SpaceX-Cursor Deal, ChatGPT Images 2.0, Fake Bear Scam | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  A bunch of major stories today. SpaceX and Cursor partnering up. More news out of Images 2.0, a bunch of news out of OpenAI. And Mythos, a group of unauthorized users have been using Claude Mythos since the day it was released. There's a big scoop in Bloomberg. We'll go through, there's a whole bunch of timeline. We can also pull up the lineup and take you through who's coming on. We got Adobe, Build Forever, Angel List, Zankar, Vast Data, Gradient. We're going through all the news of the day. Well, let's start with SpaceX and Cursor, who are teaming up in a very interesting deal. Is this a gong already?

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  This is gong worthy. This is gong worthy because it's an option to buy the company, but a $10 billion breakup fee. Incredibly, incredibly. I think it's a win-win. It's a win-win. I think it makes sense for both parties.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Well, let's go through the facts first. So SpaceX partners.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  Who needs facts?

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Just immediate takes. We assume you already know all the industry.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  Post fact.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Do you know all the information? Do we need to give you any information? We'll see. But let's run through it. So SpaceX partners with Cursor to, quote, "create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI." The deal gets Cursor, whose agentic coding model, Composer 2, basically operates at frontier level performance, access to compute from SpaceX's million H100 equivalent Colossus supercomputer. And that is the correct term for Colossus. It is a supercomputer. There were some other terms that Elon was throwing out. Fantastic terminology from the XAI team over there. What was the other one? It was like AI.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Compute Gigafactory.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Compute Gigafactory. They're all hilarious and very good. I like all of these.

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  Computer. Were they saying computer?

• 1:53John Coogan?

  The XAI timeline, I was like, I was thinking about it. I was like, when did this actually start? Like I, I, cause it just kind of came out of nowhere and just absolutely blew up. I wanted to actually review and reset on like the timeline of events here because it's gotten so crazy to the point where it's like, the thing that started as like Elon sort of being like, I want to buy Twitter is now like a NeoLab with a massive supercomputer data center and a coding agent and code review for the age of AI because don't forget they own Graphite now, or potentially will, and, and, and a social media app.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  The space code review company?

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Exactly. So.

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm really, I'm genuinely so thrilled for, for the Graphite team. I'm thrilled for the Cursor team. I'm thrilled.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  I'm thrilled for Scott Wu.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. Scott, Scott Wu is licking his chops. He's like, what are you gonna, what are you gonna leave out in the wreckage?

• 2:50John Coogan?

  He really is gonna have fun with it.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I, I also think we need to, we need to take one moment.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55Jordi Hays?

  And just send some thoughts and prayers to SBF.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, I, I don't know how this works in, in whatever prison he's in, but I imagine, you know, what, hopefully every few days, he can go and like talk to the outside world.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  And you can imagine him going, you know, making the call.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  And he says, you know, sir.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  What would the mark be?

• 3:18Jordi Hays?

  How, how, how, how's Anthropic doing? How's my, how's my baby doing? And it's like, uh, sir, it's traded up north of 800 in secondary markets and it's, it is quite possibly going to north of a trillion. And then he's like, thank you. Hangs up, comes back the next day. Uh, I, I haven't checked in with Cursor a little bit. How are they doing? Sir, you may not want to hear this, but.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  There's a $50 billion acquisition on the table.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  They've, they've agreed to sell for 60. And if they don't sell, they're going to get 10 billion of non-dilutive capital.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Absolutely wild.

• 3:51Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 3:52John Coogan?

  What a, what a, what a wild, wild turn of events. Uh, anyway, let, let's go through the timeline, uh, because it's, it's interesting to revisit the flurry of news that has come out of Elon in Inc. over the past just four years when this all started. April 14th, 2022, it's April 22nd now. So we're talking four years to go from.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  Just proposing buying Twitter. He made an unsolicited offer to acquire the company. He closed that acquisition after a bunch of back and forth saying, hey, maybe I don't want it. It was very clear that the stock would have traded down significantly from that $44 billion because this was when the interest rate hike happened and the end of Zerp and basically all software companies sold off significantly. And so we saw declines in Snap and Pinterest and basically anything that was, even Meta sold off like 40, 50% post, although that was like an anomaly and they built back up. But the question about like, okay, well, Reality Labs is a, what, a 10 billion, tens of billions dollar bet on revenues that might come in like

• 5:02John Coogan?

