Pod Insights Equity Podcast Who knew you could get a $500 million valuation without launching a product? About this episode AI agent startup /dev/agents announced a massive $56M seed round, putting the company’s valuation at a whopping $500 million. The amount is impressive given the company won’t have a first version of its product available until at least early next year. The reason behind investors’ trust, however, becomes a bit clearer when you consider the founders’ pedigree: /dev/agents’ co-founders were both on Google’s Android team during the early days of the smartphone era.
The round, as well as whether or not to include “slash” when pronouncing the company’s name, was the first of many deals discussed on today’s episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast.
Listen to the full episode to hear hosts Margaux MacColl, Devin Coldewey and Anthony Ha dig into:
How Yurts plans to become the DoD’s go-to AI integration platform and compete with AI chatbot the Pentagon is developing itself.
Why ServiceTitan’s IPO keeps getting weirder and if it’s a sign of IPOs to come.
The latest wave of VC turnover, including Brian Singerman’s choice to step back from Founders Fund and Sriram Krishnan’s departure from a16z, and where they’re going next. The crew was left wondering if we’ll see other investors following in Krishnan’s footsteps.
Strange AI. Who is David Mayer? And why does ChatGPT hate him so much?
Equity will be back next week, so stay tuned!
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Anthony Ha? This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.
0:17 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, December 6th. I'm Margaret McCall and we're back after taking a break last week. Kirsten is still off, so today I'm here with Devon Callaway and Anthony Ha. How are you guys? Anthony, how was your Thanksgiving?
0:33 Anthony Ha? It was great. I was in Washington DC with my sister and my mom.
0:37 Speaker 01 No way. I'm in DC.
0:39 Speaker 02 Oh, how come you guys didn't have Thanksgiving together?
0:42 Speaker 01 Why didn't you invite me?
0:44 Anthony Ha? Next time, next Thanksgiving, I'll definitely invite you, but it was great. And I mean, it's great to be back in New York, but I feel like a little bit of the pressure of like the end of year sprint where you realize how little you've gotten done and how quickly people are going to be going on their winter breaks.
0:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, especially with VCs. I feel like I just know no VCs pick up the phone from like December onward.
1:05 Anthony Ha? Yeah, the year's already over for the VCs.
1:07 Speaker 01 Yeah. Devon, how was yours?
1:10 Speaker 02 I'm good. I'm good. I spent the night at a haunted Victorian mansion up in Bellingham. That was, belongs to my uncle.
1:16 Speaker 01 That sounds wonderful.
1:17 Anthony Ha? Devon, the next time I'm in Seattle, you'll have to bring me to this haunted mansion. I don't care if it's Halloween or not.
1:22 Speaker 02 No, no, we're going 100%. Come on up.
1:24 Speaker 01 Well, cool. It's crazy that it's already December. I wanted to let listeners know that we are gearing up for our year review episode and we want to know how they would put 2024 in a headline. We will vote on our favorites and the winner will be featured in the episode title. So tag us at EquityPod. And then moving on to our show today, which I'm very excited about, we are going to get into deals from two AI companies and an update on service titans increasingly strange IPO. Later, we are going to dive into all the VC turnover lately and then Devon's got a rundown of all the like corkiest AI stories we've heard this year.
1:52 Speaker 02 But just this week.
1:54 Speaker 01 Just this week. Yeah, a lot of AI. And Devin, you were actually starting us off with an AI funding round.
2:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, you know, this is an interesting one. This one was by Marina, who wrote up this thing about how some of the folks who made Android and Stripe, they are looking at the sort of AI agent ecosystem or lack of ecosystem out there. Like, all the AI companies are like, oh, agents, agents, agents. They're going to do this. They're going to do that. But they don't really do anything yet. And they're making all these big promises. So these guys at, I don't even know how to like, properly say the name of their company because they did one of these weird things where it's forward slash dev forward slash agents. So probably dev agents. But the founder, David Singleton, is from Stripe, and he was previously in Android, like one of the original Android guys. And he's like, look, you know, what's needed is an operating system for all these
2:43 Speaker 02 AI agents to sort of be based in that you can take part in as a, as a business or as a service, and make sure that they can interact with your product in a way that's, you know, well documented and makes sense. So honestly, it's not a bad pitch. They know what they're doing. Like, they built up Android and Stripe. I don't know if this is really the answer, but certainly investors think so. They gave them 56 million for a seed fund. You know, they got Andy Rubin in the round and Andre Karpathy, Alexander Wang. Who knows if this is really the way forward, but like, I think that they're probably going to build something valuable, even if it doesn't really shake the foundations of the earth.
3:19 Speaker 01 I mean, 56 million is a crazy seed round. What are they using that money for?
3:24 Speaker 02 I don't know.
3:27 Speaker 01 It's like a huge seed round.
3:28 Speaker 02 They are just like, how much money do we need? I don't know, $50 million? Like, at this point, if you've been working in Google and Android type organizations, Stripe, like, you're used to building big and building a big team and like a large, complex roadmap. Like, you're not building a minimum viable product. You're like, we are going to go talk to the majors. We are going to build a team of like 100 people before we even launch our beta. We're not screwing around here. This is not a like, hey, we're experimenting in this field. They're like, we are going to build the next major AI focused operating system, and it's going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. And this is just the advanced cash.
4:10 Speaker 01 Anthony, what goes through your mind when you hear this pitch?
4:12 Anthony Ha? I think, I mean, similar to yours, not just the 56 million for the seed round, but the $500 million valuation for something that hasn't even been launched yet and is still being built, I think, is a sign that it's probably a little harder to get these kinds of elevated valuations for any startup nowadays. But if you are a startup in the right space with the right pedigree, which these guys are, you can still get $500 million valuation and you still haven't launched your first product yet, which is hypey, bubbly, but also certainly the potential and the team does seem to be there.
4:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's like with Feifei Li's startup, World Labs, they don't have a product. They just demoed their first thing and then Google, literally the next day was like, here's the same thing, but even better. And so it's kind of like, okay, where's the value here? It's very difficult to say. I mean, it's interesting and it's going to be influential, but it's kind of like, is this really going to make money? Or are you just throwing money in the AI hole?
5:13 Speaker 01 It was interesting, too, that it was Google's growth stage fund at a seed round, especially when gradient VC is like, Google has like an early-stage AI-focused fund. So for their growth stage to step in on this is really interesting. And there's a lot more we can say about that, but we are actually going to move on to another AI company, which is a startup that I wrote about this week called Yertz. They raised 40 million to basically try to become the DoD's AI chatbot. It's a really complicated problem because basically the government has all of this classified information that's very siloed. They want to use AI. They want to have these chatbots that everyone's using right now, but they have a lot of classified data and the bar for an outside vendor is really high. So Yertz is trying to build from the ground up just for the DoD. The interesting thing
5:58 Speaker 01 is that they're actually competing directly with the Pentagon, which is creating its own AI chatbot, which, according to internal memos, Bloomberg had a really great piece where employees are basically like, we don't know what classified information we can give to this chatbot. They don't want to get in trouble and they actually feel more comfortable using the Pentagon's own AI chatbot, even though it performs worse. Try to build something for the government and it's an inherently really, really hard customer. What do you guys think?
6:24 Anthony Ha? I have a very silly point to make first, which is just that our two AI startups that we're talking about had the exact opposite naming strategies where one, we're like staring at it, it's like highly technical, like, how do you even pronounce this?
6:36 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:36 Anthony Ha? And Yert is a company name that I would not have guessed was a defense AI startup in a million years.
6:43 Speaker 01 It sounds cute, Yert.
6:45 Speaker 02 I guess, but it isn't cute. It's the opposite cute. They're like, oh, we make, like, we make AI for like the Defense Department. And you're like, oh, what's your, what's your company called? It's Yert. And you're like, why? Why Yert?
