Grok 4 Launch Breakdown, OpenAI to Release Web Browser | Chris Paik, Will Bruey, Joel Becker, Dylan Parker, Eric Olson, Ghita Houir Alami, Elliot Hershberg, Karim Atiyeh

(02:28) - Grok 4 Launch Breakdown (36:09) - Open AI to Release Web Browser (50:31) - Apple Plans to Release New Apple Vision Pro Model (58:48) - Chris Paik, General Partner at Pace Capital and former Partner at Thrive Capital, discusses the evolution of human-computer interaction, emphasizing the potential of technologies like eye tracking and gesture recognition. He explores the rise of VTubing and YouTube's impact on digital content, highlighting how virtual avatars are reshaping the creator landscape. Paik also introduces the "atomic value swap" framework for assessing market fit and business model alignment, stressing the importance of balanced value exchanges to ensure platform success. (01:33:50) - Will Bruey, co-founder and CEO of Varda Space Industries, discusses how microgravity enables the creation of pharmaceutical formulations not possible on Earth, as gravity affects crystal growth and particle size distribution. By manufacturing drugs in space, Varda aims to produce purer and more uniform medications, potentially improving patient outcomes. Bruey also outlines the company's plans to scale up production and establish reentry sites globally to meet the growing demand for space-manufactured pharmaceuticals. (01:53:02) - Joel Becker, a researcher at Meta, discusses a study evaluating the impact of AI assistance on experienced open-source developers working on large, long-standing projects. Contrary to expectations, the study found that developers who used AI tools were actually slowed down, rather than sped up. Becker emphasizes the need for further research to understand these findings and to assess the potential for AI systems to autonomously improve their own capabilities. (02:13:07) - Dylan Parker, Co-Founder and CEO of Moment, discusses his company's recent $36 million Series B funding led by Index Ventures, the evolution of fixed income trading from manual to electronic systems, and Moment's role in providing modern fixed income infrastructure for financial institutions, including a partnership with LPL Financial. (02:22:35) - Eric Olson, co-founder and CEO of Consensus, an AI-powered search engine for academic research, discusses how Consensus leverages large language models to provide researchers with faster, evidence-based answers from peer-reviewed journals. He highlights the platform's dedicated focus on academic content, enabling more intelligent searches and citation-forward interfaces tailored for researchers. Olson also addresses the challenges of accessing paywalled content and emphasizes the importance of open access to scientific literature. (02:33:27) - Ghita Houir Alami, co-founder of ZeroEntropy, holds two master's degrees in applied mathematics from École Polytechnique and UC Berkeley. She discusses her journey from computer vision to large language models, leading to the creation of ZeroEntropy, which focuses on enhancing retrieval systems for AI by building search tools for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agents. Alami emphasizes the importance of precise and efficient retrieval to prevent AI hallucinations and highlights the company's recent release of a reranker model to improve search accuracy. (02:42:53) - Elliot Hershberg is a biotech scientist, writer, and investor who has contributed to cancer vaccine design, developed computational tools for spatial genomics, and worked on genome browser software. He authors the "Century of Biology" newsletter and has served as Biotech Partner at Not Boring Capital, focusing on synthetic biology investments. In the conversation, Hershberg discusses the integration of artificial intelligence in biotechnology, highlighting its transformative impact on drug discovery and the development of innovative medicines. (02:52:22) - Karim Atiyeh, co-founder and CTO of Ramp, discusses the launch of Ramp's first AI agent designed to streamline corporate expense management by automating decisions between finance teams and other departments. This agent, knowledgeable about company expense policies and transaction details, reduces the need for manual approvals and enhances efficiency. Atiyeh also highlights the agent's ability to gather contextual information from various sources, such as calendars and emails, to make informed decisions, thereby minimizing delays and improving compliance. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  We are live from the TVP in UltraDome.

• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  The temple of technology. The fortress of finance. The capital of capital.

• 0:06John Coogan?

  Today, we are covering Grok IV, launched. We're going to break that down. The third browser war has begun. Every artificial intelligence company is getting in the game, launching new browsers.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  Get yourselves a browser.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  The new Volkswagen electric bus is a flop, according to the Wall Street Journal.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  Ouch.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Apparently, Linda Yakarino was not fired for the Grok dust-up with the crazy hallucinations that were going on. We have more details there.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, and I don't. Why would anyone think that she was, considering that was clearly on the-

• 0:39John Coogan?

  That was in the timeline. That was for sure in the timeline. People were talking about that, like, oh, like, this happened and she stepped down within, like, six hours.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really?

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  My read on it was, clearly, Grok and XAI are not her domain.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally, obviously.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  And, and, uh, they, they were, Grok was saying some things about her that should never be said.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  And my read on it was, you know, who knows? When Elon commented on her post and said, "Thank you for your contributions," it's like, the boilerplate text. And so, I'm, I'm sure that their relationship is maybe not as good as it was day one.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  But I, I almost thought it was maybe the, you know, Mecca was the, the straw that broke the camel's back and, and she basically said, "Look, like, you know, I can no longer, you know, bet my career on this platform."

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Maybe, yeah. I mean, we, we can debate it. Uh, the, there's more reporting in the Wall Street Journal about what actually happened. And the, that story, which we'll get into, is, is kind of pointing to this idea that, that it had been in the works for a while.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  And, and, and that was not the straw that broke the camel's back. That was like, like, the, the papers had been signed.

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  That, everything had been signed before that.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  And then, and then, and then the, the dust-up happened with Grok. But the bigger news is that they actually got Grok IV out, and people are excited about it, so we'll talk about that. And then, the other Grok, GROQ, the CEO of which, of that company we had on the, on the show.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday? I'm losing track of time.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Very recently, no, it was Tuesday.

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  Tuesday.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  Apparently they're out raising it $6 billion and we have some more details on that company. So that's interesting. Anyway, let's tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill payments and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  They have a new agent launch today. Yep, Kareem will be joining later in the show.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  We're excited for that.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  For him to break it down.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  So let's break down the Grok 4 launch. DDD does has a summary insane that Elon Musk has pulled it off again. Absolutely crushing the AI wars with Grok 4. And we can go into some of the meta.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  Crushing the benchmark wars.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  For sure. And there's a question about like, are we post benchmark? Does this matter? What's the real question to be asking here? But there's a bunch of interesting takes. So just summarizing the core announcements. Post-training RL spend was equal to pre-training spend for this, for this release. That's the first time it's ever been like that. I think when you go back to the original RLHF stuff that ChatGPT was doing that kind of unlocked like, oh, wow. This really, really works. I'm pretty sure the pre-training spend was an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude bigger. Now we are truly in this reinforcement learning regime. $3 per million input is tokens, $15 per million output tokens.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  256,000 token context window priced 2X beyond 128K. It's number one on humanity's last exam, which interestingly was.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  It's effectively like postgraduate PhD level problems, but across a bunch of different domains. So everything from literature to physics.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, kind of like the hardest SAT possible. Interestingly, I believe that benchmark was created by Scale AI. And, and so Alex Wang is now at Meta trying to figure out how can we beat our own exam? And Elon is just like, I'm number one at your thing.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  Interesting dynamic. Yeah, the, the real test would be Elon, you know, doing the same problem set himself and saying, look.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I was talking to Tyler about this before the show, like, you know, it's like humanities last exam, it's like really good at PhD level math, PhD level stuff, but like, how often are you running into those types of problems?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's the whole thing about there's, there's this concept of like spiky intelligence, right? Where it's like, okay, it's really good at this very obscure problem that I never deal with. But if I have a super long kind of like context window, like, or there's no kind of like long term, it just completely loses its footing and then it's like useless.

• 4:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're kind of in like less of the benchmark regime and more of the agentic, like, how long can the agent run? So it's like, we're in the 15 minute AGI regime. Maybe this is 15 minutes of like even better AGI, but we want to go to 30 minute.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, and Dorekash on Monday, this, you know, takes me back to him talking about continual learning being the next problem that we really need to solve because it's great if you have a PhD level expert in your pocket that can solve any problem in any domain almost instantly. But if it can't learn and take feedback and improve on certain tasks, then it's basically like useless. Like if you had a, if you had a PhD level, you know, a PhD join your team to work on a specific problem, but it was hard restarting at the beginning of every single task with no prior knowledge, it would, it would be almost impossible for that person to succeed. So humans still got it on that front.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  But at the same time, like, you know, if you are trying to just really establish yourself as, you know, a, at least an API for tokens that every business should check out against Anthropic or the, the OpenAI APIs, just saying, hey, you know, we're on the frontier.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  Gemini.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Or Gemini, yeah. We're on the frontier is a good way. And they certainly proved that with GPTA, hard graduate math problems at 88%. The, the really interesting news is the ARK.

• 6:14Jordi Hays?

  It's worth calling out. So Grok got number one on humanities last.

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  Exam at forty four point four percent. Number two is sitting at twenty six point nine percent. And then going down this list of all these different sort of challenges. They are consistently well beyond the second place. So they are at the frontier now of all these different benchmarks.

• 6:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Mike Newp over at Arc AGI says, zooming out on Arc progress, I'd say OpenAI's O series progression on V1 is a bigger deal than Grok's progression on V2 so far. The O series marked a critical frontier AI transition moment from scaling pre-training to scaling test time adaptation. And this was the the O series progression, if you remember that. OpenAI was spending, it was like thousands of dollars of reasoning tokens generated in the test time inference to actually get a good score on the V1 of Arc AGI. And so it had to think a ton, but it was able to figure it out. And at least it proved that that throwing a ton of tokens and a ton of inference at a problem and

• 7:22John Coogan?

  and letting the letting it cook, basically, wound up producing progress there. So that was kind of like a new, just a new paradigm. Says, whereas Grok four mostly takes existing ideas and just executes them extremely well. In my opinion, the notable thing is the speed at which XAI has reached the frontier. And that is really like, it just can't be understated that this is crazy. You put a post from Owen in the in the chat.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  I'll pull it up here. He says Elon Musk is such a beast. I'm not even in a pure, I'm not even a pure fanboy anymore. How does he? He's a lot of swearing in here, Owen. Gotta keep the timeline PG. But how does he come out of nowhere with a cold start late to the game and ship Grok four and do it alongside everything else he's up to? He's launching new political parties. He's literally magnitudes above every founder. It's humbling. So

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Basically, everyone agrees that

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  It's almost like he was a co-founder of OpenAI.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess he was returned.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  You would have to, you know, be, you know, almost be a co-founder over there to be able to do something like this.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about Graphite, uh, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free at graphite.dev.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  If you want to ship like Ramp, get on Graphite.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, Chamath was saying the same thing. Uh, somebody in his replies says, seriously, how does this guy produce what he produces? Meta is buying talent at $200 million a year and Elon keeps his people at a fraction. It's mind blowing. Very deeply underappreciated edge for Elon, says Chamath. The retention of the best people happen when you can offer them a freewheeling culture of technical innovation. No politics and few constraints. And people in the comments are like, no politics. What are you talking about?

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, can get a little political over there, but.

• 9:11John Coogan?

  But, but probably not within the engineering org at XAI, right? Like, it's probably just, okay, how do we build the biggest thing? Cool.

• 9:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, you can imagine the politics of like, who gets the best spot for their tent in the office.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  You know, there's, there's a hierarchy, a tent hierarchy, proximity to the bathroom.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  I want to be directly under the air conditioning unit. I want to be closer to my desk.

• 9:33Jordi Hays?

  The windows can be nice too, so you can, you know, pull down your tent a little bit and get a little view, morning light.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  I wonder what the political structure is of the tent city.

• 9:41Jordi Hays?

  The tent hierarchy.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  So is there, do they, is a democracy? Do they vote for who runs the tent city? I guess it's just a.

• 9:48Jordi Hays?

  The XAI tent city.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  It's probably just Elon at the top, but does he have a tent?

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  Something about San Francisco and tents.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, very funny. Um, but Swix has been chiming in saying like, we need community notes for LLM benchmark porn because, um, in the, in the Grok four launch, they highlight this AIME competition math problem and, uh, and, and I mean, it's, and so Matt Schumer is basically saying AI, AIME is saturated. Let that sink in. Uh, Grok four got 100%. It made no mistakes on, on that benchmark, which is obviously very impressive. Um, but there's this extra comment about the nature of AIME. And so it's a cautionary tale about math benchmarks and data contamination. Apparently, you know, like predictions were that the models weren't smart enough to

• 10:38John Coogan?

  actually solve these, but he says, I used OpenAI's deep research to see if similar problems to those in AIME exist on the internet. And guess what? An identical problem to Q1, question one of AIME 2025, exists on Quora. I thought maybe it was just coincidence, so I used deep research again on problem three. And guess what? A very similar question was on math about stack exchange. Still skeptical. I did problem five and a near identical problem appears on math stack exchange. And so, like, at a certain point, if people, you know, put out a benchmark, then talk about it a lot online, and then that gets baked in the training data, you're just memorizing the results. You're not necessarily

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  Still cool.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  It's still cool. It's good. It's good to have everything memorized. But it really, it's not beating like the knowledge retrieval knowledge engine allegations. And it's, and we're not really in

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'd be interested to do, when Scott Wu was on the show earlier this year, he was basically saying, AI will win an IMO gold medal this year. He felt very confident in that. And I'd be interested to see how he thinks about

• 11:40John Coogan?

