Kling AI reaches 12M MAU, China's aging tech worker crisis, drama at ThinkingMachine, TBPN x CAA | 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. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console -https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn https://graphite.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid -https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Ramp -https://ramp.com https://ramp.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/welcome/ Shopify - https://shopify.com https://shopify.com/ Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com 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.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Kling.ai, the video generation video model has been on a tear. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal showing some pretty staggering numbers. They hit 12 million monthly active users and they generated more than 20 million in revenue just last year. I wanted to dig in and understand where this came from, the history of KuaiShou, the Chinese company behind it. There's a new farmer filling up the trough for everyone. Kling has hit 12 million MAUs, 20 million revenue in the last month. Now, they seem to be on the up and to the right curve. It's pretty massive ramp. The product launched 18 months ago, but Kling is not its own startup. It is a new project from KuaiShou Technology. This is a Chinese company and the founders, I couldn't find a single podcast with them.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  John, I'm gonna blow your mind right now. Guess who worked at KuaiShou?

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  He's been on the show.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  I share a name with him.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Wait, Connor Hayes?

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  No?

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  Jordan Schneider.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Jordan Schneider worked at KuaiShou?

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  He just responded to the daily newsletter.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  Does he want to hop in?

• 1:04Jordi Hays?

  And said, lol, I worked at KuaiShou. What a comeback.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  Tell all.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Jordan, Jordan, come get on the show.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  You're welcome. Come hang out if you want to.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  I'll send him a note.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  It'd be great to hear more of the story from him. He might be the only person we can get to go on the record about KuaiShou because the founders, I don't think they've ever done a podcast appearance. They haven't been, you know, certainly on like the Victory Lap Podcast American circuit. Like many founders that get a company to this scale. KuaiShou is pretty old, especially for the AI boom. It launched in 2011 as a mobile app for creating and sharing GIFs. This was before Vine and before Musically. They were sort of like a precursor to all those, just by a year or two.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  So you could almost say that Jordan Schneider made his money in GIFs?

• 1:49John Coogan?

  I think so. I think he created TikTok, basically. So there's some similar threads. So Dom Hoffman, the founder of Vine, he worked at Yahoo before founding Vine. And Alex Zhu at Musically worked at eBay and Microsoft, and I think SAP as well. And so both of those companies, they had like big tech experience, then they went and founded these companies. And the founders of KuaiShou, Su Hua and Sheng Yi Shao. Also did the same. One of them worked at Google, one of them worked at Hewlett Packard, and then they jumped into the social media boom that was going on in the early aughts, like in, or the late, I guess the late aughts, early 2010s. Is there a word for the period between 2010, the teens, the 20 teens? The tens?

• 2:31John Coogan?

  The tens? I don't know. But that era, like, post-Facebook, there was Foursquare, Twitter, Pinterest, Snap. There were just like, a new one every year was popping up. And so, they jump in on this, and the mobile internet was expanding really rapidly in China at that time. Uh, there was a big boom, there were a bunch of big winners that came out of that era. KuaiShou hit a hundred million DAU by 2013. So basically, 18 months after they launch, um, and they actually pivoted in that 18-month timeline from GIFs to videos. And so, uh, on- once they had the new product dialed, they ramped pretty quickly. Now, there was a little bit of a slowdown between 2013 and 2019 because they didn't hit 200 million DAU until 2019, so they were sort of saturating then. Uh, but, they were on a fundraising

• 3:13John Coogan?

  tear the whole time. They raised 350 million dollars from Tencent in 2017. They integrated with WeChat to accelerate distribution, and the company was worth around 18 billion dollars by 2018, just seven years into the journey. So, not bad. The KuaiShou IPO was a particularly crazy moment for the company. So, they raised 5.4 billion dollars at the IPO, and they were massively oversubscribed. For that, so they say, "Hey, we want to raise 5 billion." And 165 billion of demand shows up from the market. So, retail investors just went insane. 165 billion of demand, only 5 billion for sale. And so, the stock trades up 192% at the open. And all of a sudden, the company's worth 180 billion dollars, and both of the founders are deck of billionaires. Pretty sick.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  That didn't last, though. There was a massive sell-off. And there were a couple, there were a couple, like, speed bumps that KuaiShou seemingly hit, uh, shortly after going public. So, China had a big crackdown on, in regulation, on local tech companies. Uh, ByteDance became much more dominant as a competitor, and was, you know, had KuaiShou in their sights. Uh, and then, the KuaiShou user growth just sort of slowed down. And so, there were a couple misses on- You know, DAU, MAU growth, the metrics weren't looking as good. And so the investors said, hey, we're rotating to other things. They were pulling out. And so the stock traded down eight, eighty percent within six months. So not great, but today the market cap's around forty billion dollars. Like, it's still a very real business. Twenty, this is all USD. I converted everything. So forty billion market cap, twenty billion revenue, eleven billion