6:57 Speaker 01 Well, it's like, it's like Raytheon changed their name to RTX because I think Raytheon sounded too evil. I don't think that's the real reason.
7:03 Speaker 02 I mean, like, you know, what is it like Black Cube, you know, turned into something else or Yert's never has to change their name.
7:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:09 Speaker 02 Sort of a friendly name, even though it doesn't sound like a particularly friendly product, unless you work in the Pentagon.
7:14 Speaker 01 That was the whole pitch. They just showed investors their delightful name instead of give us 40 million.
7:20 Speaker 02 Sometimes that's all it takes.
7:22 Speaker 01 So true.
7:23 Speaker 02 I remember hearing from these guys, I think I may have actually passed this pitch to you because I thought you might found it more like up your alley, but it's certainly a valuable space. And yeah, I think that there is a tension between the like private solution is better, but the internal solution is trusted. That's the tension that's going on in the space industry as well right now, in a lot of like government adjacent stuff where they're like, yeah, Black Sky provides us with better data handling for our satellite imagery, but the one we've been using for 10 years is the one we all know and trust as far as our own labyrinthine internal Defense Department processes. So I think that getting into that is a dangerous proposition as far as actually making money
8:06 Speaker 02 and surviving that initial thing, but you know, give it a shot.
8:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's what I talked to the founder, Ben Van Ru, about was he was like, you have all these AI companies that want you to, they work with newer systems or they're building your systems. And he was like, the problem is that the government is very slow and they work on these old legacy systems and he wants to create something that he can just go and plug into really kind of outdated systems and have it just work and provide that AI value. Cool, we're going to briefly move on from AI. We'll actually be back to talking about it later, but now we're going to revisit Service Titan's IPO, which we talked about a few weeks ago. Anthony, you've got an update for us.
8:39 Anthony Ha? Right, so you discussed this on a previous episode that it was already kind of becoming clear that ServiceTitan's IPO was a little bit unusual. They had sort of what, not formally or officially, but unofficially is called a kind of dirty term sheet where it was kind of becoming clear that there are some unusual, not particularly favorable to the company terms in their previous funding round. And now ServiceTitan has also announced that their price range, their initial price range for the IPO, which is $52 to $57 a share, which is not necessarily the most interesting thing. I think what actually kind of caught people's attention is also that they're going to be using a lot of the money that they raised from their IPO to buy back a lot of stock from the existing investors. And so what
9:24 Anthony Ha? that means is that when we think about an IPO, especially for like a tech startup, a lot of times we think of it as like, oh, wow, you're sort of like opening the flood gates. I mean, obviously, it's maybe some people are going to get rich, but also we're opening the floodgates. This company is now a big company, is going to be really well capitalized. And in this case, that might not necessarily be the case. This might actually be a situation where instead the company is like, you know, kind of cleaning up its cap table and it'll use some of the money to invest in the business, but not necessarily a huge majority of it.
9:56 Speaker 01 This was so interesting to look into. I think the big question is, how many other companies signs deals like this that we don't know about? Do you think that this is kind of a sign of IPOs to come?
10:07 Anthony Ha? I think so, just in the sense that, you know, the last couple of years, and this may come up again when we talk about VC firms, is the last couple of years have been kind of tough for startups fundraising and particularly for startups that maybe raised money at huge valuations in 2020, 2021, and then needed to raise again in 2022 or 2023. They, especially if they didn't want it to be a down round, they may have had to take other terms. And that's kind of put them in this awkward position now where there are a lot of different investors who have different terms and different interests. And it means that they're just in a really tough situation. And an IPO, instead of being necessarily this moment of triumph, is more
10:49 Anthony Ha? like a necessity and hopefully it can clean up their finances.
10:54 Speaker 01 Yeah. And then I feel like the question we keep returning back to on this podcast, which is when will the IPO market pick back up? And considering this is such a weird IPO, and they do feel like we can use this as a sign that there's going to be more IPOs? Or is this kind of an exception because of how weird it is?