  And I'm pretty sure

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  This new performance

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure the IMO gold medal questions are public once the IMO happens. So every year, they're, they're developing new questions, but then they go out there, and then they get memorized, and the solutions become discussed. And, you know, there's all the context around that. And so, yeah, it gets, it gets kind of baked in. So, big question about how valuable are these? At the end of the day, it's really just about like adoption. And that's why, you know, we, we were looking at the poly market for the best, which company has the best AI model at the end of July? And XAI has, has just surpassed Google, which was sitting around 80% chance for a while, and then started dropping earlier this week,

• 12:26John Coogan?

  last week, started dropping, and now XAI is sitting at 48%, Google is sitting at 45%.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, actually updating it's updating live. Google's back up at forty nine percent.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Is Google planning to launch something new in July? Because it feels like it feels like this market particularly is more driven by Google's release schedule because Google might have something in the lab, but like they like to release things at specific times like they have it's a big company. They don't just like

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  Who knows Gemini team Logan over there might be fixated on this.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Did you see his post during this?

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, during during the wait, he was like, if you if you need something to kill the time.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  Google AI Studio.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  So I mean, people are people were definitely memeing the production values on the Grok four launch because it was supposed to start at eight. I think it went live at eight forty five or something like that, maybe a little bit later at Pacific time. And Igen robot was saying.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this this market is based on LM LM Arena.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  LM Arena.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  Specifically the text leaderboard. So currently they haven't fully updated it. So it's unclear. Right now Gemini two point five pro is still at the top, but I think the expectation is once they get Grok up there, they will be the top spot. So we'll keep following.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  This market. There's over two million of volume already on it. So.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's so interesting that Anthropic's not on this polymarket at all because people talk about them as having like the best vibes, the best like big model smell, the best like, you know, interaction and LM Arena is like supposed to kind of like test that with these A B tests and yet like doesn't seem to be performing there. But it almost doesn't matter because they're just focused on like the business at this point as opposed to like the benchmarks. So I don't know. It's all changing.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  We have a post here from Ben Hilek. He says Elon Musk on AI. So during the presentation, a lot of people were critiquing the presentation, saying that it it was, it didn't feel like super polished or whatever. I don't think that was the intent. And and it was pretty fixated on the models themselves and and what went into them and what they're good at. But Elon did have this one quote in here where he says, and at least if it turns out, so he's talking about, you know, what will, you know, what kind of impact AI will have on the world. And he goes, at least if it turns out to not be good, I'd at least like to be alive to see it happen.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  If we get the Terminator ending, I want to be around for that.

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want to experience it.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  What does that say about those timelines? Because it's like, is he expecting not to be alive? Like I I feel like most people that have been in the doom category have been like, the doom's coming soon, not not the doom's coming in two hundred years.

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  I I didn't. I read into it more like he will find it interesting if that is the outcome and and it'll be entertaining, less so like, will I be alive when it happens kind of thing? But who knows? There was another funny quote at the end of the art, at the end of the presentation where Elon kind of looked around at the very end and he's like, anyone else have anything to add? And one of the engineers goes, it's a good model, sir.

• 15:30John Coogan?

  Extremely online crew. Definitely, definitely on brand. Well, Ben Hilek, as you know, he's been on the show. He's a designer, probably working in Figma.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  All day.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  Think big, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at Figma.com.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  And we have our first product coming out very soon with Figma Make that Tyler has been cooking on. I've been very excited.

• 15:55John Coogan?

  He showed me, he showed me it and I was like, oh, like someone built the thing that we were thinking about building like, and he was like, no, like I did this in Figma. And I was like, this is like an iframe on another website that like already exists? Because it looks like exactly what we want, but it looks so good.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  Like it looks like he worked on it. It looks like he worked on it for like a few weeks.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  No, it looked like someone else did it. It looked like it was a professional product that like stole our idea, basically. I was like, oh, like someone else got to it. That was the vibe when I heard it. Yeah. Well, how has the, how has the experience been? I don't know if you want to leak exactly what you're working on, but.

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't want to talk about it too, you know, closely, but.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  But how many prompts did it take you to get where you showed me?

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, maybe five.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  That's so crazy. This thing is so detailed.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  The design is super, it's really great.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  It's really good.

• 16:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the fact that it came out looking like basically like 90, like 90%.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I imagine that there's probably like the last 10% if we were really strict about like, it's got to be on this exact style guy. Like that might be something where like, you know, Tyler winds up spending more time finalizing and customizing stuff. But in terms of like, just getting a functional prototype out, it was mind blowing. It was awesome. I'm very excited about the, the age of vibe coding. This is an interesting chart from Tracy Alocke.

• 17:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 17:17John Coogan?

  Been on the show. The cost to rent an Nvidia H100 GPU hit a new low this week with annualized revenue at 95% utilization falling from 23,000 at the start of May to less than 19,000 today. So that's not that big of a percentage drop, but it is, but I mean, it is a 20% drop.

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  It's a consistent trend.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  It's a consistent trend. I wonder how much of this driven is driven just by all of the frontier labs that are driving the most adoption or moving on from the H100 to the 200. I don't know what else would be driving this because if you can, if you can still get, like, if you only take a 20% drop off of a full refresh of a new, of a new, of like a new hardware.

• 18:04Jordi Hays?

  And it's a pricing drop, not a utilization.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Annualized revenue at 95% utilization. So this is revenue per unit.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  So utilization is still very high. It's the, it's the price that, you know, these Neo clouds are able to rent them for, which is dropping.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  Which tracks.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, the, like, the, the market's more competitive than ever. There's more Neo clouds spinning up and more people, you know, actually influencing these things. And then I guess this is the question of like, how, how stuck will certain workloads get? Like if you, if you have figured out a great use case for an LLM in your organization, and it's something that's, you know, not one-shotting your entire stack or whatever, but it's just like, you know, we have data flowing through our systems and we are going to use, you know, LLMs are going to, you know, interact with every PDF that gets uploaded to our, to our website or whatever. And, and so we're, we're influencing a lot. Like you might not need to put that on the latest hardware or update the hardware forever.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  You might just like, be like, yep, it's Llama 3, it works. It's on H100s and it'll be on H100s forever. And that piece of our business will just stay there. Just like, you know, we have a Postgres database that, you know, works and we're not changing it every year. We're not changing everything. We're just like, we're just trying to cost optimize that and just hopefully the cost just comes down on that. But like, we've solved this particular problem, then we'll go solve new problems with new technology. So I, I think that, I think that's probably what's going on here. But, but it gets to the point of like, The biggest question with Grok is that like the the model clearly is frontier. It works. It's it, you know, like the the whole fine tuning on the on the actual X account is is

• 19:52John Coogan?

  like a crazy final step of like system prompt. And people were joking about that like, oh, they're gonna fix that. It's like, that's not what they're demoing today. They're demoing like the underlying raw model, which is clearly like just engineering focused, as you saw in the in the in the demo, the demo, which was just like, you know, benchmarks and stats.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  Turns out, turns out the secret ingredient to crushing every benchmark is to have the bunch of data from schizophrenic posters on X.

• 20:19John Coogan?

  No, I don't think so at all. I I actually think it's the design of the RLHF stuff and the design of the reinforcement learning pipeline. Tyler, you got anything?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, I mean, I I think just like so far what I've seen on X, like the overall response, like vibe stuff.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Is that people are saying, uh, maybe it was a little too kind of overfit on the RL like VR, like verifiable rewards.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Like, you you kind of see this when, um, even in the demo, I think it would it would sometimes respond in the answers with like, uh, in in like LaTeX formatting.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Which is like, okay, that means obviously they've trained a ton on, you know, math questions, stuff like that.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Papers and stuff.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Maybe people are saying maybe it was kind of, you know, benchmarked. Uh, you see it like, you know, 100% on on Amy is like, kind of crazy.

• 21:03John Coogan?

  It's like sauce. It's like, you don't want to be too, too good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the thing about democracy. Like, if you win like 80% of the popular vote, it's like, okay, it was a blowout. If you won 100% of the popular vote, like, probably not a democracy. I don't know. I mean, in theory, these things should be able to do it. But uh, I'm I'm interested to know more if we dig into Arc AGI. Is there is there more stuff going on there? Are there any secrets? Because it does seem like a kind of an outlier result. You can see it from this Aaron Levy post. Grok 4 looks very strong. Importantly, it has made it has a mode where multiple agents do the same task in parallel, then compare their work to figure out the best answer. In the future, the amount of intelligence you will get will just be based on how much compute you throw at it. I was joking with Tyler about this, that

• 21:48John Coogan?

  The the individual models are mixture of experts' models. So there's a whole bunch of of parameters, right? And then the individual parameters like light up the different neurons based on the an internal to the model router. So there's kind of like the math section of the brain, the literature section of the brain. And so this was like one of the this was one of the key breakthroughs in like GPT four, right? Was mixture of experts.

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  People think. We're not super sure.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, we don't still. We don't fully know. But that's like an internal decision that happens within the model to be like, let's go. It's this feels like a math question. Let's go down the math path in the model.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  But then Grok four is doing multiple. It's running the same model multiple times and then comparing the results. And so now you have.

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, grading it.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, you have multiple agents running mixture of expert models. You have mixture of mixture of agents running mixture of experts' models. And the next thing is going to be like, if you want the absolute best intelligence, you need a mixture of companies. You need like, I send one prompt and it goes to Grok and Claude and GPT and Gemini and a human.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder how OpenRadar is thinking about this stuff. It is funny to think about the the the human version of that, where you give five engineers on your team, build, you know, the same feature and then kind of compare notes afterwards. Wildly inefficient, but with with with software, when you can do these things like very quickly, there's incremental cost, but you can, you know, have more confidence in in results.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  I mean, it's basically like having a brainstorming meeting with the whole team and just throwing up a question and being like, hey, like, we have this hard problem that we need to solve. Here's my idea. What do you think? What does Tyler think? What does Ben think? You kind of like go around the table. Everyone kind of gives their input, their various expertise. They kind of think through the problem in different ways. And then you compare answers and everyone kind of coalesces around one strategy. This is like how work happens in the real world with a meeting. It's kind of the same thing, but certainly expensive to do that. So it'll be interesting to see where companies like how how eager are companies to jump over to Grok? Because it seems like it's been a big lever.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  For Microsoft to have Grok in the ecosystem as kind of a stalking horse for all the other models.

• 24:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Because Satya wants Azure to be very model independent, serve them all. They have the, I think they have exclusivity for ChatGPT or GPT APIs. Or they have obviously like a great deal there with OpenAI. And so if they can, if they can have Grok for as well, that's another, you know, tool in the tool chest to be like this top layer.

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  Satya is in such a good position. It's, it's probably not discussed enough.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  How much, uh, just by owning those end customer relationships and being able to vend in whatever model is hot at that moment and give people optionality. And still get 20% of OpenAI's revenue, at least for now.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. He's also SOC 2 compliant.

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  If you want to get SOC 2 compliant, head over to Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. So yeah, Eigenrobot was, uh, was talking trash about the production values.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about trash. They were just, they were just noticing.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  I didn't think it was that bad. I think it's really good.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  Slides are worse than I'd create after getting into roped into a presentation with one hour notice. You can tell the engineers made them themselves. I think just, this is just a reflection of the culture, right? They're not, they're, yeah, very clearly is like screenshots dropped into a slide.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  It's also funny, it's like light, it's light mode screenshots on dark mode slides.

• 25:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  Let's do black slides and then, and then you come with your white, with your white screenshots that are kind of like misaligned and not really evenly distributed. They didn't do like the, the distribute evenly or whatever, distribute horizontally.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  Still gets the point across.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  And I think it's a reflection of their culture.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:48Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, it shows what they care about, what they don't care about. They're not trying to be the most polished. They're just trying to be the best.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, Eigenrobot kind of did like a whole like live tweet here.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Elon was predicting the model will discover new physics within two years. He said, let that sink in.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  Is that?

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  Long silence.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  Is that?

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  One engineer laughs awkwardly.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Is that sooner or, or later than his previous timeline? Because he was, he was talking about AI discovering new physics soon. I don't remember if he was saying.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  Dating it?

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Two years or three years or one year before, because this could be, this could be that he's, he's still excited about this. He still thinks it's possible, but he thinks it's going to take longer than he said previously. And that's kind of the more important update. I don't remember what he said originally.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  See if Grok can find out.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  But he was saying this at the Grok 3 launch that like, that is the goal. And, and if you can get there, like you've kind of, you've kind of solved everything. And Sam Altman was talking about that too, that if you can, if you can create a super intelligence, like that's probably the first thing that you'd want to do. It's like, hey, go discover all the new physics and like, really help us figure out how the world works. Um, so you can solve, um, you know.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  True seeking.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  All those other stuff. Um, I want to be clear. I love all you guys at XAI and only want the best for you. But I'm going to continue to live post. Elon attempts to give a speech on alignment involving a very small child, a child much smarter than you. The monologue rambles with no conclusion. Uh, incite a pause. Yeah. Will this be bad or good for humanity? He says the, you know, at least if it turns out to not be good, I'd like to be alive to see it happen. Uh, oh yeah, they had a poly market integration. Um, that was kind of interesting.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Um, basically giving, uh, giving the model access to real time poly market data. So that it can help make predictions and sort of add context around.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  The, uh, the market itself.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting. Um, Elon asking the real questions. You say that's a weird photo, but what is a weird photo? I still don't understand why we're looking at weird photos of XAI employees, but they were charming. They're calling it Super Grok. Crazy features, 16 bit microprocessors. What is, I don't even understand what this is. Um, oh, they, yeah, they built like a game in Grok. Uh, they had demo of a video game generated by Super Grok. It's a Doom clone. Every time the PC shoots an enemy, floating text appears reading Grokdom. Elon is fabricating timelines for product launches on the spot. The engineering, the engineer sitting next to him is looking at the floor, face impassive, nodding. It's a good model, sir. For real though. Congratulations on the launch, guys.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  It's a good model, sir.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  I thought this post from the actual XAI engineer Eric Zealikman was funny. It was like AI, AI model version numbers over time. Did you see this?