  10 years. Like it was so far away and the revenue ramp on VR and Metaverse projects was so slow that the market just had to discount those future revenues, even if they were still bullish on the idea of Meta winning the VR race, winning the Metaverse at some point. It just wasn't going to happen anytime soon. So you got to discount that back at 6% instead of 3% or whatever your risk free rate is in your DCF. And so everything sold off and Elon had locked in that pre-end of Zerp price. And there was a big question about could he get out of it? Were they going to twist his arm? There was a little bit of arm twisting. The arm was a little bit twisted, but Morgan Stanley came on board and a bunch of other

• 5:40Speaker 02

  It was almost broken.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  But the people who were, whose arms were twisted, Morgan Stanley and all the VC backers who came in, they wound up with SpaceX stock. And so they wound up doing very well because they wound up with XAI stock and then SpaceX stock. And so it's all looking like, you know, as crazy, it was, it was never bet against Elon. Like that was the thing. It was like, surely this is the time to bet against Elon. He's buying Twitter for $44 billion. It's a crazy idea based on the market and where things are, but everything sort of penciled out. So he closed the Twitter acquisition on October 27th, 2022. And he took control of the platform at the end of that month. That was sync day, of course. He comes in with a sync, something about, what was the joke about the kitchen sink?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Let that sink in.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  Oh, let that sink in. Okay. It wasn't, it wasn't like I'm doing the whole, the whole, isn't the whole kitchen sink another phrase as well?

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, like throw the whole kitchen sink at it.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. Well, he did that too, because he threw everything together. Yes. Good job.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  So XAI came later. He publicly announced XAI on July 12th, 2023, and that's only nine months after ChatGPT, maybe eight months after ChatGPT. Google quick followed with Gemini, and it was like, it was a very fast following, I think, to get to XAI off the ground.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  And that was like, just for context, that was right around the time you first publicly talked about the potential for a tech livestream, right?

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, I did. I think that was, I think that was actually very close to the date. Yeah, I was making YouTube videos. I made a whole YouTube video about the Elon Twitter acquisition, and I was sort of trying to justify it as a desire for free speech than anything else. Like, you shouldn't look at it in financial terms. I think that still probably holds. But there wound up being a whole bunch of other knock-on effects for Elon's strategy. He was, you know, coming out on July 12th, 2023, saying, I'm back in the AI horse race. I'm competing directly with the big labs. I'm going to go up against DeepMind still. Remember, that's why he founded OpenAI. He wanted to push back against DeepMind. I'm going to go up against Anthropic, going to go up against OpenAI. And so, the first major product milestone came just a couple of months later, November 3rd. That's when

• 7:42John Coogan?

  they introduced Grok, November 3rd, 2023. So it's been almost three years. The first real integration with Twitter happened on December 7th, 2023, when Grok started rolling out inside of X for premium plus subscribers, which was a new tier. It was, it's actually crazy.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  Everyone got verified, remember?

• 7:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the, that year on Twitter was insane. Like, just product feature, product feature, and they were shipping stuff that had been clearly developed beforehand. Like, I think the community notes idea had been workshopped and even like engineered in the pre-Elon era, but he just got there and was like, ship that tomorrow. And like, there were a lot of things like that that happened. And there were other things that got pulled back and review and like, there were other pieces of the puzzle that were like, not doing so well, and he was just like, cut, cut, cut. And so, he sort of like, put it back in startup mode, and it felt a lot more agile, and it still does. That was the moment Grok finally became a part of the X product experience. In early 2024, XAI started shipping updates quickly. March 17th, 2024, it open sourced Grok 1. March

• 8:42John Coogan?