• 4:42John Coogan?

  gross profit, net profit two point six billion. So that's like a lot of cash flow, a lot of net income to work with. Certainly enough to do some training runs, start a Neo Lab or a video lab or, you know, take some new bets. That's exactly what they did. Twenty twenty four, they launched the first version of Clang, and they did this just three months after OpenAI demoed Sora. So it was kind of like the Chinese answer to Sora. Since then, they've updated Clang thirty times and carved out a nice little place on the grid of tradeoffs around model performance and cost. For cinematic footage, people often recommend V O three still, but for Clang, it has some really strong characteristics in motion control and in physics simulations. Like, there's a number of places where Clang's been outperforming

• 5:26John Coogan?

  there. And then there's a number of other sort of niche applications where Clang's really great. And at ten cents per second, pricing has been very attractive relative to some of the other options in the market. They've certainly come out as a frontier quality model at a very affordable price. Interestingly, Quai show claims that Clang is gross margin positive. And so now it's unclear, that doesn't include training, and we don't really, I mean, it's gross profit, so it doesn't include the hundred or so R and D people on the team. My, my question is like, what happens if they try and scale another order of magnitude? Will they be paying more for inference? Will they be able to get those chips? Because there's still this big debate over how many Nvidia GPU should be able to be sent over

• 6:11John Coogan?

  to China. It honestly gets me excited about MSL dropping a video model, because a lot of the same sort of like precursor elements in terms of like the training data in the ecosystem, when you think about the, just the raw data in reels, it could wind up being a model that's a little bit more opinionated. Maybe it has some mid journey sprinkled in there. Like, I think that the MSL, the pressure on MSL has been intense, and the initial vibes launch was not loved, but they certainly have the compute, they have the team now, they have the data, like they have all the key, the key ingredients to a really successful video generation model launch.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait to see Meta's next real launch here. They have so many advantages. They have the talent now. The pressure is immense, but they should be able to come out with something that's super competitive.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Year to date, QuaiShou is up 23%. So they've been on a run and there's a lot of investor optimism about QuaiShou's potential to monetize AI. The company's AI-powered video and graphics generation capabilities will likely drive earnings over the next few years, S&P Global Ratings analysts wrote in a recent note. That could lower content creation and advertising costs and boost content creation on QuaiShou's short-form video platform. The company has the second-largest independent short-form video platform after ByteDance's Douyin, which is basically the Chinese version of TikTok. And so, is this going to be super important to the AI race in America? Probably not. We're still living

• 7:41John Coogan?

  in a world where you have OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, really battling it out, and then XAI is doing interesting stuff, MSL has interesting stuff, and then there's a couple Neo Labs that are maybe doing interesting stuff. The Chinese labs haven't been putting a ton of pressure, but I think this is interesting because we're actually getting firm data on how these products are monetizing. Of course, there is another interesting, just sort of nuanced narrative that I hadn't really noticed while I was digging into QuaiShou. One is this China's aging tech workers issue, the curse of 35. They're firing unks over there. That's what's happening.

• 8:21Jordi Hays?

  You can't even be an unk.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  You truly can't. You truly can't. Discrimination against older employees, particularly apparent in sector where executives openly state a preference for youth.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  Different approach.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  We've had back and forth on in VC Twitter about, oh, should your team be really young and cracked, or should you get the experts in there? Obviously, in America, you cannot discriminate based on age, but that hasn't stopped plenty of people from opining about what the correct mix is, whether or not you should follow those rules. But there's an article in the Financial Times that sort of has some charts here about how big tech groups in China have been downsizing in the past few years. We can go through that, but let's read through a little bit of this China's aging tech. Workforce.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  First hint, Laobai34 received that his position at short video app Qiyue Show might be at risk was when a 35-year-old colleague was sacked. I was both shocked and anxious. I realized that our situations were very similar and the same thing could soon happen to me, said Laobai, using his nickname to avoid repercussions from his former employer. Just months from his 35th birthday, the developer was dismissed, another victim of the group's reorganization known internally as Limestone. Wow, they're giving code names to age discrimination. That's insane. Qiyue Show is pushing out junior workers in their mid-30s. Laobai was told his termination was part of the company's overall redundancy program. The so-called curse of 35 has long plagued workers across white-collar professions,