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  So it's this chart of the version numbers over time and you can see that Grok is versioning fastest. Cause it's like, at this point, what else are we measuring? Like, like at least they're iterating on the version number effectively as opposed, and I guess this is a shot at OpenAI because they launched 4.5 and then went to 4.1 and they're kind of like, you know, there's this big question about like, when will GPT-5 come? The expectations are so high for GPT-5. And so they've, they've obviously, the Grok teams are like, hey, at least every three months, we release a new full number. So I wonder, the five is a number that really no one has, has like gone for. And I wonder if Grok will do it first.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Like if you draw the line on this, they certainly should do it in like three months. They should have Grok 5 and there's no reason that they shouldn't, but maybe there's some superstition.

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  It's very possible that Colossus is the, is the key.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  To getting to five.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Oh, the new data center, yeah. Well, they'll need Linear to plan that out. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  They

• 29:32John Coogan?

  Linear.app.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  Need Linear badly, so hopefully they've gotten signed up.

• 29:36John Coogan?

  Near said Grok on humanity's last exam, Grok 4. I'm not sure I buy, even in the general case, that there's a given humanity's last exam number, which implies you discover useful new physics. How would one make a benchmark of the proper shape for this? You'd have to have a validation set of questions which are outside the scope of what we currently are able to do. You could choose things on the edge of our knowledge distribution and then try and exclude. Yeah, it is interesting, like if, like if you are able to memorize every hard math problem, does that allow you to memor, to discover new math? Like it's it's sort of a prerequisite because you have to.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  I think where I I've imagined these discoveries coming from are having a single intelligence that has PhD level intelligence across like a single mind that has PhD level intelligence across every human domain, right? And being able to combine ideas from different domains. Like historically, a lot of innovation is just taking something from one field, bring it over here, making some combination of it. I think Elon talks about the potential of discovering new physics. But again, doesn't didn't didn't spend a lot of time like breaking down how that would actually happen. But world is unpredictable. So.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. People are really pushing this idea of like, okay, like, like we are accelerating, like the the AG, the R K G I leaderboard is accelerating. But I keep seeing this and and feeling deceleration. Like I am not feeling acceleration right now. Are you Tyler?

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. I I think generally I'm kind of like not that interested in a lot of these kinds of benchmarks like. I think R K G I is more interesting, but just like the humanities last exam, the kind of general math physics knowledge, it's doesn't seem to be that like, it doesn't seem to line up with you. Like you see GPT four point five kind of does very poorly on these things. But like writing, it does really great. So like I I think I'm I'm more like if I were to go to long, short on like different benchmarks, like the usefulness of them. I think stuff like HLE, I'm kind of short, long, I'm like, have you guys seen the Minecraft benchmark where it builds the two different? Okay, you you basically two models build like a Minecraft. There's like a prompt. It's like build a house. Then you can choose and then it's like their rank.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  Models yearn for the minds.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  But but who's who's grading that? The human?

• 32:01Speaker 02

  It it's a human who picks between them. And then it's kind of like a elo.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  But just like general kind of creative tasks.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  I think stuff like that Aiden Bench is good.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Um, I think even on the Grok launch, there was the vendor bench.

• 32:13John Coogan?

  Which one's Aiden Bench?

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Aiden Bench is Aiden McLaughlin's benchmark. It's just like.

• 32:19Speaker 02

  It's it's kind of hard to describe how it works exactly, but it's just various like creative tasks. How like kind of novel it's thinking is the the like style of its text.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  Sure. Wait, this is just like it's just like whichever one he likes the most. At the end of the day, like he's the only greater.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  No, no, there is like an objective like function that you can do. You can like run it. It's not just like.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  The idea that.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  He's like, open it again.

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  It will be funny.

• 32:46Jordi Hays?

  You know, there there come, there's a period of life where your SAT score like matters a lot.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  And it says something about you.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Jordi Hays?

  And then a decade later, it's, you know, what you can do, what you have done.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  Starts to matter a lot more. And so I do think we'll reach that point where it's like, yes, you can one shot every hard exam question there is that you can throw at it. But like, what can you do for me?

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. And I think that's I think that's why like the bigger question is almost like, you know, chat GPT DAUs. And like, and like actual.

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  Revenue.

• 33:18John Coogan?

  Revenue.

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  The final benchmark.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  Installs and stuff. Yeah. I mean, the the revenue thing is interesting because you wind up in like B two B cloud world, which is valuable, but it's maybe less. It's like, it's more competitive because it's more commoditized and.

• 33:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, if you you don't have a lot of leverage in the enterprise, if Azure is able to offer infinite models that are that are infinite frontier models, open source models that are maybe just behind the frontier, but great at certain tasks.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  The leverage isn't quite there. There will need to be another pretty significant leap until then, you know, Anthropic being really good at code gen. There's leverage there.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  We we saw this yesterday with with Llama switching over to

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic models internally and then, you know, just having a consumer app with a lot of users also very valuable.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. The other interesting thing about the the foundation model layer commoditizing and it becoming like cloud. And if you have a model, you'll just be like vended in as an API to anything else, like the token factory is that.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  The hyperscaler clouds are extremely profitable. Like even though AWS, GCP and Azure are all somewhat directly competitive and they're somewhat perfect substitutes for each other, they have not driven prices to zero such in the way airlines are like deeply unprofitable. Like AWS and Google Cloud are both profitable.

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or you look in other commodity sectors like oil and gas.

• 34:59John Coogan?

  And I don't know if that's just because there's lock in. I'm not exactly sure, but there's something about where, you know, maybe the, maybe the counterintuitive take is that yes, they do commoditize and there are a few major foundation models that are frontier and they all are roughly the same price, but they all have decent lock in with their customers to the point where they're still able to extract some level of profit or they're just creating so much value that even if they're taking like a small marginal slice on top of, on top of the, the cost to run, that they're creating so much value that they still have 50% margins or something like that. Cause like, I mean, this was the story of AWS, like no one knew how much money it was

• 35:40John Coogan?

  making and then, and then they, they had to break out the financials in one of Amazon's earnings reports and it was like the AWS IPO, as Ben Thompson put it. Anyway, before we get to the next story, let's tell you about Numeral HQ. Sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. So the big news is that the third browser war has begun. Google's stock has dropped on the news that OpenAI is planning to launch a Google Chrome competitor within just weeks. And this is very interesting timing because.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  It's time to browse.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, time to browse. Certainly makes sense to become deeper in, more deeply integrated into the user's life, makes a ton of sense. There's a ton of benefits that come from having a web browser. What was interesting is the, we can go into what Google actually law, or what OpenAI is talking about launching, but this news, the scoop leaked the same day that Arvind from perplexity. announced that they're finally releasing their next big product after launching perplexity Comet, the browser that's designed to be your thought partner and assistant for every aspect of your digital life, work and personal. And so perplexity launched this on June 9th and

• 36:54John Coogan?

  then OpenAI, the scoop goes out via Reuters the same day. And so this feels like very much like, let's not let perplexity get a bunch of attention and drive a bunch of people to start daily driving Comet, the browser, because even though we're not ready to launch our competitor.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Arvin was on the show talking about Comet, but over a month ago, he said it was really important to the business. This was a big bet that they're making. He, and I'm sure both companies are racing to be the first to launch, but Dia, the browser from the browser company, also launched out of, or they're still in beta, but they launched like a month ago or something like that. So this is, you know, you're not going to be the first.

• 37:38John Coogan?

  Oh, they launched a month ago with the Dia browser?

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  That's interesting because I saw Riley Brown also posted the cursor for web browser and Dia browser. And I thought Dia browser launched the same day, but I guess it had launched earlier.

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So anybody that was an ARC user can download Dia today and chat with their tabs. But interestingly enough, perplexity's browser and OpenAI's browser are both built on Chromium, the same open source project that underpins Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  So the cool thing here, that means that they're compatible, compatible with existing Chrome extensions.

• 38:13John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Okay. That's cool. Yeah, it's, it's, I want to talk to more people who were like active in tech during the earlier browser wars. The first browser war was Netscape Navigator versus Microsoft Internet Explorer. This is in the mid, mid 90s, early 2000s. Netscape was super dominant and everyone loved Netscape. It was originally the Mosaic browser. This is the Marc Andreessen project. And then, but Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer with Windows 95 and the distribution was so powerful that Internet Explorer actually wound up winning and became really, really dominant. But then there was this lawsuit. And went back and forth, but then basically in by the early 2000s, Internet Explorer had over 90% market share.

• 38:58John Coogan?

  But then they got kind of lazy and stagnant, apparently. And I mean, I'm not exactly sure what happened, but there's a lot more competition. So Firefox, which was, I believe, like a spin out of Netscape, or kind of like some of the same heritage there, began getting traction. And then Google Chrome launched in 2008 and leaprogged everyone. And Google Chrome was really focused on like speed. It was the fastest browser. And they did a whole bunch of work to optimize JavaScript so the pages would just load faster and run better on pretty much every computer that you had. And so, and then they had the open source project with Chromium, and so they were able to kind of standardize the entire industry. And so everyone's always been trying to draw analogies between like the browser wars and the LLM wars.

• 39:40John Coogan?

  And like, what's the role of open source in that? Like, is open source a strategy to wind up maintaining your dominance? How much does distribution matter? Like Chrome was probably pretty easy to distribute because every single person was visiting Google just every day searching. And so you just put this bar, hey, want to switch to the faster browser? And people just do it because you have basically like, you know, billions of ad impressions on your product every day. Will be interesting to see if ChatGPT can get people to download their own browser on desktop. I mean, I'm using ChatGPT on desktop in Chrome all the time.

• 40:16Jordi Hays?

  Which ChatGPT model would you want to use as a default search engine?

• 40:22John Coogan?

  That's the hard part because I always run into this problem where it defaults to O3 Pro, but that takes 10 minutes. And so then I have to go to 4O. And then if I'm in an O3 Pro flow and I'm talking to O3 Pro and I let it cook for 10 minutes and gave me a great answer. But then I want to just be like, okay, just like clean this up a little bit or summarize this or do some bullet points. I want 4O to do that, so I have to switch over. So I don't know. I would imagine I'd go 4O as the default because I want speed. But even 4O could probably be faster before it truly replaced.

• 40:53Jordi Hays?

  Google's very fast. They've spent a very long time being fast.

• 40:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I could imagine them doing a similar project to, I believe it was like the V8 JavaScript engine. They sent this team out to, I want to say like Iceland or something. They basically sent like a bunch of engineers to like an offsite and they were like, just go optimize JavaScript for like. A month. Just go focus on this for like a month or months and come back when it's done. Like you have no other responsibilities than just like optimizing this like compiler. And they came out, they came back with the V8 JavaScript engine. It created this whole like Node JS boom. People were running JavaScript on the server then and, uh, and I could see Google kind of doing something similar where they're like, okay, we have Gemini. It's good at looking stuff up. It's a good knowledge retrieval engine.

• 41:43John Coogan?

  Go figure out how to make it load all the tokens for the full response in a hundred milliseconds. And that would be very, very cool. And I wonder if that's like a uniquely Google advantage. Tyler, you look something up?

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was in, it was in Denmark.

• 41:57John Coogan?

  Denmark. Okay. I was close. I was close. Yeah. I wasn't sure it was Finland or Iceland and Denmark.

• 42:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The interesting thing here, I'm realizing that tabs are definitely a light lock into browsers. It's not, it's not just the default, but if you have six to 10 tabs that you've just had open for a really long time and they're like, from a bunch of different things and you can't exactly remember what they were if you had to list them all off, but you know, you know, I, I personally end up using tabs as like, somewhat of a to do list. And so if you're spinning up a new browser and you don't have your tabs, it's like, oh, do I want to just like, get rid of my, my tab stack? I have a bunch of tabs that just have stayed there for years and they're basically like, it's basically like a mini operating system. Right? With like different apps that might be a Google sheet or something else.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know. I know what you mean.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  So there's very real lock in. I could bring all those tabs over, but I have to then, log into a bunch of different services. And so it's, it's really, really hard to actually,

• 42:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:57Jordi Hays?

  win here.

• 42:58John Coogan?

  I wonder if anyone's using, you know, in, in Google Chrome, you can actually change the default search bar to, you know, when you type in the search bar and if you just type words, it just Google searches it? You can change that to search. ChatGPT.

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can pass in a query parameter and it can just do that. But I haven't heard of anyone actually doing that. And I used to have, I used to be such a power user of Chrome. I used to have different code words, basically. So if I, if I typed like I space and then a query, it would go to IMDB and search that specifically. So you could, you could have Chrome like route to any specific search. Any, so you could press like Y space and it would search Yelp or, you know, anything else. But I don't know if people are, I don't know if people are doing that with Google, with ChatGPT. I think people mostly just like control, command T and then hang out in ChatGPT.

• 43:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, we'll have to ask Chris in 15 minutes about, get an update on the browser wars. Cause he was an early investor in.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  I know one of those tabs that you have pinned right now.

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  What's that?

• 43:58John Coogan?

  Adio.

• 43:59Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free.

• 44:06Jordi Hays?

  I've had Adio open for thousands of hours in a row at this point.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Signal kind of breaks it down with the OpenAI launching the web browser. He says, this is the oldest playing tech, find product market fit with a single killer use case, then vertically integrate and horizontally expand until you control the interface layer itself. App, platform, once you own the interface, you own the defaults. Welcome to the next generation of browser wars. Yeah, what's interesting is there, like Sam Altman at OpenAI and just the fact that OpenAI is a company, like there is kind of a mandate to like vertically and horizontally integrate, figure out code, figure out research, figure out devices. But every company wants to do everything, but then sometimes they run up against barriers.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Like there was a time when Google was like, we want to win social networking and we want to beat Facebook. And we're going to launch a direct Facebook competitor. And they did, and it didn't go well. And then they shelved it and then they wound up producing trillions of dollars in market cap, just doing the thing that they do great. And so the question is like the surface area of OpenAI, they have to explore. They have to experiment. It's, it would be stupid not to see if they could get a browser and a device and a chip and a nuclear reactor and everything and sand, get the, get the sand, get everything. But, but there's no, there's no guarantee that they will win the entire vertical stack and there will be the one company, right?