  26th, 2024, Grok access expanded to X premium subscribers. Two days later, they announced 1.5. Then on April 12th, 2024, they announced 1.5V, which added multimodal capabilities.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Then Grok 2, Grok 2 Mini, by the end of 2024, Grok was available to all X users. And so 2025, XAI moved from being connected to X to absorbing it at the product level. On February 19th, 2025, XAI announced Grok 3 Beta. Then March 28th, 2025, so over a year ago, for some reason, this feels more recent than that. XAI acquired X in an all-stock deal. So March 28th, 2025, effectively merging the AI company with a social platform. After that, X kept releasing faster model updates. They did Grok 4 Fast, Grok 4.1, then came the SpaceX deal. That was February 2nd, 2026. So the clean sequences that Musk first proposed, the Twitter acquisition, then founded XAI,

• 9:40John Coogan?

  then brought Grok into X, then merged XAI with X, and then SpaceX bought XAI. And so now Cursor is joining the team.

• 9:48Jordi Hays?

  It makes so much sense, right? Cursor needs compute, they need the resources, they need the capital to train a frontier coding model.

• 9:55John Coogan?

  They've also never done a pre-train, I believe, whereas the XAI team has, right?

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  And the big, big thing is that the Grok brand has been through so much. There was an idea being thrown around last year that it had been banned in more workplaces than it had been adopted. So more people had said, like, you cannot use this product in the workplace. Then we're actually using it in the workplace. Cursor is a great brand, right? It's a brand that I think can probably expand outside of coding, right? Say in the announcement. Best to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI. So we're at a point right now where everyone is building the exact same thing. We got everyone on Earth building a box that you can tell to do things, and it does things.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  Oh, so you just want one company to do it all? Communist?

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I don't. I think, I think, I think the competition, I think the competition is great.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  You want the government to have it.

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  It's bringing out the best in, it's bringing out the best.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  It is, it is.

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  But I think Cursor is like.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Knockout, drag out, fight.

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  Cursor's always had a great brand. I saw someone else.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Wait, SPF replied to SpaceX's tweet, saying, "That's me." Pull up, pull up the first post here and then scroll down. The SpaceX and Cursor are now working closely.

• 11:10Jordi Hays?

  Is that it?

• 11:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, there you go. Look, SPF is somehow on Twitter. How can you be on Twitter from jail?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  All these people in jail on, on X, I don't understand.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  No, it says it in his bio. It says it in his bio.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  It's management.

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  "We can use BOP-approved phone calls, emails to tell others what to post on our socials."

• 11:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:28Jordi Hays?

  I think it would be a free speech violation to say, like, if you are in jail, you cannot distribute information in the outside world in any capacity. But it feels like this was maybe some legislation that was created pre-internet.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  It seems like having like a ghostwriter on your account is a really good way to like start, you know, kind of like influencing public perception, right? I think this is, Elizabeth Holmes has had enough kind of moments where it was like, she, you know, her proxy posted something that was mildly kind of entertaining and over time that just wears on people and eventually people are like, maybe, maybe she isn't so bad after all, right?

• 12:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 12:10John Coogan?

  Well, Richard Wu broke down the structure of the deal. He says, "The structure of the deal is pretty interesting here." I think what's happening is, one, XAI is having trouble training a state-of-the-art coding model, hence co-founder departures. They might have a bunch of idle GPUs. Cursor doesn't have capital to blow on a $5 billion training run to compete with Codex and Claude. XAI 3, XAI says to Cursor, "Use all the GPUs you want at cost and get to a state-of-the-art coding model as long as we have the option to buy you." For cursor also gets a free option. Train a model better than Opus and get bought out for 60 billion or get 10 billion that pays for all the GPUs you rented. Win win.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  And I was reflecting on Michael Truell's, I mean, fantastic entrepreneur, remarkably young, but his aesthetic is very much in like the Stripe world, I imagine, because I feel like the one really cinematic podcast he's done is that one with, was it Patrick Collison? Is that the one I'm thinking of? And it's like them at the coffee shop and it's so welcoming and warming. It's like that is welcome in every corporate entity in America, right? Like, and to your point about like, you know, oh, like if your corporation is like, oh, what's going on with Elon and politics, blah, blah, blah. Do we really want Grok running around with Mecca and Aani and all this crazy stuff? But if it's just like Michael Truell from Cursor, he's so reassuring.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Like I, if I'm like Coke or GE or Ford, I'm like, yeah, of course. Like we love Cursor. That's great.

