The Fable Ban's Unintended Consequences + AI's New Economics — With Aaron Levie

Aaron Levie is the co-founder and CEO of Box. Levie joins Big Technology Podcast live from the Big Technology AI Summit to discuss the government-mandated recall of Anthropic's Fable and Mythos models and what it reveals about where AI regulation is heading. Tune in to hear Levie argue that the recall — far from a conspiracy to kneecap the frontier labs — may be the closest thing yet to the "AI pause" critics have demanded, why he thinks the government is now effectively in the model-approval business, and how that shift could hand China the long-term economic edge. We also cover whether "token maxing" was ever real, why the application layer may capture more value than anyone expected, the open-weight models closing in on the frontier, and a quick lightning round on Siri, the "permanent underclass" meme, and SpaceX. Hit play for one of the sharpest, funniest reads on the AI moment you'll find anywhere, only on Big Technology. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack + Discord? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.

• 1:03Speaker 00

  Aaron Levie is the CEO of Box. He's one of the most insightful and fun voices on the future of this technology. He actually was the fourth guest ever on Big Technology Podcast and the guest the only other time we did a live podcast together. So with that, I am thrilled to welcome Aaron Levie. Please join me in welcoming him.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  All right, great to see you. Good to see you. Thank you. Let's dive right into it. I'm going to start, again, since you're not at one of the labs, let's start to talk about the biggest, most controversial moment now, which is the anthropic fable situation. Let me put to you what I call the Jassy Mystery. So what we know about- I'm sure he likes that name. Well, he didn't show up, so we can talk about it in this episode. So what we know about the fable ban or the export controls on Anthropic.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Is that Amazon found a vulnerability.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  In the software and Andy Jassy maybe made a call to Dario, definitely made a call to the White House. And then very soon afterwards, there were export controls that were put on Anthropic's frontier model.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Those two fact patterns are probably not ideal.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  So the mystery is, why did he do that?

• 2:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  And here's one hypothesis. This is from Chamath. He said, Google, Amazon, Microsoft Meta now have a serious non-zero opportunity to tank the frontier labs, go to the government, kneecap the lab's motion of putting the latest models out into the wild, become the trusted gatekeeper between labs and the public by having the labs go through their clouds.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Plausible?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Um, I, I would, I would say, um, I mean, anything's plausible. I, I prefer Occam's razor on this one. Um, which is, um, you know, ever since Mythos, um, you know, Mythos very clearly was this event that basically said, you know, AI is obviously getting super powerful. It has all these risks associated with it. We are going to give it to some, you know, small trusted partner network. They're going to go evaluate their own tools. They're going to evaluate these capabilities. There's been a lot of sort of, it's a very kind of dramatic, you know, kind of rollout of a technology. And I think what that has done is it's created this flywheel where it almost incentivizes even more, more drama and more research and more depth in, in, uh, you know, security being the primary space in a way that we could have already been doing since GPT-4 if we wanted.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Like you can go and deploy these things to go find lots of vulnerabilities. You can use them offensively or defensively. But Mythos kind of created that extra air of, of seriousness and uncertainty around it for good reason, because it's incredibly powerful model. So I go with Occam's razor, which is Amazon obviously has security research teams. They're like, like any, any company at that scale. You know, we, we try and, you know, test and push the limits of models in our particular domain of use cases. Clearly at Amazon's scale, you have a very large security team. They're trying to jailbreak models all the time. And so almost by definition, there's already a public-private partnership on. On all forms of jailbreaking models, you know, trying to push them to the limits. As a part of that, and especially with the surrounding atmosphere of Mythos, I think

• 4:10Speaker 01

  it would be very natural for Andy to either share that research or his team to share that research and that escalates and then that that sort of creates its own flywheel. But the idea that there's some kind of boardroom levels, you know, sort of strategy meeting that says, we now need to kind of like co-opt the technology, become the only interface to the government, this kind of puts us in the pole position. I think it's less likely that and more likely this is a this is a situation where the Mythos momentum continued. Fable obviously, you know, had ways of getting back to kind of the Mythos level capability. And researchers, you know, sort of shared that information. And I don't, I think there's like a basically, you know, very limited, small percentage chance