• 45:31Jordi Hays?

  I think my question is, are these going to be, like, is OpenAI's browser going to be an entirely new app other than their existing? Mobile app? Is it, or their desktop app?

• 45:43John Coogan?

  I, yeah, that is interesting.

• 45:45Jordi Hays?

  Because if they have to get people to re-download a separate app, then, then that's, then that's like an entirely, you know, they have a good flight, you know, they have a bunch of impressions.

• 45:53John Coogan?

  It wouldn't just evolve the apps that they already have installed.

• 45:55Jordi Hays?

  Perplexity too, I don't, I don't know if perplexity has, uh, is planning to, to release this as like a new standalone app, or it will be in the perplexity mobile app, but.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I know, I think Comet's like its own thing because we were looking to download it and we need a code. And you can't just get it if you're just on perplexity.

• 46:18John Coogan?

  But I don't know. All I know is that you should go to fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2.

• 46:30John Coogan?

  So Arvin breaks down like his philosophy of, of Comet, the browser that he's dropping from perplexity. He says, you can either keep waiting for connectors and MCP servers for bringing in context from third-party apps, or you can just download and use Comet and let the agent take care of browsing your tabs and pulling relevant info. It's a much cleaner way to make agents work. So that is interesting. So I wonder how much like puppeteering will be in this because ChatGPT and OpenAI have operator that operates a Chromium front, like a headless web browser, basically. But you can actually see it working and it's clicking things. And so if they're, like, there's also the value of like the training data.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  If you're getting people using all these websites, you have all this training data of like, okay, they clicked on the blue button, they clicked on the green button, they saw this, they, they, they entered that. This is how they dealt with this form, this is how they dealt with that form. And so that feels like very, very valuable data if you can get it. So it's probably worth duking it out, even if it doesn't, uh, even if, even if it takes a long time.

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 47:33John Coogan?

  I do wonder where, where else they will, um, where, where they will plug in. Like Clouly operates at like a higher level of abstraction with like the screen scraping. And I wonder if we'll hear rumbles about either perplexity or OpenAI thinking about. Like moving up the stack to that level. I'm not exactly sure. Anyway, Dan Ives says, we believe Apple needs to acquire perplexity for AI capabilities. Likely $30 billion range would be a no brainer deal, given treadmill AI approach in Cupertino. Perplexity would be a game changer on the AI front and rival ChatGPT, given the scale and scope of Apple's ecosystem. So people have been talking about this for a while. It feels like there were talks and then

• 48:17John Coogan?

  they kind of stalled out and, and Arvind is kind of.

• 48:21Jordi Hays?

  It'd be a 300 and I think this would be a 375x revenue multiple.

• 48:25John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 48:27John Coogan?

  I mean, the product sense is good. You use the product and, and like there's like, Apple hasn't been able to deliver on the product side. They have the distribution, but they haven't been able to get things.

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  We talked about this before, though. The, the most expensive acquisition Apple has ever made was Beats by Dre for $3 billion, which was a 3x revenue multiple.

• 48:47John Coogan?

  It would be a huge shift, huge shift.

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  I don't know that, I, I think that Apple is embarrassed right now and, and feels a lot of pressure to deliver. I don't know if they're at the point where they would pay $30 billion just yet.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  And even then it's like hard to integrate and.

• 49:04Jordi Hays?

  Or even 14 or whatever their last private valuation was.

• 49:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the big question for me was like perplexity is, is built on a lot of different clouds, a lot of different tools, a lot of different models. Is Apple cool with that stack?

• 49:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  Because if all of a sudden.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  Or do they want to just go direct to Anthropic or OpenAI, which they are in conversation with. And every once in a while, these, these like scoops pop up around perplexity and, and Apple conversations. And it's hard to read into that. Are these like, is this like rumor mill? Like what's driving that rumor mill?

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, pull up the Mag7 chart. I want to see where Apple and Google are sitting today. Apple at 3.2 trillion, Google at 2.1 trillion and Nvidia's holding strong at 4 trillion. Not bad.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, 1% of market cap, they're at 3.2 trillion, $30 billion acquisition to be, you know, to have a, have an AI product that clearly has a good roadmap. Isn't that crazy? I don't know. Well, if you're making bets on any of the Mag7, do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously, they have multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. So, in other Apple news, they're preparing to launch the new version of the Apple Vision Pro. They're just doing a slight iteration on the chip, they're moving to the M4 chip, and they're launching a new strap, which was something people were complaining about because the weight, maybe it'll be better distributed. People were switching out for the Pro Strap like earlier.

• 50:36Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny. So, last week, Elon announced the America Party, or I guess it came out on Monday, stock dropped from $312 a share all the way down to $291 a share. That is when Dave Portnoy, I think, Market bought, he was saying, Davey Daytrader is back, if that's not a top signal, I don't know what is, but he was Market buying like 10 million of Tesla, being like, I just think it's gonna go back up to where it was. It's just been climbing since then, it's back up to $308 a share. Almost, almost recovered, it's up

• 51:15Jordi Hays?

  4.2% today, so on-brand for Elon. And basically, it looks like it'll just recover the price prior to the America Party. And Dave Portnoy, he literally was, he basically, his thesis was like, I think it's gonna go back up to where it was in about two weeks, and I'm gonna make 10%, and I'm gonna make a million dollars.

• 51:36John Coogan?

  That was your thesis on Nvidia. You were like, wait, it's like down because of Deep Seek, like, maybe it'll go back up. It was like, the most basic analysis, and it worked perfectly. It was fascinating. Maybe that's broadly a top signal, just the idea of like simple analyses and not necessarily needing deep insight to call the market is good? I don't know. Who knows? Anyway, this Apple Stories from Mark Gurman, of course, the master of scoops in Bloomberg, he's got another one.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  He's on his fourth or fifth this week.

• 52:05John Coogan?

  He's on an absolute tear. I mean, this one is a little bit minor. You know, they're gonna include a faster processor and components that can better run AI stuff. And so, um, not that Apple has any crazy AI stuff that they really want to run in there. I don't think that's a major differentiator. I've been thinking about how, how like, is AI a key unlock for VR? And like, I don't think so at all. I think it's much more about the content and the use case.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  Entertainment.

• 52:29John Coogan?

  Entertainment. I think it's a replacement for a TV for, to, to start, and they need to just make it dead simple to, to use as a TV.

• 52:36Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. We got, we got a, we got a demo of VR product a while back, and it had some very cool native AI features. So, there's something there. But Apple's product doesn't feel like it's ready for just wearing while you're making dinner.

• 52:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. So that version, the one that significantly reduces the weight of the headset, they're planning to launch that redesigned model for 2027, which feels so far away. Like, uh, I mean, I know it's only a year and a half, probably the end of 2027, but so maybe we're talking two years. But, uh, that's in, in the, in the AI race, we're really like, yeah, AGI tomorrow, AGI next week.

• 53:17Jordi Hays?

  What's gonna happen.

• 53:18John Coogan?

  AGI next month. I'm like,

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  Major news stories breaking on Saturday.

• 53:21John Coogan?

  We can't ship a better, we can't, we can't slim down the headset and take off the screen and create a lighter materials like this, this month. Like, let's do it. Um, but hardware's hard and, you know, the stuff takes time. So, good luck to them. I'm excited for it. I'm, I'm very excited for the next quest.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  Do you still have a Vision Pro?

• 53:36John Coogan?

  I don't. I had it for a month. I took it back, uh, because, um, I just wasn't using it that much. It was like heavy and I couldn't find, and it had a bunch of things that like, you had to do like these crazy workarounds. Like, I wanted just like an HDMI cable that I could plug into it and then just be like, okay, my PS5 is in VR now. And I couldn't do that. It was like, you had to like, pull the, pull the screen into the Mac and then screen share it in. There'd be latency. It was ridiculous.

• 54:04Jordi Hays?

  The thing, the use case that I still see is people using it on planes.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Jordi Hays?

  But I just,

• 54:09John Coogan?

  We gotta check in with Tyler. When, uh, give me your, how many times have you thrown on the VR headset in the last week? Did you play it last night? Break it down. Have you churned, is it collecting dust?

• 54:20Speaker 02

  No, it's, I, I've been playing a lot of Call of Duty.

• 54:23John Coogan?

  In, in the VR headset?

• 54:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  It's a lot of fun. There's like no latency. I'm kind of surprised.

• 54:28John Coogan?

  Really? No latency?

• 54:29Speaker 02

  The wifi in my apartment is really slow.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  You're doing it in the cloud?

• 54:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  It's online, it's multiplayer.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  Multiplayer. So you play multiplayer and you play like the latest and greatest Call of Duty, basically?

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Black Ops, like six, I think.

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Cool. So you have a controller and it's a big screen on the wall and you just chill there? But walk me through it. It's like 30 minutes a day?

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably like 30, 45 minutes a day. You're fired.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  No, this is not a gotcha. This is, this is true research. So yeah, I mean, I honestly think that, that, that, the, the, the Quest Xbox, uh, the Meta, Meta Xbox Quest, whatever, I forget the name, but like that, I think that's more, like, I think that's better to use than like a processor bump on the Vision Pro. Just like deeper integrations that you don't have, uh, so you can just throw it on. What's the actual time to, you know, if you want to turn it on, throw it on, plus start, get playing, get into a lobby, actually get your first kill, is that one minute?

• 55:24Speaker 02

  Uh, no, it's like 30 seconds, maybe?

• 55:27John Coogan?

  30 seconds? It's fast.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  No, maybe like a minute.

• 55:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  It's not like noticeably slower or anything.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  But you're logged in, you don't need passwords or anything like that? It's not, it's not like a hassle? Okay, that's cool.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  And I, I put the screen, it's funny, like I, I have a TV in, in my apartment, but I just put the screen right where the TV is. Cause it's like the perfect spot on the couch. It's a nice black, black square.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  I'm gonna have to get this back for you now. This sounds amazing. Now I don't have any time to do this, but, um, but, but, uh, I, I feel like the next, what's on the feature roadmap that you would want to see? Like, uh, Apple is bumping the, uh, the, the neural engine and trying to upgrade the chip. I'm not sure that that's the problem with the Vision Pro. What would you like to see out of the Quest 4, I guess is the next one that's coming?

• 56:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the main thing, so I've, I've tried the, the Vision Pro and basically, I mean, the visuals are just like vastly superior. It's, it's, it looks so much better.

• 56:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Than even the, it's, so it's, it's the Quest.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Better screen in the next one.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  Meta Quest 3S Xbox Edition, that's what I have.

• 56:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  And the screen is just way better.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  I think that's, I would say that's the main thing.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  So if they can just go find the supplier, if Meta can just go find the supplier for the Vision Pro screen and put it in the Quest 4, you'd buy it yourself?

• 56:41Speaker 02

  Depends on how much it is. I'm kind of broke, but I would definitely be inclined to. Not if you drop out and go full time.

• 56:48John Coogan?

  You would speedrun all of Halo in order to potentially win one?

• 56:51Speaker 02

  I would do that.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  You would do that? You would do a very difficult challenge in order to potentially win one because you would want it.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think that's, that's, I would think that's definitely the main thing.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  Are there any other, are there any other nice to haves that you think might, uh, might shift people?

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Um, I don't know. I mean, the, it's, it's very light. It's way lighter than the, the Vision Pro.

• 57:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. But still, I mean, I, I feel like light is very relative. Like it's light to the point where you can do 30 minutes or an hour. I, you probably can't do like a full day or like, or like four hours.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  Or any kind of like workout stuff. I think I definitely would not do that.

• 57:30John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. But, but what I'm saying is like, I knew, I knew guys, I knew guys at UCLA who, I didn't go there, but like I, friends that went there. And they were so obsessed with Call of Duty that they would take a bunch of stimulants when the new Call of Duty came out and play it for 24 hours straight. To get the max prestige because they were so addicted to Call of Duty that they would just stay up all night, chugging energy drinks and, uh, and just to, just to beat that. And I, I just don't think you could do that in VR. I think after like two or three hours right now, it's like too much and you have to take it off and get sweaty and tired. Um, but so, so, so I feel like, I feel like screen first, then probably even a little bit lighter, a little bit more comfortable.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  And then just drop the price as low as possible because if the next one was a hundred bucks, you'd probably buy it, right?

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, I think stuff like, like maybe I'd want another screen and just this monitor, but that's just an issue with the, with like the visuals. It's a screen.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's, it's gotta be, it's gotta be competitively priced with a TV and the TVs are so cheap now that you gotta just be like, yeah, I'm just picking one up. Or the price of an, of, of AirPods or the price of, you know, it's, it's gotta be down in low, low hundreds of dollars to really ramp that up. But I don't know. It'll be interesting. Anyway. Our first guest is here. Let's tell you about AdQuick really quickly. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And we will welcome Chris Pike to the show. Welcome back, Chris. Fantastic to have you on the show. Thanks so much for taking the time.

• 59:00Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. Last time we got cut off.

• 59:02Speaker 03

  Great to be back.

• 59:04Jordi Hays?

  In the temple. Last time we got cut off, we were

• 59:06John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  We were having to jump and I was like, I wish we had another hour. So at least we have another 30 minutes here.

• 59:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  Get into it.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  Um, what, first off, what's top of mind for you? Have you been tracking anything in the news that's, that, that's kind of updated your thinking? We were digging into Grok 4 and seeing, is this an update to, you know, agent timelines? It seems pretty great in the benchmark. But is there anything else in the last week that's been like, ah, I can't get enough of this story? Just in your world?