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Very, very, aesthetics do matter, vibes do matter. And I think makes a lot of sense.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  Matt Slotnick says he loves math.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  Okay. What is the math here?

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  What he's talking about Julian, he's, so Julian says at a 30x revenue multiple, at first glance, it appears that SpaceX is overpaying for Cursor. However, the deal is wildly accretive for SpaceX, given it is expected to go public at more than 100x revenue. A 70-term multiple expansion on 2 billion of revenue adds up.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  This is a notorious thing in corporate M and A and occasionally it's gone poorly. But there is like an old adage that if you can acquire earnings at a lower earnings multiple and maintain your current multiple, that is accretive to the stock. And so there's a whole philosophy around that. But the smart investors should price each earnings stream differently and having like a monopoly on launch capacity should be a higher multiple than a super competitive oligopolistic coding market, if that's what this winds up being. It's a tricky, tricky situation.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  Will Brown. Wow. Cursor just hit a $10 billion run rate.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  They did. It's guaranteed, right? There's no way that they won't make 10 billion this year. That's not even a run rate. That's just like, it's locked in. It's more than contracted. I don't know.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it's very meaningful because it is effectively an exit in that it's, you know, by itself.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:04Jordi Hays?

  They can. You know, they'll be in a position to actually reinvest that. That's like a nice little NeoLab kind of series A, basically.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Ken says no, you got to multiply that 10 billion by 12 because in that month where they get the $10 billion check from SpaceX, it will be 120 billion, right? They will be the largest AI company in the world that month. And then they just have to figure out, they don't collect until end of year if they're still independent. Otherwise it's more like 25 billion. Okay.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Patrick is quoting Scott Wu.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Last of the Mohicans. Scott Wu. I love it because despite, this does not look.

• 15:41Jordi Hays?

  See, without images too, without images too, we just, this, this kind of asset. I actually think this might have been done the old fashioned way.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  No, this is Nano Banana. This is Nano Banana.

• 15:50Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  It's good at cutting out faces.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Watermark.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  He says, here we go again. Last of the Mohicans. Yeah, Scott Wu is the last one standing in this particular category. And yeah, he's licking his chops thinking about who might want to hop over to cognition cursor. Cognition, windsurf, Devon, cursor, Zombie Corp. As the, as the ghost ships continue to line up on the shores of Scott Wu's territory.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  Some news from Space News, Inc.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  This is very interesting.

• 16:21Jordi Hays?

  China backs orbital data center startup with 8.4 billion in credit lines.

• 16:25John Coogan?

  They're pilled. They're pilled.

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  Elon is interested.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  8.4 billion in credit lines. That is a lot of money. A Beijing based space startup has secured early stage funding, early stage funding to the tune of 8.4 billion. What are we doing here?

• 16:39John Coogan?

  And extensive credit backing is part of a broader Chinese push towards space based computing infrastructure, Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited. We don't know how to name companies like that in this country. Seriously.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  This is the new meta.

• 16:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is, what is Cursor's real name? AnySphere? That's a, that's a pretty good name. I like, I like AnySphere and I like Cursor, but doesn't hold a candle. So Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited. Also known as Orbital Chengguang. announced the completion of a pre-A1 funding round April 20th. The round saw participation from venture and industrial investors, including Hi-Song Capital, CITIC Construction Investment Capital, Cathay Capital. They got everybody. It's a murderer's row over there. At the same time, Orbital State said that it has obtained strategic credit lines totaling 8.4 billion from 12 major financial institutions, including the Bank of China. Are they going to build rockets with this?

• 17:36John Coogan?

  I mean, I don't, I don't understand why this would be so capital intensive if they're not going to fab the chips and they're not going to launch the rockets.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, they're going to put a lot of GPUs in space.

• 17:44John Coogan?

  I guess they're just going to buy a lot of Huawei chips or something? Are they going to go to Huawei and get some special stuff?