11:10 Anthony Ha? My suspicion is that you're going to see maybe other IPOs similar to this one, not necessarily identical terms, but again, companies that just need liquidity are getting a lot of pressure to be on the public markets, but they're not necessarily going to be IPOs where everyone's high fiving each other. Maybe if anything, it's sort of like a kind of sigh of relief of like, okay, that went okay. So I think when when people talk about the market opening again, it's really about these kind of big, successful companies coming out, making people a lot of money, you know, potentially funding the next wave of startups. I get the sense that's not what this is a part of. This is going to be sort of a, there might be a trickle of other IPOs like this, but not kind of the floodgates opening.
11:50 Speaker 01 An IPO is a sigh of relief. That's kind of sad. Anyway, we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we are going to talk about all the crazy VC musical chairs that have been going on, which I think, fingers crossed, is going to touch on my favorite topic, which is Silicon Valley libertarians. And then in case you were wondering if we were going to talk more about AI, we are. We have another fun AI segment by Devin after the break.
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12:54 Speaker 01 This week, there's big news in the venture world, which is that Brian Singerman is taking a step back from Founders Fund. He's been there for 16 years. This is a big deal. It's a big deal in part, too, because Founders Fund already had a huge departure earlier this year. In January, Keith Roy left to go back to Coastal Ventures. And it's also surprising to me because in conversations I've had with people in the industry, Brian was very much talked about like a big leader of the firm, especially after Keith's departure. But him leaving, Keith leaving, is very much in line with a trend I've been noticing this year, which is that a lot of VCs at major firms are leaving or switching things up. You have Shereem Krishnan, who is reportedly leaving A16Z to join Elon's Doge. You have Michelle Vols, who I followed really closely because she does American Dynamism at A16Z,
13:39 Speaker 01 is apparently leaving to start her own fund. We actually have a great piece on the website from my colleague Rebecca, who has been cataloging all these departures. The ones that I chose to highlight, there have been a bunch more, obviously kind of have the common thread that I'm interested in, which is that A16Z and Founders Fund are deeply linked to the upcoming administration. There is a lot to unpack. How are you guys thinking about these departures?
14:03 Anthony Ha? I think it is the convergence of a few different things. One is certainly that I think there's probably, yeah, opportunities for VCs, especially if you're a right-leaning libertarian VC in the upcoming administration. I think the other is that, again, it's been a rough few years for the VC business. So being a partner at a VC firm is not necessarily as rewarding financially, intellectually, as it has been in the past. So it's funny because in Brian Singerman's case, he said he was leaving for better work-life balance, which seems so euphemistic. And you're like, well, that's obvious BS. But then when I saw that he'd been there for 16 years and I thought about the last few years in the VC business, I'm like, oh, maybe actually it is somebody who's just like,
14:47 Anthony Ha? I don't need to do this anymore. I'm just going to take some time off. I don't have any inside information there, but it actually seems like a time where that's not a crazy idea. But it also is not crazy to think that maybe he'll announce that he's at another firm or in the Trump administration in a few months.
15:04 Speaker 02 He needs more work in his work-life balance. He's got too much life going on. He's like, I have had three beautiful children and they are taking up way too much of my time. So I'm taking on a much more intense job.
15:15 Speaker 01 No, it's a really interesting time, though, to leave Founder's Fund in particular because, I mean, Peter Thiel was super supportive of J D Vance's political beginnings. They're very close with Elon and Doge.
15:27 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. That entire gambit has just completely landed 100%. But my own personal feelings about, you know, like Doge and the new administration and stuff aside, this transition period, like all presidential transitions between administrations, especially administrations of different parties, represent a natural breakpoint for many industries. And it's a perfectly good point to say, like, you know what? Now is a good time for me to go do something else. This is a good time to take stock, especially because there are like 100% guaranteed big changes coming down the line. Whether those changes you, you know, perceive as positive or negative or disruptive
16:09 Speaker 02 or consolidating or whatever, probably people have been planning these moves. They probably were planning what they were going to do, depending on the administration, depending on how the economy goes. But I think that this is probably a lot of people's own little gambits, sort of finding the natural time to, to execute.