• 4:52Speaker 01

  that then Andy and team knew that like the very next event would be they'd stop the model. And that's not even good for Amazon, like strategically, like Amazon makes plenty of money, the more that Fable gets used in the world. So I don't think you would, I don't think you would do some kind of like, you know, kind of maneuvering to create this. So I kind of just go with this is, it's a very chaotic kind of environment right now. The government has, you know, only a few tools at their disposal at any given time to deploy against these things. Those are going to be kind of blunt instruments. And this stuff is coming together very quickly because of, you know, in some cases, the lack of technical capability of the government compared to how powerful these models are. It's like you don't, you know, when you see something that seems very scary, like, oh my gosh, the thing could be, we can jailbreak the model and get back to Mythos level capability.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  And Mythos was the thing we're supposed to be scared about, then, you know, just like stop it. Like that, I think that's a very natural reaction based on the atmosphere that we've created in AI recently. So I just go with that as the answer.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  I mean, I like that you say the atmosphere that we've created in AI lately.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Everybody but me, yeah.

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it's funny because

• 5:54Speaker 01

  I didn't create it.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  The company on the receiving end of this, though, is Anthropic. And, you know, you talked about these mythical capabilities, they called the model Mythos. They put in the documentation that like it broke out of its containment and wrote the engineer while he was having a sandwich in the park. Is it that surprising that this is one of the downstream impacts?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but if you put that in your announcement blog post, you know, people might be able to kind of extrapolate and get pretty, pretty, pretty scared of things. I think it's interesting. So. You know, on the anthropic front, first of all, I have I have a huge amount of respect for the entire kind of stack of researchers and policy folks across AI. I happen to have disagreements with some of the categories, but but I think there's a deep, let's say, if you were, if you imagined a continuum of the most like, you know, if you if you kind of had like, like the most, I mean, this only in like a polite way, it will sound impolite, but like, I mean, like, if you're the most doomer on one end of the spectrum, and the most like, like accelerationist on the other end of the spectrum, here's kind of the the views.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  The most doomer possible is was afraid of like GPD III, and GPD III was gonna like, you know, sort of accelerate and, you know, kind of achieve some kind of unstoppable continual improvement. And, you know, the accelerationist says like, we need like Fable 20 as soon as possible, right? So that's that's sort of the continuum. I'm probably like, you know, maybe two thirds up to the accelerationist kind of side of things. But if you were on the on the doomer, and I'm trying to say the polite version of doomer, like, you're deep in AI safety, you're very scared of the technology, you think there's as much likelihood of bad things happening as good things, you know, happening, we have to win the race and control and kind of stamp down on the technology, we don't want this to be this sort of thing that runs in the wild. If you're on that end of the continuum, the thing that happened this weekend is actually

• 7:40Speaker 01

  the best case scenario for you. So so like, you actually want there to be these sort of like, like valves and like buttons in the government that just is like, we're just gonna stop it.

• 7:51Speaker 00

  I mean, that's Dario's position. Do you think he's happy with what's going on?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  You know, I'm not gonna, I won't try and guess any of that, but I will just say, if you had to establish a, if you had to establish a regulatory regime that said, we are going to review models, we're gonna push the limits of models, and we're gonna have the ability to either roll back access to models or prevent their their release in the first place, we want that to be a regulatory approach. You would need an event like Fable to effectively create the precedent for that environment. Like, you're not going to wait for Congress to vote on this being the new kind of, you know, process. You would kind of need something that sort of shocks the system into that kind of regulatory framework. So all I'm saying is that if you're, if you were on this end of the continuum, this is