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is pretty interesting because I feel like, you know, generally the main bull case for space data centers is that the like regulatory environment in the US is going to be so hard to build data centers.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Like.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  Supercomputers, but yeah.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Normal land. So, oh yeah, yeah, supercomputers. So you've got to send the supercomputers to space.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Because there's less.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  No, we can do data centers in space. We just, we, if it's on the ground, it's a supercomputer.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, that makes sense.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  Because, because we don't want any more data centers on Earth. It's Earth Day, by the way. Congratulations, Earth. You've done fantastically.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the whole thing, like in China, it's like they, you know, you can just like build things there, right? There's like very little regulatory overhead. So it's like, I feel like the space data centers.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  It's a lot more sense for the US.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  If, if the, if the bull case is regulatory, which it seems to be, that's like generally consensus, I think.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  I was laughing about how, you know, how there's all this fear about like data centers using water in America, but over in China, they have the Three Gorges Dam, which generates electricity from water. And it technically uses a lot of water. The water's not destroyed or anything. It just passes through the dam, generates electricity, but.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  They're using.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  They're using.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  Ocean of water.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  Exactly. The Hoover Dam, that's a nightmare. If you just, like, there's one frame where you don't want the water to be destroyed or made unpotable, so you can't drink it anymore. But there's another one where you think like water has individual rights and should not be used at all. Like, it should not be used, it should not flow through a water wheel, it should not flow through a dam and generate electricity at all. It should be left to its own devices, still, and just chill. Maybe. Anyway, Orbital has incubated, was incubated by the Beijing Astro Future Institute of Space Technology, which itself is backed by Beijing's Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the Science Park Administration. The institute leads a consortium of 24 organizations. The rationale for the constellation in November briefing. So, large-scale data centers have

• 19:33John Coogan?

  expanded rapidly worldwide, but further growth faces major obstacles, including heavy land use. Weird. Soaring energy consumption. Weird. Limits on atmospheric cooling. These things usually don't apply in China, but maybe they are skating where the puck is going. And maybe they're thinking that they will need to change their direction. They're planning a dawn-dusk orbit about 700, 800 kilometers above the Earth, aiming to achieve a large-scale space data center to support space-based computing by 2035. Wow, thinking in decades over there. An initial phase spanning 2025 and 2027. Wait, why are they talking about last year? We'll focus on core technological changes in the first computing.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  They're manipulating time, John.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  The experimental satellite was slated for launch in late 2025 or early 26, but it does not appear to have launched. They have, they have like decent launch capacity with the Long March rocket. I think that they just are not amazing at landing it, but you got more money. You can just YOLO more rockets up there, I guess. Problem solved, although I would be surprised if there's as much pressure to not build supercomputers next to the Three Gorges Dam. Moving on, more images out of ChatGPT Images 2, Image Gen 2.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  Pull these up.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  Images V2. These are crazy. Has anyone done that Rune test of the, of the guy driving the car into the, you know, the whole thing where he was like, it's AGI if it can understand this meme? I guess you can't because like that particular meme has been saturated on the internet and so it no longer is a challenge.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna have it make an image up.

• 21:08John Coogan?

  This is a crazy image.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  I am a, I am a tiny man.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  What is this? MySpace.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  My son was born.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  This is truly never.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  He handed me to him.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Never forget where you came from. Blink 182. It really packed so much stuff in here. It's almost too much. I have been noticing Gabriel over there is pushing the model into chaos and seeing what happens. Cows are flying, horses are flying, trampolines are flying.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  The next one by Ethan Mollick has like every image benchmark in one.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Yes. You were, you were asking about this. You, you said, and explain the history of this.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  So originally like when, when like Dolly first came out, the, the like image that everyone was like, oh, this is crazy. It was an astronaut riding a horse on the moon.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  So then it's like, okay, that's like very easy. And then it became.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Well, it's very hard to Photoshop that. It's very hard to go get an actual picture because if someone's just like, make a picture of a dog and it's photo real, everyone's like, oh, who cares? We have a picture of a dog. We don't have any pictures of astronauts riding horses on the moon.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  There's people riding horses, right? And so like.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  It should be able to process.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  There's a sense where it's like, maybe it's not, doesn't need to fully understand like everything that's going on because there, there's a lot of like references it can pull from.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  So then it became, can a horse ride an astronaut?