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  with older staff widely perceived as being less willing to put up with long working hours because of responsibilities at home. As China's tech sector reels from Beijing's crackdown, this article is from 2024, by the way. And economic slowdown, tens of thousands of jobs have been cut over the past several months, and older workers are seen as particularly vulnerable. Technology companies have made no secret of favoring young and unmarried workers. Ageism in the tech sector is a big problem. There's a perception that older workers don't keep up with the latest technological developments. They don't have the energy to keep up the hard work and that they're too expensive. Thankfully, our very own John Coogan, who you're very much keeping up with the latest technological developments.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  Otherwise, we wouldn't be talking about this. Because you didn't just read about Kling, you studied and you wrote about it. While China's labor law prohibits employers from discriminating on the grounds of attributes such as ethnicity, gender, and religion, it does not explicitly refer to age. Whoa.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Between 20 and 30, most people are full of energy. You're more willing to march forward and sacrifice yourself for the company, but once you become a parent, your body starts aging. How are you going to keep up with the 996 schedule? ByteDance, which owns the video app TikTok and e-commerce giant Pinduoduo, have some of the youngest recruits among Chinese tech companies. Data suggests the average age of their workers is just 27, according to the latest figures. The average age of the worker in China is 38, according to the All China Federation of Trade Unions. This trend has become only more entrenched with progressive waves of layoffs. And this is the chart that I wanted to show you. So. Big tech groups in China have been downsizing in the past few years. So this is 2021, 2022,

• 11:40John Coogan?

  and 2023 for Alibaba, Baidu, Quisho, and Tencent, and they're all downsizing across those three years.

• 11:49Jordi Hays?

  It's worth noting, I pulled up MAG7 employee counts, and every single company in the MAG7 has increased headcount over that same period that we just showed.

• 11:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. There have been like periods of layoffs, but even when, even when Mark Zuckerberg comes out and says, hey, we're laying off a thousand people in the Metaverse team, in the Reality Labs team, it's like, well, he's adding tons of people to the AI teams, and tons of people to the Instagram teams, and Threads teams, and Facebook core, and marketing, and salespeople, and events people. Like, the whole organization's just growing so fast that one niche, like, layoff is not really going to cause a multi-year trend.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  Back to the timeline.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  The messy drama that dealt a blow to one of AI's hottest startups. This is an exclusive in the Wall Street Journal. After a relationship with a colleague, a Thinking Machines co-founder had his role changed. Months later, he was fired after a contentious meeting. Mira Maroti's meeting with her co-founders going off the rails. Maroti, the chief executive of AI startup Thinking Machines Lab, had shown up for work on Monday last week expecting to have a one-on-one with Barrett Zof, her chief technology officer, according to people familiar with the matter. Last summer, she had learned that Zof was in a relationship with a colleague. In the months since, she had expressed repeated concerns about his lack of productivity, according

• 13:13John Coogan?

  to the people. She was invited instead to an impromptu meeting with Zof, another co-founder, and a third employee. The three told her they agree, they disagreed with the direction of the company, and that they were considering leaving. They asked Zof to be given Charge of all technical decision making, according to people. Maroti responded that Zof was already CTO and asked why he hadn't been doing his job for months. So they're clearly beefing. It's a very funny. It's a funny request, like what was he doing as CTO if he didn't have full control? But I mean, I mean, obviously CEO can override all sorts of stuff and there's all other people around the table. And, uh, you know, titles only mean so much. There's soft power all over the place. So two, two days later, Zof was fired within hours.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  All three had signed offers to rejoin OpenAI, the AI lab that they ditched a year ago to join Maroti's fledgling startup. The departures are a sign of how the heated AI race that is consuming hundreds of billions of dollars and transforming the economy is as much a battle for talent as technology. For all the high tech advancements AI startups are spreading to develop, they are ultimately at the mercy of the humans.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  So do you think this was a three hour talent acquisition process? Do you think OpenAI just, just looked at, uh, checked the timeline and said, hey, we got three people that are on the market. Maybe we should hire them.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  It seemed like they were talking before.

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  They entered the portal and then they immediately got the. They entered the portal.

• 14:38John Coogan?

  The trade portal for sure. That's exactly what happened.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think very obvious that, uh, the conversations had been ongoing. It's very likely, I would assume they had already agreed to, to terms.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seemed like it.

• 14:49Jordi Hays?