• 8:39Speaker 01

  actually an outcome that is sort of almost desirable. Now, maybe you, you would wish that there'd be more technical evaluation, more back and forth, maybe you wish the policy people were different on the other end, who knows? But the idea that we now have established that the government can press a button and prevent the rollout of AI is, is actually like a, probably a positive update for an entire cohort of people. Now, unfortunately, I don't know that, that any of your guests represent that cohort, but I think you could easily get some people that would be like, this is the greatest thing that's ever happened in AI safety, because now we actually have, we've created the case law essentially for this. We, we now, we know, we know the tool exists. And then the next messy process is when should we use the tool again? What should the real, you know, kind of ongoing process look like?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  But I think that, you know, probably, I wish this wasn't the case, but I think practically in the next three to five years, we probably have to end up in an environment where models do get evaluated by the government. There is a sort of collaborative approach between the government and research and the labs. You know, the government has to kind of green light the, the release of the model. I think it's probably become either too scary of a technology or too economically powerful of a technology for governments to not want to be in that position. I think that, that that has massive implications when you, when you kind of unpack it, like just totally massive implications. One being, other countries now have far more incentive to stand up their own sovereign AI initiatives.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  So it's actually like, maybe net negative for the US economic position in AI, that this is the, the outcome. I think somebody could take the other side and say, no, we'll always have the most powerful models, and so this puts us in the best position, because now we can do like horse trading with other countries of, do you want access to our stuff? So I think it's, it's, you know, I, I like the fact that this is a super interesting debate, and I, I have like a huge appreciation for every Every part of the continuum, because I think it's like so intellectually interesting. I still land on the, hey, we probably want to treat this technology more as a substrate technology. And then regulate the applied use cases. So we should regulate if you use AI to break into something. We should regulate if you use AI to do bio, you know, kind of research that that leads to dangerous things. We shouldn't regulate the model itself.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  But I totally understand the other views that are on the other end of this. And I think it's kind of very natural with this important of a technology that it has to be somewhat of a democratic process of how we decide to regulate it.

• 11:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, you remember there were all those petitions, six month pause and everyone kind of laughed at them?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  This is effectively the best way to do that type of pause.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is, if you were in the pause AI movement, this is, again, like, this is a great outcome. We now have proven how we can pause AI. Now, it's an interesting kind of like mechanic that they chose. It's sort of this export control thing. But effectively, if you have an export control where non-US nationals can't can't use the technology, like effectively that's pause AI. Because your end API users of these of these models almost have no way to fully ensure at all times that their end users don't sort of fall into some kind of, you know, criteria that's off limits, so.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  And there's there's already companies that are pulling back. JP Morgan, for instance, has told its Hong Kong users, no more cloud.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Right, so, so, okay, so now if you really war game this out, like two to three, four more years out. This is, this is kind of interesting. So we have this like sovereign cloud kind of comparison. But but cloud, you know, for better or worse, basically became a commodity. Like whether you're running in a cloud in, you know, there's like lots of, you know, performance implications. Like some are faster, some are cheaper, but like largely like you can get a web server, you know, built out wherever you are in the world. You can get storage built out wherever you are in the world. We can build sovereign clouds. Sovereign AI is a different kind of, you know, has some intricacies that are different, right? Like, like, intelligence just is not commoditized yet. We don't have everything having the same model capability.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  So, so there's lots of really interesting implications, which is, well, what if like one set, one country has access to, you know, frontier intelligence? Before the other country, you know, what does that mean geopolitically? What does that mean economically? Obviously, now, if you're another country, you have so much commercial incentive to make sure that you can build out labs and have access to frontier intelligence as a kind of hedge against the US. So who's a net winner in that? Probably China. Like, and so what's interesting is like, you end up, I don't know if, you know, probably most people saw the Dorcas Jensen interview. And you can, you can actually, it's a Rorschach test. You can watch that through two totally different lenses. You can have one lens, which is, which is like, Dorcas is totally right. We have this huge lead, like this stuff is so dangerous, but if we control it,