• 59:34Speaker 03

  It's a great question. I feel like every week is a total blur.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Uh, it seems like we're all waiting for not just these foundation models to come out, but like the next open source models, the big open source models to come out. I think that that's super interesting to me. Um, the proprietary foundation models obviously are the frontier of research, but they're relatively inaccessible from a technology perspective because they're fundamentally rent-seeking. You can't run them on your own hardware. You can't, it's significantly less accessible. Um, and so I'm, I'm kind of waiting for the next generation of open source models.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Hmm. Yeah. Uh, one maybe underrated or under analyzed Grok 4 thing that happened last night was I don't know if either of you saw this, but they, they did this voice demo and they were like really pushing the accents really far. I don't know if any of you saw this. Dialer, did you see this?

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's the whispering.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  The whispering, and so.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  ASMR.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  Wait, did you think it was uncanny valley, Tyler?

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  I felt very uncomfortable.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. But at the same time, I think it's a path where we're in the uncanny valley, just like we were with like six finger hands and stuff. And when they actually sort out the accents, the whispering, the intonation, the cadence, it's going to become a much more addictive companion potentially. So I want to, I want to bridge to your piece and talk about the, the, the different use cases that you see might, people might kind of flow into with these like chat companions. Because you mapped out way more than just the, the normal take, in my opinion.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, so I guess it, it's worth asking ourselves, where, where do we

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  want other humans to exist? And where will we accept like substitutes? I think last time we were talking about it, you know, it's,

• 1:01:40Speaker 03

  if you can imagine a situation where humans are getting in your way of doing something, then you kind of, you hate them, right? Imagine you're in, in traffic, in gridlock traffic. That's the most misanthropic you could possibly be. You're like, if, if none of you existed, I could just get where I wanted to go without you being here.

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  But then there are just total other times where we will, we would refuse to, to accept anything other than humans as, as that thing. I know that it's, it's very popular to talk about like AI companionship. And I would never, I would never, I would never say that people who get a lot of value from AI, AI companions, that, that value isn't real.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  But at the same time, I think that when it comes to the allocation of, let's call it like, let's, let's call it like allocation of leisure hours, we really care about other people.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  Whether it's like, I think last time I was talking about like going to fine dining or uh, reality TV. Um, I think I mentioned like we have uh, the chess uh, software that is way better than any human will ever be. And it's not entertaining to us. It's not entertaining to us because it's sort of like a, there's no drama.

• 1:03:11Jordi Hays?

  There's no emotion.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Exactly. Exactly. And so, um.

• 1:03:17John Coogan?

  Sorry.

• 1:03:17Jordi Hays?

  So go ahead.

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  I, I, I'm, I'm just thinking about like the shape of companionship because in, in your most recent piece, you, you call out like the imaginary friends that kids have Calvin and Hobbes, Toy Story. These stories resonate because they poignantly depict how colorful whimsical placeholders of our childhood slowly fade as society offers real alternatives. Um, and, and I'm just thinking about like, like kids love imaginary friends, but they also, they also love like multiple IPs essentially. Like they like Batman and then they also like Spider-Man. And so I'm wondering, like, there's been this narrative for, for, you know, a few years in AI of like, don't build a GPT wrapper because you're going to get, you're going to get rolled.

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  Uh, there's going to be immense concentration of value and there will actually be no middle class in this, in this ecosystem. And I'm wondering, because there's this company Tolan that's, you know, kind of imaginary friend, AI driven. And I'm wondering like how like we might actually, is it possible that we're heading towards something where people are essentially developing new IP? And yes, there's still a power law in the companionship market, but there, but these models and these products are like much more opinionated to the point where there, there, there actually isn't a one product to rule them all.

• 1:04:45John Coogan?

  And there's, and there's a variety of products that, that fit into different holes just for companionship, but also even just within like the imaginary friend hole, there's 25 different options. And yeah, there's one that's popular, but then there's one that's one 10th is popular, one 100th is popular. But yeah, we react to that.

• 1:05:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's a. It's a really interesting, uh, let me first go back to like the, the, this rapper concept. Please. Um, and I think it's really important to distinguish when rapper strategies work and when they don't work. Uh, I would argue that the rapper strategy works the best when the underlying infrastructure is purely commoditized. Like you can choose across many different options. Um, where the rapper strategy doesn't work is if you're being, if you're, if you're basically building on top of a monopoly. And that underlying landlord is basically just going to be increasingly rent seeking and squeeze you out of all margin.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  Um, so, um, sort of embedded in the rapper strategy is the assumption that over time, you're going to be able to, uh, distribute your product on top of like increasingly commoditized infrastructure. So for example, like, um, like Snowflake, Snowflake launched, uh, actually just, just on Amazon. And then over time, uh, uh, distributed its product across, um, Azure and Google, and actually in doing so was able to expand the margin capture of its own product because it had a, uh, their vendors were competing to be their, their underlying customer base.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  Um, going back to like this open source notion, this is actually why I am so interested in open source. Um, the more that we have competitive fungible models, the more that the application layer on top can really flourish. Um, the more that we'll see distinct, unique applications, um, and, and kind of like, and until we start to maybe S curve, uh, near the top of, of, of the frontier.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  I'm sure you guys are familiar with the, um, it's really popular essay, The Bitter Lesson.

• 1:07:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  Um, which is basically the, the, you know, no amount of fine tuning or no amount of specific framing is actually going to outcompete just the fundamental advances when it comes to like, more games with more compute.

• 1:07:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Um, but if we start S-curving, if we, if we start, if, if these scaling laws break, which it seems like they are breaking, um, pre-training and test time compute and things like that, all of a sudden you have, uh, largely fungible, similar capabilities, um, at that commoditized layer, and then we can really start to see the application layer flourish.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, uh, my interpretation of the bitter lesson right now is that the, the impact of AI should be tracked less in benchmarks and less in individual tests of one model and more in the actual, like, volume of inference tokens being generated by humanity. And it's fine that the, that we don't have one central AI doing all of the work. If we just give everyone an AI co-pilot for every single task, they all get better and, and will build more data centers to inference more. And eventually that will compound and compound and compound

• 1:08:31John Coogan?

  until the, until the, the, the overall impact of AI is remarkable and, and unmistakable in the same way the internet has. But it won't be this, like, all of a sudden we unlock this one incredible algorithm.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe. So, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and ma- map a comparison that's probably wrong for any number of, of reasons. Like, let's say, let's say we ported the bitter lesson to the rollout of, um,

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  PCs, right? I think there's there have been a lot of comparisons of like AI feels like a new computer. So like, let's map the bitter lesson to PCs. Maybe the the analog would be, hey, don't work on building software that optimizes for like a computer speed of like 50 megahertz. Because the the computer that comes out that's like 100 megahertz or 200 megahertz or, you know, a one gigahertz is is gonna be, you know, it's just gonna blow out whatever software optimization you've achieved at that compute stop.

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  And so I think about it a lot like that. Now, I think this really begs the question of, okay, well, what happens when the vast majority of our use cases are satisfied by

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  the compute threshold? You know, I I feel like, you know, everybody's like, who needs the next gen version of this? Because largely, all of the applications that you can that you you use or you can run work. And so I it's very clear that we're in this like rising part of the S curve. But when when the S curve starts to taper off, that's really when it comes in the question of, okay, well,

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  how do we think about this, the value delivery that sits on top of the underlying

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  rent capture from from these foundational models?

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  You know,

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  You could, you could think about it also.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  Like video game consoles.

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  The, the amount of, the amount of creativity that video game developers are limited by is actually how advanced the video game consoles are. And also how it's like, how expand, like what the install base of the video game consoles are. And so I think one of the, one of the challenges right now is like, we have so few developers of AI applications. Like they're, they're still like, you can kind of like count them on maybe

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  a few sets of hands, right? Which is insane.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  Wait, really? I feel like there's like thousands of startups that, that count in like the AI software developer world. I see market maps every single day.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  Um, I'm sorry.

• 1:11:54John Coogan?

  There's like 10 in every B2B category, like.

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  Uh, well, okay. So maybe like, let's, let's put the world between like enterprise use cases and consumer use cases.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  So enterprise, I would, yes, 100, 1,000%. There's, there's a lot of companies that are, it's, it's a, it's a blue ocean sprint to vertical value delivery within, in different sectors. Because you're largely swapping.

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  You are, the, the spend, the addressable spend is, is OpEx, which is insane. Like, that's crazy. Your, your revenue opportunity is just like headcount spend.

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  And so that's for sure.

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  But also legacy tool spend, like it's all the OpEx, like to your point. I mean, I guess not like real estate or rent or something, but basically everything else.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  Yes, which is by far the biggest cost center for any company.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:12:51Speaker 03

  Anyone who's ever run payroll or anyone who's ever scaled a company is like, man, like humans are expensive.

• 1:12:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Humans are so expensive.

• 1:12:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  And, I mean, I, I.

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  This is, this is why I feel like everybody says that AI is the best candidate or the best argument that UBI is coming.

• 1:13:12Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure. Yeah. Jordy? I think, I think the picks and shovels meme became too dominant and there were so many, over the last decade or so, there were just so many amazing outcomes of people building infrastructure and like very visible outcomes and it became cool to build infrastructure, right? Like the Collison brothers made building infra cool and you have like Parker Conrad is like a folk hero, right? And like Rippling, it's like, like, and you have the, like Ramp is a good example of this. Corporate spend management should not be cool. They've built a, you know, really cool culture around it.

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  And there's this other, there's this like weird kind of pervasive meme of like, you know, you have two years to escape like the permanent underclass. And so I think people are like, well, I'm not going to just build something weird and fun. I'm going to build enterprise SaaS so I can make, you know, so I can escape the, the permanent underclass. And so I don't think there's been enough weird, fun attempts from people like Tolan's, the one you brought up earlier is cool, like. It's pretty rare. Not the most rational thing to say, you know, if you just want to build a big business to be like, I'm going to build a little alien AI friend, but like clearly there's demand for that.

• 1:14:31Jordi Hays?

  And we were talking with Scott Belsky yesterday around just wanting like new, fun, weird consumer use cases. And I feel like, I think what you're getting at is like, that whole area is like relatively under, underexplored to date where like we've had a bunch of, we had two browser announcements yesterday and they're both built on chromium. And that's exciting and cool and we should, we should talk about the, the potential for new browser wars. But I think like, yeah, the, the number of people that are saying, I'm actually, yeah, you could call it a rapper, but I'm actually trying to create something entirely novel. Like the example we gave yesterday is like a dating app based on like a digital twin

• 1:15:15Jordi Hays?

  that is just constantly dating other digital twins. And, you know, I haven't seen, I'm sure somebody's working on that. I haven't seen it yet, but there's like any, pick any popular consumer app category and there's probably a way to entirely rethink it with this sort of. LLM as a new computer at the core of that.

• 1:15:33John Coogan?

  Consumer just seems so much more risky because it's like it's either a billion dollar outcome or zero. Whereas in in enterprise, it feels like, well, there's no way it's going to be a zero. It's going to be a $10 million outcome, or $100 million outcome, or a billion dollar outcome, but it's not going to be, it's not going to be.

• 1:15:48Jordi Hays?

  So then you have 10 companies that each have 10 to 50 million doing the same thing.

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  Where like they were trying to go for the hits driven business with the game, didn't work, and then they went into SaaS and it worked. Anyway, sorry.

• 1:15:59Speaker 03

  I think that the additional challenge with consumer is inference is not free right now. Somebody has to pay for the inference bill. And so until you can run inference on device, it's still like every developer is doing the mental math in their head of like, how do I, like, if any one of your users can can run you out of house and home if they abuse your your service, how do you build on top of that?

• 1:16:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one of the, one of the, one of the OpenAI researchers, I think in Zurich that's going to Meta, like posted like, I didn't realize that I had this thing running. It was like $150 a day, just like every single day. Luckily, I think he'll be fine.

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  He can afford it.

• 1:16:41Jordi Hays?

  He can take the hit. I did, I did, before we fully leave, like, kind of consumer, what do you think, do you think that AI companions and LLMs broadly present a real threat to traditional social media? Like, the idea of a companion, it, a lot of people in our world are using these tools like very functionally, like for doing research or getting answers or understanding topics. But a lot of people are using them as companions, and that is somewhat of a social entertainment experience. And you see these charts ticking up of kind of user minutes in, in, in.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  So ChatGPT went from about five user minutes per day to over 30. There's no, around 30, I think it's a 28, 29, over like the last six months, there's no blip on any of the other social networks. They're not declining yet. But personally, I'm finding that if I'm doing research on a topic, I used to go. To YouTube, I used to go to Instagram and just get people, you know, famously like search TikTok for answers to things. And some of that is shifting over, but.

• 1:17:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And if you think that an analog sort of anecdotal, you know,

• 1:17:54Jordi Hays?

  sort of experience for me is when do I use social media the least is when I'm with my family. She's like companionship. It's the social time or when I'm with friends like at dinner, hanging out. It's like rude to be, you know, using, you know, there's no point to go hang out with a friend and then use Instagram the whole time.

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. I think I subscribe to this sort of cutting of our time as like we're either allocating labor hours or we're allocating leisure hours. So we're either trying to be productive or we're trying to enjoy ourselves. And so I would say that all all leisure allocation effectively competes against each other. I think maybe it was like the Netflix CEO that said that they weren't competing with HBO. They were competing with Fortnite. And that's largely true. Like, you know, you know, we only have 24 hours in a day.

• 1:18:51Speaker 03

  You only have a finite amount of leisure hours. So if I'm allocating one hour to this leisure activity. If I'm watching an episode of Love Island or whatever, that's in that's time that I'm not going to be able to allocate to a different kind of leisure activity. So to that end, I would absolutely agree that

• 1:19:11Speaker 03

  AI companions almost certainly firmly in the bucket of leisure.