  Prior.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  To the news going out.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  20 people from OpenAI left during the, uh, Thinking Machines, uh, foundation. Addressing Zof's departure to Thinking Machines employees, Maroti said there had been multiple issues with his performance, trust and conduct. According to an internal message viewed by the Wall Street Journal, Zof said she fired him after he exposed an intent to take a job elsewhere. Thinking Machines terminated my employment only after it learned I would be leaving the company. Full stop. At no time did Thinking Machines lab cite me on any performance reasons or unethical.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  John, I'm breaking up with you. And you're like, no.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  You're fired. I'm breaking up with you. It does feel like a little bit of that going on, but there, yeah, there's a war for narrative here between, between Barrett and Mira, clearly. They didn't, so he says, uh, Thinking Machines. Didn't cite any performance reasons or unethical conduct as part of the reason for the termination. And any suggestion otherwise is false and defamatory, Zof said in a statement to the Journal. The exits, coupled with fellow co-founder Andrew Tullock's decampment to Meta last fall, leave Thinking Machines with just three of its original six founders. Maroti's issues with Zof started over the summer when she began to suspect he was having a relationship with a colleague who with whom he had lobbied to bring over from OpenAI, according to people familiar with the situation.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  In responses to questions from the Journal, Zof said that many people at Thinking Machines wanted to hire the woman, including Maroti. At the time, Maroti was in the process of raising one of the largest seed rounds in Silicon Valley history. The company ultimately raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation when she confronted Zof about the possibility of an undisclosed relationship with a female employee who was junior to him at the company, but did not report to him. He initially denied it, according to people familiar with the situation. By June, however, both Zof and the woman had told Maroti about the relationship, which had begun when they were colleagues at OpenAI. The woman then left the company and returned to OpenAI, which is sort of a wrinkle in this. Zof told his boss that he had been manipulated by the woman into a relationship,

• 16:51John Coogan?

  according to people familiar with the matter. Shortly after that conversation, he took a break for more.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I gotta, I generally think that the-

• 17:02John Coogan?

  Mira, she told me it was cuffing season. I didn't know what it meant, so I just said, okay. I got cuffed. Is that what happened?

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think just saying, like, I was manipulated into becoming the significant other. You know, you gotta take a little responsibility.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  You know, everyone is assuming that this is a romantic relationship. They never reported that this is a romantic relationship. They just said that he had a relationship with someone else and it was undisclosed. And I think that more companies need to be clear about- The rules around disclosures of relationships. If you and Tyler start an esports team, for example, like you would have a relationship, you would be teammates on playing Call of Duty. And if you didn't disclose that to me, I would be, I would feel left out. I'd be like, why don't I, why am I not on the team? If, if I find out that, that Tyler and Scott are going off and, and drinking a bunch of athletic beers, athletic brews every night, uh, you know, without me, that's a relationship to bros.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  And it wasn't disclosed.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  It wasn't disclosed.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  And you might be very angry.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  I might be angry.

• 18:04Jordi Hays?

  That they didn't disclose.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  So I, I think relationship disclosures need to go beyond romantic relationship disclosures. If you're, if you're just bro-ing, bro-ing down with people.

• 18:14Jordi Hays?

  That actually is, that actually is kind of a real thing. Sometimes catching up Monday after the weekend, somebody's like, oh yeah, I was hanging with so and so on Saturday.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  I'm like, wait. Where was my invite?

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  You guys hang out on Saturday?

• 18:25John Coogan?

  What? You didn't disclose that relationship?

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  You guys went to Korean barbecue?

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, so you have a relationship where you go to Korean barbecue together?

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  And you just didn't think to tell the rest of the company that?

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  Okay BBQ.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  I, I was gonna say, I think there's, you know, I, I like to imagine there's some kind of like Shakespearean tragedy here, right?

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Where it's like the Montagues and the Capulets, that's OpenAI and Thinking Machine.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  And it's these forbidden lovers.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Can't be together.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  But now they are, they're, you know, they're united because everyone is an OpenAI. Even though, I mean, if you go to the journal and you say, I've been manipulated by that woman, who's now my colleague, because they both work at OpenAI now, right? So that's odd.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Went back to.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  So the woman left the company, Thinking Machines, and returned to OpenAI. But they were both at OpenAI, they both went to Thinking Machines, and then they both went back to OpenAI.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  I still think this is a company that would have a pretty meaningful valuation in an aqua hire context, right? Like if Amazon were to come and buy them, how much would Amazon pay to get John Schulman and Miramarati?