• 13:14Speaker 01

  then like, we're going to control everything. The other lens, which is probably more of the Jensen angle, is like, actually, you know, these other countries have a lot of incentive to also get this right. And so even if it's like a $500 billion problem for them, they just might deploy that much capital on this problem and, and they will eventually get it right. And so at the outcome, actually, we haven't gotten any gains as better intelligence from the rest of the world, but what we have lost is our economic superiority in this technology category, because what we've caused is a catalyst for all the other countries to have to build out their own stack. And if they build out their own stack, it's probably going to be, you know, chips from China, models from China, et cetera, which I don't have any like, you know, you know, reason to be, be against, other than just like, I want America to win the economic, you know, angles on this.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  And so, so this is sort of this debate that happens on, on like, where should you apply export controls? And what are the implications of that downstream? And even this week, you know, post Fable, we see that, you know, you have models that are certainly not Fable performance level, but, but OPUS 4.7, 4.8 level, which is a big update for a lot of people on what, what is now possible with, with open weight to models that we just didn't have, you know, kind of visibility into, you know, before.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think you shared recently that the open weight model or open source models, the capabilities are not that far away from the frontier. And in fact, like, as these models get smarter, they're, they're only, they're almost going to saturate with intelligence, where there's not going to be such a big difference between, let's say, the smartest open source model and the frontier, don't you think? And then, so won't this push people to open source?

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Well, so the big ongoing conversation, and I think you have some guests that can really represent what they're seeing on the front lines, is do you have a sort of fast takeoff scenario of model capability in progress? And with some kind of continual learning, kind of self-improvement dynamic? And then it stands to reason that the company with the most compute, or the country with the most compute, and you get the fast takeoff, you get sort of a virtuous flywheel that maybe has some compounding benefits to it that are just unreachable by anybody else? That's a scenario. Another scenario is that that's another incremental capability, everybody kind of catches up to it, and you always have this sort of, you know, kind of two loops going at all times,

• 15:26Speaker 01

  with the closed providers and the open providers, and they're kind of always within three to six months of each other. The world is so different from a market structure standpoint, whether we end up in an outcome where we have sort of an exponential progress in the models that continually learn versus the closed source models, and it's like a five-year gap in progress, and that just goes again kind of exponential. Totally different market structures. The one where we have this exponential progress is, again, it's probably actually net positive for America in that case, in which case the export controls probably worked. It means our kind of top three, four labs have this incredible superiority, we control access to this technology.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  That's actually a good scenario, economically speaking. It might not be like a total net good scenario for society, but it's good for the US. Let's just say that's one scenario. A lot of people are betting that that's where we're at with research. The other scenario, and like China sits around, and they probably bet on this scenario, is no, we're going to be able to keep up, we're going to throw more compute at the problem, we're going to get more data, we're going to build our own flywheels, and it's always three months out, kind of behind. And if it's three months behind, and it's an open weights provider that has more of a commoditization kind of business model approach, because they just want to sell more infrastructure or chips, or they just want to reduce our superiority in this space, which is actually like strategic for China to do. Everybody wonders like, why are they doing this open weight stuff? It actually makes total sense.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Like, you're just reducing US's dominance in a field, and it might be worth a couple hundred billion dollars to do that for something that might be worth 10 trillion dollars. So if that keeps up, because there is real economic advantage to doing so, then...

• 17:09Speaker 01

  You have this new kind of, you know, sort of dynamic that plays out, which is maybe the layer of incremental value shift is effectively the applied layer of AI. So if you think about, there's the lab layer and then there's the applied layer.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Like the cursors.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  The cursors, the Harvey's, the Sierra's, the Decagons, the boxes.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  Which is amazing, because everyone said they're just a thin wrapper on top of large language models, but now maybe that's where the value comes.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, and, you know, it's one of these things, which is like, we just have to not be binary about it. Like, everything I'm saying, I think the frontier models still make way more money in the future than they do today. Because what happens at the routing layer is you still sort of say, hey, I want Fable, or GPT-5, you know, five, or whatever the next model will be, I want that to be the orchestrator. I want, I need like the super intelligence at the orchestration layer, and I need super intelligence at the review and sort of like, you know, fix and check the work of the, of the other agent. And, and so, so you have like a barbell, you know, maybe U-shaped model where you use frontier intelligence, but then everything in the middle, you can just say, no, I'm gonna take that to NemoTron, or, or Kimmy26, or GLM552, or whatever. And, and then all of a sudden,