16:27 Speaker 01 Something else I was thinking about with A16Z was like, if this is something we're going to see as these funds become mega funds and like with Shereen leaving, with Michelle leaving, maybe it's just not a shoe in. Like it used to be, I feel like if you landed at A16Z, maybe stay there for your whole career because like you're at the top, like congrats, but it's a mega fund, right? Like it's huge. They sent Shereen to London. He opened up their London offices, which, you know, maybe is not how he saw his life going. And with Michelle, this idea that starting like a $50 million fund might be more valuable experience than being at the biggest American dynamism-ish fund. I think it's interesting. Like I, I wonder if you're going to see a lot more turnover at, you know, the general catalyst Sequoia's injuries into the world, just because of how big they are now.
17:13 Anthony Ha? Sharam is also an interesting case because obviously he's had this whole podcast career on the side too. And so it was also interesting to see that he was going to Doge because I would have assumed that if he left, he was just going to go full time, you know, on the podcast. But I think. It also just suggested that maybe he had other interests that sort of were kind of taking him out and away from A16Z, which again, I think probably especially at a firm of that size, there can be just a lot of politics about who actually has real check writing power, how many checks you can write. And so at a big firm like that, it's not surprising to me that people might, that there might, you know, you might be able to stay there,
17:55 Anthony Ha? but there's not necessarily as much opportunity to invest and to lead as you'd hoped. And so you start looking for opportunities elsewhere.
18:02 Speaker 01 No, for sure.
18:02 Speaker 02 I wish more people would retire. Like I just, you make so much money. You've got hundreds of millions of dollars in your personal funds. You wield power, but you're still in meetings all day. You still have a boss. Maybe it's somebody like Ben Horowitz or something like that, who's like telling you like, no, we're doing this, not this. And you're like, man, I am worth $500 million. I want to do what I want to do. Like I would retire so fast and buy an island and just go there with my family and like get a bunch of dogs and make like a dog shelter or something like that. It's like you can live your dreams. Are your dreams sitting in a conference room, hearing the same pitches you were hearing about AI like five years ago? Like a lot of people really love it, I guess, but I just
18:45 Speaker 02 am surprised that we don't see more long time people and like people who have become rich and powerful, just retiring and being like, you know what? I'm out. I've, I got mine. I'm going to go retire.
18:56 Speaker 01 I agree. I covered a talk that Palmer Lucky gave and he like addressed this in a very Palmer Lucky way where he was like, you'd think that I would retire after, you know, making a billion dollars, but like people like me were like pirates always looking for like the next fortune. Like we, we want more. And I mean, he was just describing like greed, basically.
19:17 Speaker 02 I was like, that's not really unique to pirates. Like it's a very common thing.
19:22 Anthony Ha? I will say that there are VCs who are not the like Mark and Draysons or Palmer Luckys of the world who don't yet have 500 million or a billion dollars and
19:31 Speaker 02 Of course.
19:31 Anthony Ha? who, you know, I think have what we would think of as a lot of money, but you know, maybe do feel like there's still more money to be made before they can sort of comfortably retire.
19:41 Speaker 01 Well, what do we think Doge is gonna play? Like, I don't think Doge is gonna be.
19:45 Speaker 02 No, I think I'm actually gonna enjoy watching that play out, I think, but we don't have to go into that.
19:50 Anthony Ha? Without getting super political, I will say that I do think it's gonna be an interesting laboratory for people who say government should be run like a startup or run like a business.
20:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
20:00 Anthony Ha? We're gonna see whether or not that's a good thing.
20:03 Speaker 02 I think we're gonna find out that a lot of businesses are not very well run.
20:06 Speaker 01 This is good. That was a really good sort of spooky quote to end that section on. Thank you, Anthony. We are gonna actually end on a lighter note, which is Devin is gonna take us through some of the sort of like weird AI stories that have happened this week. Go for it.