• 19:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  Like at?

• 19:28John Coogan?

  Should be able to clear the prep stack, for sure.

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, by like a long shot, you would imagine, so.

• 19:33John Coogan?

  I wanted to look at this photo of Davos. It's AI-generated, but it captures a good vibe. A whole bunch of private planes parked there. That's not real, but I like the Kevin Kwak contextualizing it anyway, saying, "This looks like Hoth Echo Base." The, uh, Demis and Dario are apparently just bro-ing out in Davos. I love it. Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind at Davos, quote, "When told that Dario Amade was here earlier today, his face lit up. Two minutes later, he was talking about a CERN-like collaboration for AI, once the labs are close to AGI." They're just stoked on each other. "I'm on pretty good terms with pretty much all of the other leaders at the leading labs. I love Ilya and we're good friends."

• 20:18John Coogan?

  You love it. Just some positivity hanging out at Davos. Demis said that he thinks entry-level jobs and internships might fall away due to AI. Sees consistency as the biggest problem with current agents. Advice for college graduates, get incredibly proficient with these new tools, AI agents. Yeah, we were debating this earlier, like, the role of a junior engineer is going away, but is it possible that it just changes? Like, what makes a senior engineer that much better with an AI tool? That they don't need anyone else who can potentially use AI tools as well? How much of this is something where,

• 21:03John Coogan?

  I mean, to go back to like the Chinese young hiring boom, there's an element where, I'm sure there's companies where you have older software engineers who are more resistant to adopt AI technology and you'd actually be better off with a young junior person.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  Here's a tough question for you, Tyler. What are you fantastic at that AI is bad at?

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Uh, walking around being physical, physically embodied.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  Embodied, that's the last.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  So maybe that's like for China, it's like maybe the, you know, Silicon Valley has kind of found like Peter Asti from First Principles.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Maybe, you know, it's just a similar thing over there, right? There's actually a lot of value. I think, uh, like, so generally, like, I'm kind of, I've always gone between like, is our jobs actually going to go away?

• 21:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Or are they just going to get like more fake? Or are there just going to be no junior jobs in like five years? Or are they just going to be like, you know, you're in the office because like, it's like people like having other people in the office and stuff like this? I think I'm probably more in the camp of like, you just don't need to hire new people.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 03

  First of all, it's a, it's a pleasure to be on the gloom and doom panel.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  We're not, we're not, the 1920s were an extraordinary period. As I said at the beginning, it's not preordained that it has to end badly.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  The end note of the 1920s, which was of course the Great Depression, Andrew. So let's, let's take a step back and, and talk about where we are right here, right now. The, the area of recklessness is the, is the spending of governments around the world who are all, with, with little exception, are all spending well beyond their means. That's the recklessness of this moment in history. This is not a parallel to the 1920s in terms of the recklessness of the, of the private capital markets. It's a story of the recklessness of government spending. Within the private sector, there's a huge question as to where AI will take us.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  And I, I was carefully taking notes and listening to what Larry has to say or to what Madame Lagarde has to say, because this is one of the big issues of our moment. Will AI create the productivity acceleration that is honestly just hoped for in Washington and in the halls of government around the world as a ways to overcome?

• 23:27Speaker 04

  The profit at spending that we're currently engaged in. Like, the world, the world needs a savior. And the hope is that AI is the savior that we need for productivity. And the challenge with this is it is it may or may not be. We just don't know yet. Now, there's a tremendous amount of hype around AI. And in some sense, the large AI companies need to create that hype to raise the tens or actually hundreds of billions of dollars of investment.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  You hear that, Tyler?

• 24:01Speaker 04

  That are going into the field.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  Coop.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  You wouldn't be able to raise hundreds of billions of dollars. We'll spend, and Larry could probably correct me on this, but roughly $600 billion this year in CapEx for data centers in the United States.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  I think it'd be larger.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  But does that mean that it's getting hyped up too much? Or it's just the hype is required as a, as a sales mechanism?

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Go ahead.

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  Larry's backing you up, Tyler. All right, let's play the next video, uh, which was the one I was originally talking about, uh, which is, uh, talking about, uh, job, uh, job loss.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  What AI has done is it has re-empowered the head of technology in every business in the United States. And it has pushed budgetary resources into the hands of, of the chief technology officer. So what you're seeing across American business is actually the impact of American businesses spending more on digitization writ large, of which AI is just one component.