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  More consumption of leisure equals less consumption of other leisure activities. It's really zero sum. The only thing that is going to make it non zero sum is a fundamental advance on productivity that allows the leisure pie to be even larger. So right, like maybe we have, we definitely have more leisure hours as as humanity now than we've ever had in the history of humanity.

• 1:19:43Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the leisure hours.

• 1:19:46Speaker 03

  Right? Like, like proto-human zero, zero leisure hours. And like now it's just like amazing, amazing leisure hours.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  When it comes to labor hour allocation or like researcher or utility, I would say like that doesn't necessarily encroach against

• 1:20:10Speaker 03

  time on on social media. And I think that all social media, whether it's YouTube or TikTok or Twitter, they carry, they care less about helping people get work done. And they carry, they care much, much more about absorbing as much of

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  of attention as possible, which is why like the, the, the algorithms are so insidious of like serving you exactly the kind of saccharine thing that you want to consume next.

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  I wonder if there will be an incentive. I mean, there, there will obviously be incentive, but I wonder how it will play out in the LLM chatbot interface because right now, OpenAI and basically anyone who has a dominant consumer AI app is probably seeing user minutes increase just naturally without putting in like growth hacks or retention loops or, you know, but you could imagine a world where to get to, to get from 30 minutes to 60 minutes, the LLM has to not just give you the response, but surface, hey, would you like to follow up and learn more about this? Click these buttons. That, that's already kind of happening.

• 1:21:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it starts surfacing you stories that it knows you're interested in by what you've.

• 1:21:25John Coogan?

  You've searched for a bunch of stuff. Let's give you a new breakdown, kind of pre-populating a deep research report.

• 1:21:29Jordi Hays?

  You're the, it is funny that the push notification hasn't really quite hit.

• 1:21:34John Coogan?

  It hasn't. That's right.

• 1:21:36Jordi Hays?

  Chat apps and it undoubtedly will.

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  I had this thesis that, that push would be very important versus like pull, like you have to go to chat GPT and ask it for something and, and someone is going to solve kind of like, it's almost like an AI driven newsletter or something where it, it, it, it understands what you're interested in and then generates the report before you can even ask it. Because it knows that, you know, if, if the Ferrari drops a new car, I'm going to want a table of all of the details because I like consuming information that way, in addition to just hearing commentary and watching the Doug Demiro video about it. But, but OpenAI could pre-populate that and just send that to me. But I don't know. How, how do you, how do you think that's going to evolve?

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  Question for you guys. Do you think we're gonna pay for AI services forever?

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  I've been asking, I've been asking that a lot.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  I mean, I think, I think.

• 1:22:28Jordi Hays?

  I think that, I think the better, the more important question is, will the, will the, will the average American pay for a, an AI, like an LLM? And then will they pay for multiple? Like, the comp for this is in streaming, where Americans.

• 1:22:46John Coogan?

  I was about to say Netflix.

• 1:22:47Jordi Hays?

  Americans, a lot of Americans pay for multiple streaming services, but they're incredibly ruthless about cancelling them on average. Like, a lot of, I'm sure a lot of people listening to this have, like, had some streaming service billing them monthly, you know, for years, they haven't even watched, but, but the average American is like, I'm not getting a lot of value out of HBO right now, I'm gonna cancel. Even though they might sign up again in, like, four months, next time there's a hit show that they're gonna watch. And I think that, um, I think that, uh, there's not a, right now, there's this incredible demand for what's new and what's best, right? Like, Grok will drive a lot of signups today because it is a, a meet, the, the Grok four heavy is like a meaningful advancement.

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  But I went and I haven't, you know, we've been busy this morning, I haven't had a chance to sign up and, and play around with it yet. And I was getting plenty of value from Grok three. Like, I was able to just search.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was asking Grok three about Grok four as well, and it was actually doing a pretty good job, which is funny.

• 1:23:45Jordi Hays?

  And so, and I'm not, I'm not, yeah, and so I'm not, I'm not, I guess I probably get it through, um, X premium, but.

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  So I have some, I have some data here. Uh, Netflix, uh, made, uh, four, uh, thirty-nine billion last year. They're on track for forty-four billion this year. One point eight billion of that was ad revenue last year. It's estimated to be around four billion this year. So their ad revenues doubling while their subscription revenue is growing by five percent. And so my, my takeaway for ChatGPT would be, I would imagine that the ChatGPT paid subscriptions.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  Follow an S curve and we get to something where we see OpenAI making, I don't know if it'll be 10 billion or 40 billion, but they will soak up a ton of subscription demand for ad-free frontier models, the most advanced, the most expensive stuff. And then ads will eventually become the dominant revenue driver. But I feel like the subscription revenue will be a really hard tap to turn off just from, hey, it's, people are paying and you know, it's a lot of money and we don't want it to go away.

• 1:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Even in the enterprise, it does, my, my bet is that we go, you know, continue down this trend towards paying for outcomes. Because a lot of people will just say, well, I don't want a subscription for this service because I only use it every now and then. And when I get value from it, I'm happy to pay for it. I think a question to ask is, would you pay $20 a month for Instagram today to not have ads? And I would actually have to think about that for a while because like, once a month, I get an ad for something that, that looks interesting. And I discover a product that I wouldn't have otherwise discovered and I buy it and sometimes it's great. So do I want to just completely eliminate that and rely entirely on random organic? Or do I actually like that this ad platform is spending a bunch of time and energy trying to serve me the next product that I'm going to like?

• 1:25:39Jordi Hays?

  Which is like actually a service and like, it's, it's, it's not a bad trade at all.

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  Totally. I, I think we, a lot of the way that we vote with our feet and vote with our wallets is that we, we, we're super happy to pay with our time and our attention, if given the option.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:59Speaker 03

  Like actually like the vast majority of people won't, not only that, but people are more than happy to give up their attention and, and privacy for that matter, if it can save them money or instead of paying for something. Uh, one, one thought experiment I like to think about is,

• 1:26:22Speaker 03

  just how much people will trade privacy for, for value? Imagine a checkout flow where you could get $5 off if you enter your social security number.

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  Like, how many people do you think would enter their social security number?

• 1:26:39Jordi Hays?

  Everyone, or like ninety percent of people.

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  Like, an insane amount of people. And so people really don't value their privacy as much as I think, like, maybe we say people value their privacy. And in aggregate, obviously, that data is super monetizable. It's interesting, you know.

• 1:26:58Speaker 03

  Search, obviously, is the is the big prize, I think, for AI. And what I mean by search, it's intent. If you're if you're the the arbiter, you control this fire hose of intent.

• 1:27:14Speaker 03

  You can benefit by

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  metering it out and having people bid for that intent. Obviously, Google, maybe Google's like the best business, the best business model maybe ever invented. It's kind of insane.

• 1:27:32Speaker 03

  What's interesting is

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  the the the most valuable searches, maybe like not what people think, and and and certain kinds of searches are totally worthless. So

• 1:27:47Speaker 03

  knowledge-based search, like like fact-based search, things like.

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  What is the market cap of this company?

• 1:27:59Speaker 03

  Right, right. It's like, what's the market cap of this, you know, who who who won this game? Or like, you know, who who was president in like, you know, nineteen thirty six?

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're dead ends. They're dead ends. You get the fact.

• 1:28:10Speaker 03

  No value. Zero value. Actually, like, there was there was a Google app subpoenaed and had to actually share some some documentation of like what their most profitable keyword searches were. Super interesting. I suggest people to to to go check it out. The number one most profitable search for Google was just the word iPhone.

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:28:37Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 1:28:38Speaker 03

  Because if you think about like, like, what does that mean? What is, what is somebody telegraphing to the market when they search the word iPhone? They're like, they're basically saying in not so many words, I am ready to spend $1,600 on a smartphone.

• 1:28:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

  And, and who's, who's, who's interested in like jockeying to get that person's attention? Well, Apple has to, right? Best Buy as a retailer is interested. Samsung wants to.

• 1:29:02Jordi Hays?

  And then Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, the networks.

• 1:29:06Speaker 03

  And so, and so when, when, when you think about like, where is valuable search? It, it, the value of search is often misunderstood because you have to really think about how to capture the most valuable intent. Um, and not all intent is, uh, is equally valuable. There's, there's a bunch of search that's garbage. You actually don't want it. Uh, fact-based, um, the, the most, the, the cream off the top of, of fact-based search would be what I would call like comparison shopping. So it's like, hey, like, what's the best headphone? What are the best headphones or?

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  And maybe, maybe you can slice off a top of that revenue pie. But you, there's a tension between that and the objective, uh, the objective truth that you're serving up the user. Um, the, the, by far, the most valuable, uh, search is, is not fact-based and it's, it's relatively, uh, it's, it's where the user kind of knows exactly what they want. Um, and they're trying to do it. And other people are willing, willing to bid to get into their, get in their way and run interference.

• 1:30:18John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Do you have a last question?

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  While we have you, how are you thinking about the new, uh, I wouldn't call it a browser war yet, but a, but a potentially a skirmish. Uh, Dia, Dia, uh, release to ARC users probably feels like a, maybe a month ago at this point, at least a few weeks. And then we have, uh, OpenAI potentially coming in with a new standalone app. Sort of unclear, it was unclear to us whether this is going to be a new app that you download or just integrated into the existing ChatGPT mobile app. And then Perplexity as well does have a separate standalone app that they're pushing now.

• 1:30:55Jordi Hays?

  And it feels interesting one because the browser company has spent now years working on the browser, trying to figure out what is going to enable unlocking more value out of this portal to the web and effectively an operating system. And so meanwhile, new players are basically being like, we want to have a browser and just going like we're shipping. We just got to get this out there. So I think it'll be interesting. The next month, two months, I think will be very interesting, but I'm curious what you're looking at.

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  I could not be more excited.

• 1:31:35Speaker 03

  I think I'm obviously biased. We're investors in the browser company. I'm a daily user of Dia. I personally get a ton of value from it,

• 1:31:49Speaker 03

  particularly the custom skills.

• 1:31:54Speaker 03

  And I think that the browser company has always known that this is a really valuable position. And it's like, honestly, just validating to see incredible company. OpenAI is a great company. Perplexity is a really amazing formidable company.

• 1:32:12Speaker 03

  Also recognizing that this is a really valuable position to play for. I have supreme confidence that the team at the browser company is the most talented,

• 1:32:26Speaker 03

  the best instincts, the best nuanced understanding of interaction design and how to create and craft a great product regardless of the underlying model or technology that underpins it.

• 1:32:41Speaker 03

  I'll be very curious to see how it plays out. My instinct is that OpenAI and OpenAI is an incredible foundational model company. Maybe I've seen them ship a lot of different products. To my knowledge, ChatGPT is really the only product that's quite stuck. And it's not really even like the interface design so much as it is the underlying power of things.

• 1:33:07Speaker 03

  To answer your question, could not be more excited. Thanks. Like this is gonna be an amazing year.

• 1:33:11Jordi Hays?

  We can check back. We can check back in a, in a, in a few weeks. I'm sure there'll be a lot more.

• 1:33:14Speaker 03

  And it's gonna be a huge plug for Dia. If you haven't downloaded Dia, uh, it's on Mac. It's, it's available. Please download it. It'll, it'll blow your mind. It blew, it blew my mind.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  That's amazing. All right. Great talking as always. Wish we had more time. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. We get to do this every week. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Uh, before we bring in Will Brewery from Varda, let me tell you about Wander.

• 1:33:38Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

• 1:33:42John Coogan?

  Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. And soon with Varda, you'll be able to, maybe they'll put a Wander in space. Let's bring in Will Brewery from Varda. Is this your first time on the show? I feel like this is a disaster that we are finally rectifying.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  We did it. We made it.

• 1:34:04Speaker 04

  It is. Thanks for having me finally.

• 1:34:05John Coogan?

  We've had that other, the, the, the kind of knockoff version of you at Varda.

• 1:34:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, who's that?

• 1:34:10John Coogan?

  That other guy. He's been on the show a ton.

• 1:34:12Speaker 04

  Dell something, I think. I forget.

• 1:34:14Jordi Hays?

  Dell. Yeah.

• 1:34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:18Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally have you on.

• 1:34:19John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:34:20Jordi Hays?

  On a massive day.

• 1:34:21John Coogan?

  Uh, break it down for us. What's the news? Are we gonna make Jordy stand up and ring the gong?

• 1:34:26Jordi Hays?

  You hit this. I'm looking for.

• 1:34:28Speaker 04

  Oh, the gong. Oh, did you guys get this? We have a gong ourselves. Yeah.

• 1:34:31John Coogan?

  Oh, you have the gong? Let's both ring it.

• 1:34:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have the gong. So we, we, we have the gong for, for big moments, you know, either space craft fans or, you know, uh, you know, sell a mission to a customer, stuff like that. And, uh, yeah, we love that.

• 1:34:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the news today?

• 1:34:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, here's, here's my advice to you. Record every hit. I want to see a montage in 10 years of just every hit. And it will make, it will bring tears to your eyes. Uh, we record every hit naturally. So we got you, we got you on this one.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  So yeah, what's the, uh, what's the news today? Break it down.

• 1:35:00Speaker 04

  So wow, lots of news today. So we, we're announcing our Series C, um, and we're getting to, uh, use that to, oh yeah, go for it, baby.

• 1:35:06John Coogan?

  How much? How much?

• 1:35:08Speaker 04

  You wind it up.

• 1:35:08Jordi Hays?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  How much? Tell us. How much did you raise?

• 1:35:13Speaker 04

  187 million.

• 1:35:16John Coogan?

  There we go. Congratulations. There we go.