20:21 Speaker 02 I mean, it's not like it's not like there's just been a ton of weird or spooky, you know, AI stuff, but so I think a lot of our readers may have, or listeners, I should say, heard about this David Mayer thing that like if you type this guy's name into ChatGPT or ask ChatGPT to write it out or whatever, it would just crash. It would say, you know, I cannot provide an answer. And everybody was like, why? This is so weird. And it worked. It was like a magic spell that killed ChatGPT and millions of people did it. So we looked into it and a lot of people looked into it, I should say, and they came up with a list. And the list had Jonathan Turley, who's a Fox commentator, Brian Hood, who is a mayor from Australia, Jonathan Zittrain,
21:05 Speaker 02 David Faber and Guido Scorsese, all these people who you're like, who are these people? But we started looking into it. And I remembered Brian Hood because I wrote about him last year. He was a guy, he was a mayor who had said like, hey, I think it was Google's chatbot or whatever, like AI is giving incorrect information about me and it is, it amounts to basically libel. Because it was saying that he did a crime when in fact he reported the crime. And he was like, I'm gonna sue you unless you can correct this information. And I was like, I don't think that's a coincidence. And these other guys like I think Jonathan Zittrain is a scholar about right to be forgotten. And I was like, okay, so there's a thread running through these people. These are people who either have some reason to want to not be in chat GPT
21:50 Speaker 02 or not be on the net in some way. There's a privacy thing. And it turns out the name David Mayer, this was a guy, a poor guy, a professor of drama, who was having trouble going between the UK and America because a terrorist used his name as his pseudonym when doing terrorist stuff. So he was for years trying to get his name cleared online and in all kinds of like, you know, diplomatic systems and whatever. And he died recently, never solved the problem that I know of. But he was like, oh, so this is definitely that kind of thing. And it turns out OpenAI finally confirmed to us that this was some sort of privacy tool internally that had gone rogue and was basically breaking chat GPT. And it's like, this was all just a big reminder
22:34 Speaker 02 that these systems are not some magical intelligence. It's just a bunch of weird software tied to statistical like text prediction systems. And it breaks in dumb, dumb ways all the time.
22:48 Speaker 01 So interesting. And my question is, how do I get my name? Like, is there a way to be one of these people that like, yeah, chat GPT can't give you any information on them?
22:56 Speaker 02 I don't know. You know, there are various official programs like the right to be forgotten. There's some stuff with the GDPR, but not all this stuff is very voluntary. There are very few authorities, although Guido Scorsese is on the Italian Data Protection Authority Board. So I think that's why he was on this list. He may have requested this or whatever. But there is no sort of central location where you can say like, hey, chat GPT, don't, you know, give out personal information about me. Because there's also the question of like, what is in the public domain? You know, what is publicly available? What is public domain? If there's a Wikipedia article about you, why should chat GPT not cite that and say, oh, Margot McCall is this reporter, she's done this and this. I wish that there was a way because I would sign up right away. And I sign up for all the like data deletion stuff I can.
23:41 Speaker 02 But I was surprised actually that chat GPT and OpenAI were respecting these. I don't know exactly how it works, but I was surprised that they had it to begin with.
23:50 Speaker 01 Anthony, what are you thinking about with this AI weirdness?
23:53 Anthony Ha? Well, I mean, I think the biggest point is just underlining what Devin said, right? Which is that these models are subject to a lot of the same kind of like rules and flukes and things like that that a search engine is. I'm also wondering about, I guess, thinking about, again, not just these like legal sort of right to be forgotten things, but these kind of broader ecosystem of online reputation. And, you know, 15 years ago, we had this whole wave of companies like Reputation Defender, which I think is now like reputation.com or something like that, where it's less about withholding information, but more just burying bad news and good news essentially is my understanding of how they worked and wondering how that kind of thing works in a sort of more AI and generative AI centric world.
