allow this to happen in the first time. You know, VPNs, virtual private networks, allow you to anonymously access internet traffic and

• 1:19:27David Friedberg?

  and access internet traffic via remote destinations. So, so that the ultimate consumption of content that you're using can't be tracked and monitored by local agencies or ISPs. And I think that saying that that can now be restricted takes away all ability to have true privacy and all rights to privacy on the open internet. So I'd love to talk about this more. Unfortunately, I gotta run.

• 1:19:51Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Great seeing you.

• 1:19:52David Friedberg?

  This is a super threat to me, and I, I, I think this is something we should be super, super concerned about. And that the entire community of technology, internet, and anyone that wants to have, you know, freedom of choice, steps up and says, this is totally inappropriate and overreach.

• 1:20:07David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:07David Friedberg?

  There are other ways to manage stuff like this.

• 1:20:09Jason Calacanis?

  It feels like complete overreach, Sacks.

• 1:20:11David Sacks?

  Yeah, I agree with this.

• 1:20:12Jason Calacanis?

  Intentional overreach or poorly written or somewhere in between? What do you think?

• 1:20:15David Sacks?

  Both. I think both. I think this is the biggest bait and switch that Washington, the central government has ever tried to pull on us. Everybody thinks that they're just trying to ban TikTok from operating in the US. And if that's all they did, then I think the bill would be supported by most Americans. But that's not what they're doing. They're not restricting TikTok. They're restricting us.

• 1:20:35Jason Calacanis?

  That's not the goal here. Yeah. What a bait switch.

• 1:20:38David Sacks?

  It's a huge bait and switch. And so just so you know, what the act provides is that a US citizen using a VPN to access TikTok could theoretically be subjected to a maximum penalty of $1 million in fines or 20 years in prison or both. Now, you know, they'll say, you know, Mark Warner, the sponsor of legislation, will swear up and down that's not the intent. But the problem is that the language of the bill is so vague that some clever prosecutor may want to pursue this theory one day. And that needs to be stopped. Also, there's another problem with the bill, which is you think this is just about TikTok. It's not. What they do is, it says here, I guess they don't want to mention TikTok by names, so they're trying to create a category of threatening application, but because it

• 1:21:23David Sacks?

  is a category, it's very, very broad. So the bill states that it covers any transaction, transaction, not just an app, in which an entity described in paragraph B has any interest. And then entities described in some paragraph B are, quote, "a foreign adversary," and "entity subject to the jurisdiction of or organizing the laws of a foreign adversary," and "entity owned, directed, or controlled by either of these." And then it gives the executive branch the power to name a foreign adversary, any foreign government regime that one of the cabinet secretaries defines, without any vote of Congress. So this is giving sweeping powers to the executive branch to declare, you know, foreign companies

• 1:22:08David Sacks?

  to be enemies.

• 1:22:09Jason Calacanis?

  This feels like the plot of the prequels of Star Wars.

• 1:22:11David Sacks?

  Well, like you said.

• 1:22:12Jason Calacanis?

  Emergency powers, here we go.

• 1:22:13David Sacks?

  You know, we criticize China for having a great firewall. What do you think this is?

• 1:22:18Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I mean, this should obviously have nothing to do with the American consumer and everything to do with a foreign adversary collecting data of Americans at scale. This could be written in a much simpler way.

• 1:22:29David Sacks?

  Yeah, you know what it should be? It should be one sentence, which is that app stores are prohibited from allowing TikTok to be an app in their store. That's what they do in India. That's it. Case closed, game over.

• 1:22:40Jason Calacanis?

  I think India's doing okay, right? They block like 100 Chinese apps, and I think their society's still functioning. So, you know, all due respect to AOC, you know, like the idea that 150 Americans, million Americans are going to suffer because they can't be tracked by the CCP is kind of nuts.

• 1:22:54David Sacks?

  This is going to give sweeping powers to the security state to surveil us, to prosecute us, to limit our internet usage. This is basically the biggest power grab and bait and switch they've ever tried to pull on us. And again, if they really were concerned about TikTok, it's one sentence.

• 1:23:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we were done. All right, everybody. It's been an amazing episode for the Sultan of Science, David Friedberg, the Rain Man himself, David Sacks, and the dictator Chamath Palihapitiya. I am the world's greatest moderator, and we will see you next time. Bye-bye.

• 1:23:37Speaker 04

  And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, S. I. The queen of Kenwa.

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  Besties are gone.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 1:24:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big Hugh Georgie because they're all just... It's like this sexual tension that we just need to release somehow.

• 1:24:08Speaker 04

  What? You're the bee. What? You're the bee. What? We need to get merch. Besties are gone.