• 18:15Speaker 01

  it's like you have super high cost, you know, inference in one part of the workload, super low cost, still pretty good inference in another part of the workload, but who has the incentive to do that? It's the applied layer of AI. Because, because like, the business model of the applied layer is obviously, like, we, our job is to, you know, give you the best model for the job, not just the model from just our lab. So, it's cool, because we actually now have a good kind of push-pull between frontier labs and the applied layer, where, where you probably wouldn't want it to be that we're all sort of only in the orbit of one or two companies, you know, commercially and economically. You'd want, you'd want to make sure that there's some good tension there. And so I think that's kind of the direction things are, things are headed, between kind of the token costs,

• 18:58Speaker 01

  the, the open source models becoming so good, and then maybe even some of this regulatory dynamic. I think the applied layer sort of incrementally gets, gets more, more of that opportunity, which is, which is obviously great.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  So you've talked about open source, and you've just mentioned China. But what you could, what can you tell us about La Chantonne Fat?

• 19:15Speaker 01

  It's, it's great memes.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  So folks, La Chantonne Fat is a rumored open source model from Mistral, and has been the subject of great fascination from the internet, wouldn't you say?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  There's great comedy.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  John, Dan, can we, can we show people what we're talking about? Let's roll image A.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  This is la chaton fat.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  The number one model from Europe, yes.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  My French.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Where the world.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  My French rudimentary French, it translates to the very fat kitten.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Can we roll B? This is a standard day in Paris now.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  But it does show something that there's so much eagerness for AI that there's now fan art for this potential model from Mistral.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  We've reached, we've reached a really important sort of phase in the cycle. So, so, you know, I do think that it is kind of cool because what, some of the things that you maybe discounted the importance of, all of a sudden just like have so much more importance. Like I'm watching the, I don't know if folks are watching like the fireworks based tense based as an example. Like it's pretty cool that, that, that we now have these open weights models that you can effectively post train on your particular domain of, of task. And you can go and, you know, eke out another five or 10 points of, of performance on these types of models. And again, that's only possible because of the Mistral's, because of the, the Chinese, you know, kind of open weights models.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  And the cost curve has gone down so much that there are actually some situations, which is, oh, actually, maybe I should train a model just for my use case. Because it's literally like economically now, it's not even like I want control, it's, it's actually economically advantageous for you to do so.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  So is this the answer to like the big token maxing hype where like everyone's spending all this money on tokens and not really understanding where they're going or whether there's an ROI that.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that in practice, that phase probably lasted two and a half weeks. Like, like from the moment that Meta token max.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Are you saying the media overhyped token maxing?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  No, I would never claim that. We should go through your, your various podcast headlines, but the.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  We're not going to do that. We got the cat pictures and that's it. Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  No, but like, I mean, if I, if I had to like capture the, the cycle of like the first token maxing, you know, Meta has a leaderboard, uses the most tokens possible to now, you know, the last weeks of rumors of like, we're shutting down everything, no one can use AI. You know, it's about a two month period. So it's, you know, people need to like probably, you know, always kind of step back and just be like. Okay, is what we're doing like a pragmatic, you know, thing for, for, for work? Are we just sort of like, like getting kind of hyped up too crazily on something? What's interesting is this, this phase was so short that I don't ever think it reached outside of, of the tech industry. I was, I was, I was, I, I, we, we kind of host these CIO dinners in every city that we go to.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  And I was, we had a dinner like within three days of like the token maxing, like, like initial spike on like Google Trends. Like the word finally emerged and like three people had heard about it. And so I, I feel confident that it would have died.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Right. They haven't heard about it because their employees are out spending the tokens.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, fair point, fair point. But hopefully it will have completely died by the time it reaches, reaches the rest of the world. And then we can just move to more normal environments. And, but the, the, the thing that, that is true of, of the phenomenon is that these agents are just using hundreds of times more tokens than they were before. And so, you know, when we launched our first kind of AI use case within Box, our product, the average number of tokens that was, was being used on a task was like 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 tokens. Now our latest agents might use a million tokens or five million tokens on, on executing a, a task. And so that, that's, you know, in some cases, that's a hundred X increase in, in number of tokens. And the reason for that is obviously like what's happening is right as we solve one use case,