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  Right? It's like the reverse.

• 22:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  And early image models would always just do the flip. They would just put the astronaut on the horse.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Yep. Cause that's more logical generally.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  So there's a numbers, a number of these things where like, if you ask a person to draw it out, it's like, okay, you just think logically like this is how it would look, but there's just like no reference images online. So the another, another one was like a full wine glass.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  So you think of a full wine glass as like, it's still only like technically, you know, halfway, three fourths.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  I never understood why that one didn't work. I, I saw the whole video.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  There's just very few images online of a full wine glass being like.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Oh, full to the brim because people typically fill them halfway. And so in the training day, okay, got it. Yeah.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then there was the, you know.

• 22:52John Coogan?

  What is this image? This is not the one.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  This is not the one.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  This is not the one for the timeline. That one's way more aggressive than, than the, this is the one. This one looks aesthetic and it still looks weird.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  The only thing is, would a horse's belly really look like that?

• 23:08John Coogan?

  It is sort of like a humanoid horse.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  It kinda looks like a human.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  But it does have the wine glass completely filled and, and then explain the clock.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  The last one you pulled up was, was Grok, I think.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  Okay, explain the, explain the clock. What's going on with the clock?

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that one's just another like, understanding thing where if you give it a time, can it do the, the clock?

• 23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  Like, the correct time. There, there's also one where, um, you do a bunch of clocks on different time zones.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  And

• 23:33John Coogan?

  It couldn't do the clock. It couldn't do the clock. It has two hour hands.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this one.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  So you know what that means? We're moving the goalposts.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Moving the goalposts. The goalposts, we, we all

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Do it. It's time. It's time.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  It's time, we move the goalposts.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  We got a, we got a one goalpost. It's, it's ninety-nine percent of the goalposts, but it's not, it's not complete yet. It's not complete yet.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  You guys have more work to do.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  No, no, Sam was talking about this with Ashley Vance. He was saying that like, uh, you know, he thought, he thought job was finished with, uh, like, chat GPT images because it was really good and then they worked a lot harder and they realized that there was more to do. And this is like the Carpathian thing about like, yeah, you get the self-driving cars to ninety-nine percent and then it takes another year to get it, add another nine, and then it takes another year to add another nine, and then another nine, and it just takes forever to improve these things because we demand perfection. We do not accept two hands on a clock. Keep grinding, folks. Keep grinding. Anyway, um, there are a lot of other fun posts. Uh, Sammy analysis, I thought this was just a real image of Dorkesh taking a selfie and then it was recontextualized via a meme. It is in fact an AI image. Um, and it

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  This doesn't even look like the new model, though.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Hi, I'm Dorkesh. I grew up all over the US and now SF-based and always down to nerd out about AI science and history. A little about me. I host the Dorkesh Podcast, study at UT Austin, just published a book on the history of AI, AI scaling. Let's grab coffee or do a fun activity this summer. Because of course, this is a, a meme template that is very popular and has gone viral with a lot of, uh, new people that have been hired and moved to San Francisco.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  So, so the other thing I've noticed with images too.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  Is that I think it has fully, the new model has, actually has taste.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  And it has fully democratized, like, high-quality lifestyle and product imagery.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  And I'm shedding

• 25:28Jordi Hays?

  A tier, just a little bit.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  Because you used to be able to tell, if somebody was working on a CPG company, you could kind of clock their ability.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  As a founder.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Based on the quality of their images.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  Because maybe they're not super creative themselves, maybe they haven't raised a bunch of money, but if they're scrappy, they can meet the right photographer, they can put stuff together.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  And now it's like everyone just has a great product photography.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  And I saw it this morning with, there's that Andreessen back company that does like electric scooters.