24:39 Anthony Ha? SEO, as we think of it now, I think, doesn't apply, but there will be sort of ways to try to hack the system so that when somebody looks you up, which was, you know, certainly the first thing I did on ChatGPT was to look myself up.
24:49 Speaker 01 Same.
24:51 Anthony Ha? And, and then you start thinking about how can I influence those results? And I don't know the answer to that. Maybe I should figure that out, but I think that's something a lot of people are going to be thinking about.
24:59 Speaker 02 I'm just not a self-Googler. I don't know why, but I probably should do that.
25:03 Speaker 01 How are you guys thinking about, there are other stories that we have on the website about OpenAI right now, which is they're having like 12 days of ship miss.
25:09 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
25:10 Speaker 01 Shipping features. And like reportedly, we're going to finally get Sora, which is exciting. And they also just hired their first marketing chief from Coinbase, which is interesting because they've gotten so many users with zero marketing spend. How are you guys thinking about this like next chapter of OpenAI?
25:24 Speaker 02 I, you know, this is one of the, not exactly weird, but this is something that is kind of unique to the new AI era is that these companies are just throwing features out there. They throw them out there on Twitter. They announce them rapid fire perplexity is the worst. Arvind just goes on Twitter and is like, we do this now. And you're like, oh, in what way? For who? How much does it cost? Who are you partnering with? What's the, what's the data behind that? And they, they're like, well, yes, we'll find out, or maybe we'll just kill it later. So OpenAI is doing this like 12 days of ship miss, which to me. They've probably been saving up a bunch of stuff that they were gonna have at like some big events and then they decided not to and then the verge kinda scooped them on some of this stuff which they strenuously denied as did an investor talking about it was reported
26:08 Speaker 02 that they're gonna increase the price of you know chat GPT by like 10x and he was like absolutely not lo and behold here's the chat GPT pro plan for $200 a month you know 10 times the normal price it is a different product but it's like obviously they are looking at a higher tier of service here whether that's worthwhile or not we'll see but that's probably how you'll get early access to Sora which is the video generation thing that I don't really know what an ordinary like chat GPT pro type user would use Sora for every filmmaker every editor every like person in media to me is like uh we would not use that except in like
26:49 Speaker 02 very offline pre-production concept stuff and I don't know why you would use open AI's version versus one of the other like five or 10 things but that's the AI like advertising thing they just throw it out there and hope it sticks and in fact I just wanna say you should go and read Max ZF's piece on AI ads not AI generated ads but ads about AI because they are another weird thing they totally miss the mark they're written like an alien observing human society and being like we can automate that interaction between uh you know father and his beloved daughter like we don't you don't need to spend time doing that uh so that's a that's a wonderful little piece that Max did you should definitely check that out.
27:32 Anthony Ha? Max's piece was great I was I was a little mad reading it cuz I had wanted to write something similar but he did it first and he did it better than I would have. Really good it's a great piece. And and I think it it does speak to obviously like you know you were saying earlier there's been this tremendous interest in these products especially chat GPT with no marketing and so maybe on some level they don't need to get the marketing right maybe all these bad ads don't ultimately have an impact but I could also imagine a scenario where there has been this huge rush but now we're getting to the point of like oh are people gonna keep using these products or is this actually gonna continue spreading into more crucial activities and if they kind of can't get their story straight and can't sell an actually appealing vision of human life with AI that might sort of have a natural cap or plateau.
28:17 Speaker 01 And with that, we are out of time. But before I say bye to everyone, my producer let me know that I was mispronouncing Shroom's name. Shroom, I'm sorry. I've chatted with you before. You're lovely. I apologize for mispronouncing your name. So, thank you, Anthony and Devin. Appreciate you guys jumping on and chatting with me.
28:35 Anthony Ha? Thanks for having me as a guest. Always, always happy to pop on.
28:39 Speaker 01 Equity will be back next week. But until then, you can find Equity under the handle at EquityPod on X and Threads. Thanks for listening.
28:49 Speaker 03 Equity is produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator, and we'd like to give a big thanks to our audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
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