• 23:07Speaker 01

  when you would think that we can drive down the cost curve of that one use case, all of a sudden a model capability allows us to now add another use case that's much harder. And then our appetite just grows to solve harder and harder and harder problems. And so it's this funny thing because people get confused. They say, I thought AI was supposed to get, was supposed to be getting cheaper. And, and it's like, yes, you can actually think about it as cheaper if you looked at like the unit of intelligence. The reason it's more expensive is because we're now taking on bigger tasks. And so we're getting confused because we're like, why is this the one, you know, tech trend that doesn't have sort of the Moore's Law phenomenon? And it's because actually, no, we're, we're outrunning the improved, the efficiency improvements in our appetite for what these models can go and do. And so it's actually what you need to do is have like a way to normalize the

• 23:52Speaker 01

  cost of the tokens to the tasks that you can now deploy. And then if you look at that, then that starts to look cheaper on a per task basis. It's just, again, our tasks are getting bigger or more accurate or more effective. And that's going to happen for quite some time.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  The reason why token maxing took off as a concept is because people saw the exponential revenue, right? The fact that Anthropic and OpenAI were at zero 2023, now they're like going to do $50 billion this year at the very least. And so people are looking for an explanation. And either the question, either the answer is this is real or some that somehow inflated, and that's why people go to token maxing. So if I'm hearing you're right, if I'm hearing you right, what you're saying is all this spend is much more legit than some of the online discussion makes it out to be.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Well, I think if I had to like officially provide my own takeaway for my own point, it would be, it would, it would sort of be there's, there's sort of always this experimentation phase of a new technology. And this happens to be a relatively expensive technology, so thus the experimentation phase is expensive. And then what will happen is enterprises will deploy AI and then they'll sort of peel, they'll, they'll start to see like where are the real use cases, where are the ones that aren't as real? They'll wind down the ones that aren't as real. The ones that are real, they'll then look at it and they'll say, is there a way to do it at a lower cost once we understand it enough? Or do we still need the frontier intelligence for, for everything we're doing? And that's actually just like a pretty normal, I think, process that, that everybody's going through right now.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  But, but, you know, I, I, I think about it like our engineering team, we are not token maxers in the sense of like, there's no leaderboard, we're not incentivizing overuse of tokens, we're just saying, use it as effectively as possible to, to get your work done faster. And our growth rate of spend is exponential and we're like totally happy about it. Like, nobody internally is, other than like, ah, we gotta like shift some things around and make sure we plan for this even more next year. Like, that's obviously a stressful conversation, but we're not stressed about the idea that we're spending on AI. Like, we're, we're quite excited about the productivity gains that we get. And so I think what's happening is, is every enterprise is having to kind of go through their own journey on it. Like they're they're deploying it in some teams and some teams are saying, oh, my gosh, this is this is like the greatest thing of all time. And then other teams, you kind of

• 26:06Speaker 01

  look at what they're doing. You can't see any kind of measurable improvement in the output of that organization. And so then you're like, OK, you know, like, maybe, maybe it's not as effective there. But I am, I would say, like, I think it's very easy to kind of capture one or two anecdotes and then and then kind of over extrapolate on the overall themes. I would say the vast majority of the current agent expend that's happening is sustainable because because partly because it's actually coming mostly from engineering and engineering related related tasks. And this is an audience that is kind of technically capable of of, you know, determining whether they like the work, you know, product that's coming out of the AI. Maybe as it gets to other parts of knowledge work, you know,

• 26:48Speaker 01

  those people will not be as sort of familiar with how to do the ROI measurement. And then it'll get even messier. But like so far, I think it's actually been largely, you know, totally reasonable.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  OK, we have a couple of minutes left. Let's do a small lightning round.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  So my first take here is that that series is really good. It's gonna be really good now.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  What do you think?