• 25:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  They were just like ripping out a bunch of images that look like they spent tens of thousands of dollars doing them, but they're clearly like images too. Uh, which is cool. It's just like funny that we've entered a world where.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen, I've seen some people, I, I, I think that the, the end result will be like, you will see more opinionated and creative and, uh, and more people like, like there will be a collapsing around, like everyone will copy Apple or linear, but then on the flip side, you will see people that are, um, that are doing things that are really unexpected and those things will be copied. But if the, if the brand can run through and actually establish itself as like, oh, it has this unique aesthetic, it won't matter that somebody can, can recreate it because plenty of people did that with the red antler stuff. It was like, that like, there were brands that really owned that and carved that out as like their aesthetic. And then there were a bunch of copycats and no one really liked this. I was reflecting on the fact that like, for a long time, mid journey felt like it had a very unique aesthetic,

• 26:52John Coogan?

  like, uh, at like, uh, art station and like painterly and sci-fi really well. And then chat GPT images V1 and some of the other image models just felt like stock photography. And now I feel like I'm starting to see more stuff out of images with chat GPT that feels more opinionated and has a stronger aesthetic. And it can do more of like the sci-fi stuff, although sometimes it leans in a little bit too much to the photo realism. I think you gotta get kind of crazy with the prompts to actually get something that's abstract.

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  Post from Ben Hilek, the legend. Says nightmare blunt rotation.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, it can do uh

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know it could do these.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  360 images. It can do 360 images, which is really cool.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  You got Sam, Johnson.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  So it generates a full equi-rectangular image, which is something you could view in VR. And then, uh, and then you can load that into a, uh, panoramic, you know, stereoscopic image, uh, generator. The big question is like, people are gonna wanna animate these. What's the downstream tool chain for actually turning this into video? Are we going back into video at some point? We will see. Anyway, people are having a lot of fun with it and, uh, it should, should help with like front end and, uh, you know, and a lot of other stuff. It seems like it's done very well on, uh, on, on, on design and layouts and all this stuff. Well, oh, I wanted to get your take on this. Uh, uh, imagine if Codex existed in 2005. And, uh, it's this very retro, people are doing, imagine if Codex existed in 2012.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  And it's the, uh, it's the Apple design cues from, uh, the early Mac OS X and then, uh, the Windows XP aesthetic. Do you think the Windows XP aesthetic is overdue for a comeback? This is in the middle of the GPT, uh, Image 2, uh, feed, right there. This aesthetic.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta come back.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  This is a Mountain Dew?

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  It would fix you.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  This would fix me. No, uh, you know, I have somewhat fond memories of XP.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  John, John, John. Imagine playing Halo while you just look over and this is just running there.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  You're just drinking a Mountain Dew.

• 28:59John Coogan?

  There are a couple other important, uh, warnings in here. One of them, I know you had thought about potentially putting on a bear costume and trying to defraud your car insurer. And if you and the audience were thinking about dressing up like a bear... And attacking your car in order to collect a insurance payout that's up to $141,000. Think again, think again, because humans, this is in the New York Times, humans who used a bear suit to defraud car insurers are sentenced to jail. You might be thinking, I'll just throw on this bear suit and I'll attack my car and then I'll call my insurer.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  Collect a check.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  And I'll collect a check and it'll be easy, easy money, easy money, get rich quick scheme.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  No.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Three Southern California residents were sentenced to jail after masterminding a scheme in which they staged fake bear attacks on their luxury cars, then collecting more than 141,000 in insurance payouts. To carry out the attacks, the residents had a person in a bear suit climb into the cars and use claw-like kitchen essentials to leave scratch marks. The Los Angeles residents then filed claims to defraud three different insurance companies. So I don't understand why they had to be in a bear suit. Like, were they filming? Were they filming it?

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Yes, there is security footage.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we're gonna pull up the security footage.