• 25:03Speaker 05

  You know, as Dario Amadei says, you know, half of all entry-level white-collar jobs will, you know, be gone in the next five years. Is it that kind of change or is it more incredible?

• 25:13Speaker 04

  Look, you know, put yourself in his shoes. How much money does the AI community need to raise over the next five years?

• 25:17John Coogan?

  So he's wrong about this, right? Demis doesn't need to raise.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  Data centers in the United States this year, over half a trillion dollars.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  Google's doing this with cash flow.

• 25:23Speaker 04

  Over $500 billion.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Like, that's true for every other lab lead except for Demis. Like, you would expect Demis to be like, no.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  Unless you're gonna make a promise, you're gonna profoundly change the world. Yeah, but the question was about Dario. And the question is, where will AI land in productivity gains at the end of the day? In certain areas, we know it's gonna be profound, whether it's call centers, whether it's helping to improve the productivity of software engineers. But in a number of white-collar jobs, you know, there was a, there was a recent Harvard paper on this, they called it AI work slop. That it looks good, but if you sort of peel back the onion, the substance isn't there.

• 26:00Jordi Hays?

  This is, I mean, this was the, probably the, the story that got reported on the least out of Davos over the last 24 hours, but is arguably the most important. The most expensive car in the world. Everyone wants to know, of course, it is the car that Jensen bought his parents. So let's pull up this clip.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 26:19Speaker 06

  My only regret was at the IPO, after the IPO, I wanted to buy my parents something nice. And so I sold Nvidia stock at a valuation of $300 million. The company was at a valuation of $300 million and I bought them a Mercedes S-Class. It is the most expensive car in the world.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Maybe a billion dollar car? I don't know if I have the math right there, but it seems like.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, around 65K.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  It seems like the stock might be up 15,000 X. I don't know. I mean, it's definitely up 1,000 X, right? Cause it's, uh, yeah, 300 million, 300 billion. And then you get another zero, so 10,000 X. I, I bought a TV with a Bitcoin. Terrible. Not even 4K. Things in the trash now. It was like, it was like a thousand dollars back then. OpenAI will reveal, will unveil its first AI earbuds dubbed Sweet P in September this year, and shipments are expected to reach 40 to 50 million units in 2027. Makes a ton of sense. You know, you're chatting with OpenAI, you're chatting with ChatGPT, uh, you got Johnny Ive on the team, former Apple, um, and you put something together that's your always

• 27:37John Coogan?

  on AI assistant that you're chatting with. But 40 to 50 million units, that's a lot. The Amazon Echo in year two sold 11 million units. The Xbox Series X slash X, 16 million units in year two. The iPhone, the iPhone in year two, 17 million units. The Apple Watch did 20 million units in year two. The PS5, massive success, hugely anticipated product. The PS5 shipped 30 million units in year two. AirPods now, AirPods did do 50 million. If the ChatGPT, OpenAI earbuds dubbed Sweet P.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  Perform as well as AirPods, you could see 50 million units, but it's a tall order.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  From the goats.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  It's a very, very tall order.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  Consumer hardware.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  We didn't even talk about CIA. We are officially signed with CIA. We went Hollywood mode. That's very exciting.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very, very excited.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  We're pleased to be partnered with them. We put up a trading card.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  CIA team, they're going to be helping us navigate.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  The entertainment landscape.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  Very excited.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, we went down, we took some headshots at CIA HQ. Also, you know, I like to think of

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  We had to make them a little goofy.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  The Creative Artists Agency, sort of the anthropic of agencies. Creative Artists Agency was formed by five agents. They were at WME. They were at William Morris Agency in 1975. Who you got? There's a dinner. You got Michael Ovitz, Michael Rosenfeld, Ronald Meyer, and Roland Perkins and William Haber. And they're at this dinner, and they decide to create their own agency. What happens? They're like, okay, we need some financing. We're going to start a rival agency. We're leaving WME. We're starting CIA. What happens? Before they can get financing, they all get fired. They all get fired. Seriously, this is real. This is not the way it should be.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  It's almost like a thinking machines dynamic.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it really is like AI lab talent wars all over again. Of course, CIA was incorporated in Delaware and had a $35,000 line of credit and a $21,000 bank loan. They rented a small office in Century City. And within a week, they sold a game show called Rhyme and Reason, The Little Rich Show, and The Jackson Five. An early plan was to form a medium-sized full-service agency, share proceeds equally, and do without nameplates on doors, or formal titles, or individual client lists, with guidelines like be a team player and return phone calls promptly. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. Is that the bomb? The bomb has been planted. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Goodbye.