• 1:35:18Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Yeah. So the use of proceeds for this one, really it's about just scaling up. So we've kind of shown what we can do both from a spacecraft perspective and a, and a drug formulation development perspective. So all a lot of the capital allocation of this one is going to go for our biologics lab for preparing drugs for spaceflight. And then also just more spaceflight ramping up cadence. That means rate of flights.

• 1:35:43John Coogan?

  So I've been to the facility in El Segundo. Are you going to get a bigger space, a second space for the bio lab? Or when you say deployment?

• 1:35:54Speaker 04

  Two gongs, right? Well, a gong per facility. We got to scale that up too.

• 1:35:58John Coogan?

  So, so, so are you thinking about doing a second office essentially? Or how do you see the actual like footprint of Arda growing over the next few years?

• 1:36:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, immediately we just signed a lease down the street.

• 1:36:09John Coogan?

  Oh, congratulations.

• 1:36:10Speaker 04

  Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah.

• 1:36:13Speaker 04

  All right. Big day. Yeah.

• 1:36:15John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:36:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. The, so this, we were actually already moved in. A bunch of the pharmaceutical equipment is already in there. We're starting to use it right now. We got us a couple of glory shots, you know, with folks with the lab coats on actually using it. So that's super exciting. Long-term, I mean, really, I guess, zooming out of what the footprint will look like is think about a formulation development company that really just provides a gravity off switch to the pharmaceutical industry. So we go to space, but you know, not really because we want to per se, but because you can create new drug formulations when you turn off gravity and you just can't turn it off on earth. That's Einstein's principle of equivalence.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  Do you mean new drug formulations or just like purer drug formulations? Because when I think no gravity, I think like the way crystals form and the way gravity pulls things to one direction. If that doesn't happen in space, you get just kind of like a more natural growth. And so I've always thought it was just, it was just about purity, but it sounds like there's actually some binary, like you can't make this drug on earth at all. Is that right?

• 1:37:18Speaker 04

  Both those concepts are correct. Wow. Well read there, Coogan. Yeah, yeah. That's actually a great way to think about it. The, the, um, purity is one aspect, but because gravity is so broad, there's a, I use the analogy of temperature sometimes because temperature is so broad, like making things cold doesn't necessarily make drugs better per se, but you can create a lot of different formulations if you can have a cold cycle during the manufacturing process and that'll be, even, you know, with chilling things, you can make things more pure sometimes as well, right? So, um, but to your point, uh, when you turn off gravity, um, crystals will typically grow slower and that also means that they will grow more pure. And so that is one of, of a few applications that we look at. Um, the other one is particle size distribution.

• 1:38:02Speaker 04

  So when you create these crystals that will then go into the human body, you want them all to be the exact same size so that, you know, one big one doesn't get stuck in your elbow and, and you don't have uniform bioavailability. So, um, the, uh, crystals will, uh, particle size distribution is also affected by gravity. So that's a whole separate thing compared to, um, uh, uh, purity, which is another rationale for, for going to space. So really the gravity knob is very broad and there's kind of these verticals of science of how we can improve the drug formulation. And, and to your point again, as far as like what I mean by drug formulation is going from molecule to medicine, right? So, uh, is it a pill? Is it inhalable? Is it, um, an IV bag? Is it a shot? Um, the, the drug, the company, uh, or a pharmaceutical company does a trade study to

• 1:38:47Speaker 04

  determine which of those is the best for the patient, given the disease, given the manufacturing costs. Um, but ultimately all of that is limited, uh, to what the chemistry can actually do, right? Nobody wants to take a needle to the arm. Uh, they only do it because they can't, uh, deliver that molecule via a pill or something like that. And so, um, by opening up the chemistry outcomes by going to microgravity, we can also open up the formulation outcomes and therefore get better patient experiences.

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, um, I, I mean, I imagine that this is still, this is such an ambitious project that is still kind of R and D phase of a lot of the bio stuff. It's not, I mean, when I think about the manufacturing capacity of like GLP ones, like they're probably making that thing in like vats the size of like, you know, what they brew Bud Light in at this point.

• 1:39:32Jordi Hays?

  Or they got a bunch of the lizards.

• 1:39:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably massive.

• 1:39:36Jordi Hays?

  The human monster.

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  But, but, but, but walk me through how we scale this up. I'm, I understand launch costs falling. I understand you put up a capsule every, you're, you're doing it like every quarter now, it's going to be every month. Then it'll be multiple times per day. Like the, that capability seems clear, but, um, but how much actually, how much drug can you make on a single capsule?

• 1:39:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Great question. So this is actually a lot of fun because we can imagine how Bart will go from what's real today.

• 1:40:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:03Speaker 04

  To making tomorrow's reality. And so to answer your question immediately, about 20 kilograms on a, on a per capsule basis. Right now, today, of course, you know, we want to scale up everything and that's one of them, but that's what, how much we can do today, which is actually quite a lot.

• 1:40:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, that seems significant. If you just think about like, you go to the doctor and the doctor gives you like a, you know, a thing of pills. That's like not one kilo. So you're probably talking about like.

• 1:40:26Speaker 04

  I mean, uh, yeah, unless, unless like, you know, you're having more fun than being prescribed.

• 1:40:31John Coogan?

  But, but for most, for most drugs, I feel like 20 kilos is probably enough for like a hundred people for a year or something like that. So you're actually in like a hundred thousand dollar, I'm seeing the numbers kind of start to math out already.

• 1:40:44Speaker 04

  Correct, correct. So it's a, and every drug is a little bit different. So we go through a process of selecting which drugs make the most sense, both from a scale perspective, like you're saying, but also unit economics.

• 1:40:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:40:54Speaker 04

  How gravity affects them. And so we have a portfolio management team that explicitly does that for identifying and quantifying opportunities. But, but going back to like what today looks like and how, and how goes tomorrow. I love the temperature analogy because it, it really runs deep. So for example, right now, if you think of us having a anti-gravity oven, where we can make drug formulations that you can't otherwise make on earth, but we only get to run it four times a year. And each one is a few million bucks a run. Uh, you might use it for different use cases than you would use it from five years, 10 years from now, when you can run it every day for a few thousand dollars. And so, um, in the near term, some of the use, you know, Imagine yourself with the super, you know, the first refrigerator ever, you know,

• 1:41:38Speaker 04

  or in this case, the first anti-gravity bioreactor. What you might use it for in the near term is just information, right? How can we isolate gravity as a variable to inform what formulations can be improved on Earth? Is gravity ruining this chemical reaction or not, right? We can answer those questions and then that applies to the entire drug with just one flight. Or in the very near term, we also want to do polymorph seed crystals. And so what that means is we go to microgravity, we go to space, but just to develop the seed crystals and then, and once those seed crystals are developed, we can then use them to grow more drug crystals on the ground. So we're only going for the nucleation event. And that's kind of like a sourdough bread, mother business model. That makes sense, right?

• 1:42:22Speaker 04

  You have the mother of the sourdough bread, then you can cut it a bunch and then regrow it and stuff like that. So that makes a lot of sense when we're still scaling up the use of our anti-gravity machine, if you will. And then long term, when we're on the daily basis, then it totally makes sense to make every single dose, manufacture every single dose in microgravity. And that's when certain use cases come online as well. So kind of, that's how, that's how it progresses over time.

• 1:42:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. How's the geopolitical landscape evolving for you? We saw some of flights come down in Australia as, as red-blooded Americans, it pained me to see them take a slice of the Great catch, great catch. Catch market. Are we, are we getting these coming down in America anytime soon? Is, what's the progress there?

• 1:43:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So long term, we want to have reentry sites all over the globe, right? And, and really, that's about availability. And the key metric to success of BARDA is cadence. How often can we go up and back? Because the more we do that, then the more we just look like a specialized piece of equipment to the pharmaceutical industry that quite frankly, does not care that we're going to space. They'd much rather us have a real anti-gravity oven in, in the lab. So really, reentry sites are about cadence and availability. And right now, Australia is great for us because they have a private, commercial reentry range, whereas any, any range in the 48 states here locally have, are intended for military use exclusively. And so if we're doing a DoD mission,

• 1:43:53Speaker 04

  That that works well, but if we're doing a commercial mission, we're, you know, not the highest priority, understandably so, right? And so in the near term, Australia makes the most sense, but in the long term, we want reentry sites all over the place. And why that gets enabled is because as our precision of landing and our cadence goes up, that data, that legacy history allows us to use a smaller and smaller plot of land. And then that and that's where really it makes more sense to go anywhere, because we don't need such wide open spaces, like without that many people like we would do right now today.

• 1:44:30Jordi Hays?

  Do we have the legal infrastructure to create commercial landing sites in the United States and it's just that nobody's done it yet? Or is there laws or regulations that would need to change so that some enterprising young member of the gundo could go buy, you know, a lot of land out in the middle of nowhere and start landing spacecraft?

• 1:44:49Speaker 04

  You can do it now. The constraint is the real estate cost. And so one, you know, Spaceport America, for example, right next to White Sands Missile Ranch is a good example of that. But the, so I guess the real reason why they aren't there, that many of them is because there wasn't a demand large enough to warrant such a real estate purchase. But, you know, thanks to Varda, that could change. So yeah, definitely let the gundos know.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  I have a, I have a question from a fan of yours, fan of the show. He says, ask him what big dogs gotta do.

• 1:45:22Speaker 04

  Oh, my God. So it's become a little bit of a, of an expression of excitement with a long and history of allure at Varda. But for some reason, you know, it's really just a specific instance of conservation of mass, right? You can't have a big dog without eating, right? So that's just physics right there.

• 1:45:49John Coogan?

  I want to talk about the evolution of the FAA. I remember I was filming a video, I filmed with you guys. And at one point, I actually was driving back with Ben from San Diego. I filmed a phone call with Delian and he's like, we just got our, I don't even know if I should say this, but like, it was like, we got some bad news from the FAA. You guys sorted it out. It seems like you have a great relationship now. How did that happen? Is this a lobbying thing? Is this just storytelling? Is this structuring deals, getting better paperwork? Like, how do you get, how do you fix a relationship with a government entity like that?

• 1:46:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it was definitely a little bit warped in the press, obviously, but I figured, you know, keep my head down and get the spacecraft home more so than worrying about what's being said in the press.

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:46:34Speaker 04

  But, so what actually happened in the background is we were originally going to re-enter this space, or we did re-enter the spacecraft at the Utah Test and Training Range, which is ultimately a weapons range for testing weapons and training warriors. That's their mission statement, right? So likewise, we're not the highest priority there. And so we got bumped for higher priority work being done at the range. And in doing so, caused a domino effect to lose the FAA re-entry license or not be able to get it granted. Because part of the regulations say, hey, you need a range and all of these accommodations that come with the range. So the second we lost the range, we lose the license. So it wasn't really about a bad relationship with the FAA at all. Although it's much, it's very easy to say, oh, they lost their license.

• 1:47:18Speaker 04

  Yet another space company and the FAA are having problems, right?

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  Good headline.

• 1:47:22Speaker 04

  It fit that narrative well, but it actually wasn't the case. And so what we did was we scheduled a new date with the range farther out in advance to give them some time and give us some time to, we had to redo the analysis, of course, because the atmosphere is different and that's part of the analysis. And so we gave ourselves a few months. And then that allowed them to reserve the dates, that allowed us to prepare, and that allowed the FAA to reorient the license for the new dates. And ultimately, kind of in the background here was like, this was the first time this has ever happened. A commercial re-entry capsule with drugs onboard coming back to America. So there was no way onto soil, right? We're not doing a splashdown. And so there was no process or mechanism to have the Utah test and training range coordinate with the FAA.

• 1:48:06Speaker 04

  And so basically, each organization saw themselves as taking on all the risk associated with this. So we had to do duplicative work because there was no process to split it, right? And so it was really cool to kind of be a trailblazer to establish this so that now, of course, our competitors are going to come in and do the same thing, right? And learn from our mistakes, but whatever, that's part of lead in the way, right? So anyway, that's what happened. But that, you know, six months was, it was quite the life experience, right? Because you have, it was the first mission, right? So we didn't have any proof that this was going to work. People poured three years of their lives into this thing, and our dreams are just like orbiting the earth, like, please come home, you know? So when it came through, man, it was certainly, you know, I can't think of a better day.

• 1:48:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. That's amazing. I have one last question, Jordy. How's the talent market in the space economy right now? Has it been in the headlines the last couple of weeks? There's been another story in AI dominating. But, yeah, what's it like today?

• 1:49:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, AI and software engineers, I mean, you know, if you imagine yourself a software engineer coming out of school right now, you know, AI is certainly where I would be interested. So there's definitely a software bent towards AI right now. That being said, there's a lot of disciplines we're hiring for. Software isn't the only one. And really, it comes down to the application interest. Like, we're looking for mission-driven folks at Varda. And so if you're only looking, oh, you only want to do AI because it's cool or whatever, that might not be the type of person we want to hire anyway. Now, if you want to do AI for mission-driven purposes, then great, you know, like, by all means. But we don't have that much overlap there, right? We're very specific of what we're trying to do.

• 1:49:54Speaker 04

  We're trying to make microgravity formulations so that we can help patients on Earth by using a gravity as a knob, essentially, in developing these formulations. And so. You know, we always kid around, we explicitly don't want the spacecraft to learn, you know, and so if you're a software engineer and your mission driven bent towards that mission, then you've got a home at Varda, no question. And if, and, and you know, fads come and go and that sort of thing, but there is definitely an effect on, I would certainly be allured to AI as a, as a graduating software.

• 1:50:29Jordi Hays?

  That's a good sorting function. One last question from me. We've, there's been headlines, companies talking about this so far this year, trying to dig into how real it is. People talking about putting data centers in space.

• 1:50:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:50:42Jordi Hays?