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a Rolls Royce ghost.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, a 2010 Rolls Royce ghost. I know someone who has one of those. I don't think he's responsible for this, but they are dressing up like a bear to get into the car and rip everything and destroy it so that you can file an insurance claim.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  Hey, I'm just a bear, I'm gonna just get in this car.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  The schemes are really out of control these days. That is a wild, wild one. The California Department of Insurance began its investigation called Operation Bear Claw after an insurance company flagged a suspicious claim about a, about a bear rifling through a 2010 Rolls Royce ghost in Lake Arrowhead, California, where there are in fact bears. So it's not that unreasonable. The defendants claimed that a, that the bear had damaged the interior of their Rolls Royce with photos they submitted to the insurance company showing scratched seats and doors. Video footage submitted with the claim and released by the department shows what appears to be a bear crawling around in the backseat of the Rolls Royce and swatting at the dashboard. Investigators later discovered fraudulent claims submitted to two other insurance companies

• 31:28John Coogan?

  that claimed a bear had damaged the same interior of two Mercedes Benz.

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  Just scratching everything.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  That is like the most perfect scratch line. Like it's so suspicious. Like it's so clearly like, I feel like a bear's claws would be way more organic and like.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  Also hopefully doing more damage. That looks like the weakest bear ever.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, because it's not a bear. It's a human. The department concluded that the culprit was not in fact a particularly nimble bear. The defendants were arrested in November of 2020.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  So I would, I would, my, my first thought is not super believable that the bear walks up to the Rolls Royce goes, opens the door and goes around. But a few weekends ago, I was hanging out at a former guest of the show's house. He has goats. Friend drives up in his car, parks and leaves the door open. A few minutes later, what's in the car?

• 32:18John Coogan?

  A bear.

• 32:18Jordi Hays?

  A goat.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  People do odd things with animals. Uh, people dress up as bears. Scientists also apparently have been giving salmon cocaine. I have no idea why, but, uh, the New York Times has a post, "These salmon got high on cocaine. That wasn't the craziest part. Scientists in Sweden made an unexpected discovery." I think Tyler read this piece and can spoil the ending because.

• 32:44Jordi Hays?

  What are they doing over there Tyler?

• 32:45Speaker 02

  I think, I think they tested like what happens when you give the fish cocaine.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  And I think the answer was that they swim much faster and they can swim for longer.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Okay. And that was unexpected?

• 32:55Jordi Hays?

  Imagine being the scientists that like didn't get a grant for their research, you know, and they were working on something.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  I'm really close to breaking Alzheimer's.

• 33:03Jordi Hays?

  And they're reading this article and they're like, wait, like I was gonna do Alzheimer's research and then these scientists just wanted to give hard drugs to fish.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Nearly twice as fast.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  Nearly twice as fast. I guess that's somewhat interesting, but this does feel like something that could be one shotted by LLM.

• 33:20Jordi Hays?

  There's no way, there's just no way you could have.

• 33:22John Coogan?

  You had to prove it.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  You had to prove it for science.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  This is a good quote. "While it's unclear if swimming faster and further while under the influences harm these fish, experts say it's probably not great."

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of things under the sea, Red Lobster brings back Endless Shrimp for a limited time, starting April 20th.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  Endless shrimp.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  Luke Metro says this is an EA cause area, hostile takeover of Red Lobster. Make it vegan.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  Make it vegan.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Make it vegan.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  No, they gotta, they gotta make a play to make it come back and this seems like something that customers were clamoring for, so. I don't, have you ever been to a Red Lobster?

• 34:01Jordi Hays?

  Nope.

• 34:01John Coogan?

  I don't think I've ever been to a Red Lobster. I've done the Outback Steakhouse.

• 34:04Jordi Hays?

  There are things in life that I don't think I will ever do.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  No.

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  And Red Lobster, I believe, is one of them. Ben, have you been to Red Lobster? I've been there.

• 34:12John Coogan?

  Yeah?

• 34:12Jordi Hays?

  You, what's your? They're vegan in Minnesota. One to 10? Wanna, uh, rate it? It's fine. I think they're all gone now.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  One to 10, what are you rating it?

• 34:21Jordi Hays?

  Like a five.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  Like a five?

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  I think before it was. No fives, no fives. You gotta pick a side. Four.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Four.

• 34:27Jordi Hays?

  Four, okay.

• 34:28John Coogan?

  Subpar. It's sub-five, in fact.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  See you tomorrow.