• 27:09Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  What? Elaborate.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Oh, is it lightning round? Or is it like, you want to hear a five minute answer round?

• 27:17Speaker 00

  You give like a 60 second answer.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, what could be easier than pressing a button on your phone and talking to it? And if you, you know, at least based on the announcement, they've taken Gemini, which is a very good model, and been able to, I don't know if it's fork or distill or something within there is is sort of Gemini grade intelligence. So if you get Gemini grade intelligence and voice on your phone, press a button, I think you're just gonna use that for a lot of things. And and then, you know, I think the exciting thing is like, imagine that hooked up to various apps on your phone. You're like, hey, order this thing for me, or, you know, you know, you know, go and add this calendar entry. Like, I think those are very plausible daily use cases that that we will have. And it's exactly the sweet spot for Apple to kind of own that space.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think Apple did it finally. That was that was good. That was good time.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Are you gonna tell me if my answer is right at the end of each one?

• 28:06Speaker 00

  OK, that's yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  OK, OK, so we agree, one for one.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  All right. How about this one?

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  Permanent underclass.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  I don't like this one. This one I don't like at all.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  Not only do I disagree with it, but I think it's just like a bad meme to have in the atmosphere. I think it's like not good for college students coming into the into the workforce of having so much stress about, you know, what company to join and and what's gonna what's gonna, you know, kind of play out. I do think companies actually do the job market a disservice, though, by not being as clear on their own philosophies on this, which some of it is reasonable because it's like, oh, man, we're just like, we're getting thrown through a loop. There's so much innovation. But I do think that companies like need to be somewhat clear on, hey, here's how we want to use AI. We want to use AI to accelerate our our work or accelerate our technical innovation or accelerate our ability to hit customers versus, you know, no, we're

• 29:01Speaker 01

  actually like our metric is as few employees as possible, you know, with AI. Like, you kind of do want to, you know, be able to have some stance. And I think companies have been very confused. And that lets this meme somewhat persist, you know, for for, you know, the Internet.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  Okay, I won't rate that one.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  All right, last one is is the SpaceX performance good or bad news for OpenAI and Anthropic?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Oh, well, it's obviously good news.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  You don't think Elon took some of their money because he pitched the market on an AI company and that's where the money got funneled into?

• 29:35Speaker 01

  I'm not sure I've seen like a limit of appetite of of

• 29:39Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  of if for, I mean, there's, there's a literal limit of money in the world, but I don't know that. I don't know that that is zero sum at this stage. So I think I think people are pretty clear that that, you know, if the revenue of this entire category of the frontier models and the infrastructure stack is measured in the trillions, then you can have, you know, 20 companies that that all take a piece of that at different layers of the stack. So so I'm not, I'm not sure I would be convinced that that would be zero sum.

• 30:08Speaker 00

  Did you buy SpaceX?

• 30:09Speaker 01

  I actually did.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Not, you know, I'm, I don't know if I'm embarrassed or not, but I'm not gonna say the amount of shares, but I wanted to like be a part of the movement. So I'm on Robinhood, buying my my retail shares of SpaceX. I'm up like 15 bucks now, per share, per share. But

• 30:30Speaker 01

  So I'm happy. Yeah.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Amazing. Well, Aaron, you know, you, you answered my email when we were just at the very start of this podcast, four episodes in, came on the show. I feel like every single time we talk, something crazy is happening.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  That's a guarantee at this point. So.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Boy, are we in the thick of it, right?

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Awesome. Good to see you.

• 30:48Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. Aaron.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Thank you, everybody.

• 30:58Speaker 02

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• 31:29Speaker 03

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