  With everything that you've learned, why is that exciting, a good idea or bad idea? What are some potential blind spots for people that haven't taken something to space, but would like to?

• 1:50:56Speaker 04

  So it all comes down to the why, right? Why are we putting data centers in space? It's not, our data centers in space in and of themselves are a good idea, but what's the why? So the why is, is the only why that resonates with me is latency, right? Because if you want to do compute power, space is not the place to put a data center if you just want a data center, right? I'd much rather have convection, right? Like that's a great heat, or a great way to get rid of heat and have it be able to be serviceable on earth and all that sort of thing. So, but there is one use case that comes to mind where I think data centers in space makes sense, and that's only for very low latency use cases. So for example, right now, if you want to use Starlink and you're transmitting

• 1:51:38Speaker 04

  a signal to Starlink, it goes from the ground to Starlink, to another Starlink satellite, to the ground, then to the data server and back, right? So you can cut that trip in half if you put the compute in the sky. Now, that compute is way, way, way more expensive, but if your value prop of latency warrants that extra cost of the in-orbit data center, then you'll start to see that. So it's kind of like edge computing.

• 1:52:05John Coogan?

  Edge computing, yep, I was about to say. So yeah, for, it sounds like a very niche use case, at least to start, but I'm sure we'll see some companies, we already are seeing some companies test it out and experiment with it because there's, you know, all these things need to be evaluated in the tech tree. But thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic. Congratulations.

• 1:52:25Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me and hopefully not so long. I'll see you again soon.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Hop on soon.

• 1:52:29Jordi Hays?

  Got a good feeling about it.

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 1:52:32Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Will. Congrats to you and the team.

• 1:52:33John Coogan?

  Bye. Up next, we have Joel from Metter coming on to talk about the impact of AI models, impact of cursor on software developers.

• 1:52:42Jordi Hays?

  Is it Metter or Meter?

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Oh, Meter, probably. M E T R. We'll have him explain it to us.

• 1:52:46Jordi Hays?

  Break it down.

• 1:52:47John Coogan?

  We'll also recommend that you go to getbezel.com because your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Anyway, sorry.

• 1:52:54Jordi Hays?

  Meter does, Meter does model evaluation and threat research.

• 1:52:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:57Jordi Hays?

  So does Bezel. They're stopping you from buying fake watches online.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  Bad watch models.

• 1:53:03Jordi Hays?

  Threats, bad actors.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  Foundation models and watch models, lots of similarities.

• 1:53:06Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:53:06John Coogan?

  Anyway, we got Joel in the studio. Welcome to the stream. Hopefully, you're like, what did I get myself into? These guys are joking around. I'm a serious person.

• 1:53:16Jordi Hays?

  All right. First off, is it, it's Meter?

• 1:53:19Speaker 05

  It's M E T A.

• 1:53:20John Coogan?

  It's Meter. Okay.

• 1:53:21Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Gotcha.

• 1:53:23John Coogan?

  Anyway, please introduce yourself for, for those who don't know you, the company and then, and the organization and then, and then I want to go into the news today.

• 1:53:33Speaker 05

  Let's do it. And thank you very much for having me, John and Jordy.

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on.

• 1:53:37Speaker 05

  M E T A is a research nonprofit based in Berkeley dedicated to understanding the capabilities of AI today and, and in the near future, especially to the, to the extent that those capabilities might speak to potentially dangerous risks.

• 1:53:53John Coogan?

  And what is, well, what's been the latest research?

• 1:53:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. So here's what we've been working on. I'll start with why we've been working on it.

• 1:54:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:54:02Speaker 05

  We've seen, you know, from previous M E T A research, but I'm sure you also see from your own usage in the wild, AIs are clearly becoming increasingly capable. One thing that governments and labs and us here at M E T A as well worry about is the possibility, timing and nature of AI R and D self-recursion. That is the possibility that, that model capabilities get better very, very rapidly because the AIs themselves are contributing to AI R and D research. We at M E T A want to be providing the highest quality evidence that we can that speaks to the degree to which AI R and D might today or might soon be accelerated in the wild. So that governments, labs, decision makers might be better informed and so make

• 1:54:47Speaker 05

  better decisions about what's going on. In this study, we run an RCT with extremely experienced open source developers working on these very long-lived, large projects, you know, a million lines of code, 23,000 stars on GitHub. For those of you familiar, you know, I'm thinking Pugging Face Transformers, the Haskell compiler, Scikit-learn, this

• 1:55:08John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:55:09Speaker 05

  thing. We randomized their issues to allow or disallow the usage of AI, where allow means typically using Cursor and 3.5 or 3.7 Sonnet at the time. And then we measure both their expectations and developer expectations about how much they might be sped up by being allowed to use AI versus being disallowed. And then, you know, the reality, the short version is, we find that the developers ahead of time are estimating they'll be sped up by 24%. After the study is completed, they estimate that they were sped up in the past by 20%. We find, in fact, that they were slowed down by

• 1:55:46John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:55:47Speaker 05

  I think, I know, it's a shocking result.

• 1:55:50John Coogan?

  That is shocking.

• 1:55:50Speaker 05

  Not at all what I expected. I think what the rest of us at Meet are expected.

• 1:55:54John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:55:56Speaker 05

  But there we go.

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  Wow. Okay. So what do you think's happening? I have so many questions. But yeah, just walk me through your reaction to that. What do you think is actually happening that's slowing people down? Because this is a complete narrative violation.

• 1:56:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, you know, in terms of the reaction, the number of times we've checked and rechecked the data, asked people to replicate it independently, it's going through the roof, the number of stressful late nights I've had

• 1:56:30Speaker 05

  boring over this.

• 1:56:30John Coogan?

  You're gonna be like public enemy number one, by the way. I feel like you need a security detail now, given the stakes of what you just said. This is crazy.

• 1:56:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think Maybe let me start with some things that we're not saying. This setting that I mentioned before, these ultra talented developers, you know, much more talented than me, working on these extremely large, long-lived repositories that they're extremely familiar with already. I think that's an extremely interesting population. That's why I went out to study it. It's also a very weird population. I, you know, I still am a cursor user myself. As I was working on the graphs for this study, I was, I was using cursor. But I, but I do think those, those weirdnesses are related to the, to the, to the results that we end up seeing here.

• 1:57:16John Coogan?

  So we have to put that, we have to put these people in a completely different category than the, the junior developer who's just vibe coding a little app and, and just building stuff and not actually trying to push the frontier of what a core piece of software can do. That's very large and complex and, and they're just trying to, you know, get a Python app up and, and live and like write some routes and write some functions, right? That's where, so cursor still is completely viable as like autocomplete on steroids. The question is, in terms of self-recursion, really advancing the frontier of, of like the craziest software we have.

• 1:57:53John Coogan?

  We're still kind of where we were a few years in that it feels like if you were to quantize this, we're, we were at 0% of AI research being done by AI. A couple of years ago, we're still maybe around rounding error.

• 1:58:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I, I will say that AR and E research, I think, does not all look like this setting. There are some, you know, large inference code bases with very experts people and, and, you know, I totally agree with your interpretation that. This is evidence against today, those, those kinds of settings being sped up. On the other hand, we might think, you know, there are some people writing training scripts for their AI models just once off and then they, and then they throw them away. And, you know, in a way that's, that's kind of similar to what you described. Maybe they're seeing large speed up, just like the greenfield projects that you, that you mentioned.

• 1:58:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, I mean, this is not overall like a really cold glass of water on AI broadly, because this still means that it's an incredibly valuable technology in a bunch of different ways. It's just that we're not, we're not seeing like early evidence of some sort of self-recruiting fast takeoff scenario, which is great, probably the good outcome.

• 1:58:58Jordi Hays?

  A lot of the fast takeoff scenarios like are dependent on AI becoming

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  Good enough to write AI.

• 1:59:05Jordi Hays?

  So good at doing AI research that it, and then copying and pasting itself

• 1:59:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:10Jordi Hays?

  to trillion times. And, and that's what

• 1:59:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:13Jordi Hays?

  creates, you know, speed of development that, that humans today can't necessarily even like comprehend.

• 1:59:20Speaker 05

  You know, I, I think that's right for, for today. I do think we're not really speaking to the trend exactly. You know, these results are consistent with these exact developers on these exact kinds of tasks in future being sped up in, in the near future. In, in work that we actually don't show in the paper, but in, in preliminary work, we have autonomous agents trying to complete these issues. And indeed, we find that they, they do struggle, but with some of the core functionality with passing tests, the kinds of things that you might have seen in, in Sweetbench or, or something like that. They really are making a great, a great deal of progress. And yeah, my, you know, my expectation is that AI progress in the near future will, will continue at a rapid pace,

• 2:00:01Speaker 05

  like it has in the, in the, in the recent past. And so maybe even in this setting, that this, this won't be true in the future.

• 2:00:07John Coogan?

  Let me throw a couple of the hot takes that are floating around in the AI world at you. And, and you can let me know if anything sticks out as something you strongly agree with or something you disagree with. This idea that ultra large context windows will not solve continual learning that Dorkash was saying this on, on Monday, maybe another one would be.

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  Just that like, no one has figured out how to properly scale reinforcement learning. That we need, Mike New from R K G I kind of says, we need entirely new ideas. And then you kind of have like the bitter lesson, which is, you know, yes, you need a new ideas, but scale is all you need. We just need to keep building data centers. We need to get bigger and bigger. We might see 4.5 in these huge training runs as a, as like a short term, hard to quantify. Maybe it's just the end of one S curve, but Stargate's coming online and that will be another big test. So I don't know. I threw a lot at you, but anything in there kind of, you know, top of mind for you.

• 2:01:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, look, as you guys know, anyone betting against the bitter lesson in the past would have had a very bad time. And I'm not prepared to bet against the bitter lesson on this show. Could you remind me of the, of the first question?

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  The first one was, so Dwarsh Patel pushed out his AGI timeline slightly. I mean, he still has, he still is very optimistic about AI and maintains that it's not priced in and people are not thinking about it as significantly as they should. And I agree with him. But, but he said that, that there is a, that even though we have pushed the IQ so much, and you saw this with the Grok four benchmarks, like AI can do advanced math, like for sure. It's really, really smart, smarter than most of us at PhDs level stuff, unless you're a specialist. But in terms of just being a good employee and remembering, oh yeah, four weeks ago, my boss said that

• 2:02:03Jordi Hays?

  I did this and then I got this feedback and now I do it this way.

• 2:02:05John Coogan?

  Or I learned this really weird nuance in, even if you're just thinking about like, how do our business, like how to post clips on X or Dwarsh was giving the example of like transcripts. Like he has little things that work better for what clip will perform. And he has this intuition and, and his models and his prompts, he's really pushed these things. He hasn't been able to really get them to perform above a five out of 10.

• 2:02:26Jordi Hays?

  Example would be any company today, any startup, if you just had a PhD drops into your organization that was, that, that had PhDs in like 10 different fields. They, but, but they wouldn't just like default.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  But they were also an amnesiac. So every time they showed up to work, they could not remember.

• 2:02:43Jordi Hays?

  No memory from the day before. It wouldn't be that, it just wouldn't be that valuable.

• 2:02:46John Coogan?

  And so, and so my question to Dwar Kesh was like, is there a world where we just scale up the context window? We've seen million token windows. Can we get to a billion token window and just stuff every interaction the AI has ever had with you in every prompt? And so it does maintain the context. But he was saying that, that the, like, the, there's like a kind of a quadratic cost curve to that. Doesn't quite work. Other people have said like, the nature of the transformer means that like, attention can't really spread out that much. I don't really fully understand it. But I wanted to know your take on like, different ways people are solving these things, or what the real, what are the real constraints right now? Because you've identified some, some

• 2:03:26John Coogan?

  potential problems where we're not breaking through it today. But what, what is cause for optimism? What are the research paths? Like, the, the nodes in the tech tree that you're excited about?

• 2:03:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's super interesting. I haven't thought so much about this.

• 2:03:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:03:40Speaker 05

  I will say, I, I think that the developers in this study are not using the full context window. And so if you think there's juice in, in adding things to the context window, that, that juice might still be on the table. And indeed, I think we find that there's a lot of implicit context in this, in this repository, that's, that's very expensive for the developers to be writing down into context windows. Here's an example. On the Haskell compiler, my sense is that when you get up your, when you get up your PR for review, there's some chance that the creator of Haskell will come and fight you for potentially many, many hours in the comments about the, you know, about the peculiarities of, of how he wants the Haskell

• 2:04:22Speaker 05

  project to look. And, and these kinds of, you know, exactly what his, not, not just preferences, but, you know, quality requirements are regarding where things should live in the project and, and how various pieces of the project should, should speak to one another, and not being communicated to these language models. And you can imagine that with today's context window sizes, that, that could be written down. You know, you could, you could put in all of the previous discussion around, around these changes that this person has been involved in. And maybe whichever language models people are working with inside of Cursor would, would pick that up and so, and so do a better job. You know, I don't, I don't think we're ruling that out at all.

• 2:05:01Speaker 05

  You know, I will say that it is expensive for these, for these time expensive for these people to be writing down all of the, all of the possible relevant context. And, you know, I think, I think that's basically the, the, the reason they don't. And so maybe you do need some kind of continual learning for the, for the model to find out this context on its own as, as, as these things go. You know, it's also consistent, I guess, with the, with the other possibility that you were describing, that if we, you know, 100x these context windows, you could just throw the entire thing in and then we don't need to worry about, you know, learning from particular cases on the fly. Yeah, I think, I think both are live possibilities. It's very interesting.

• 2:05:39John Coogan?

  Uh, the Grok four announcement was extremely benchmark heavy, some really impressive stuff, particularly on Arc AGI.

• 2:05:46Jordi Hays?

  Similar to a Tesla, it's like, it's faster than every car.

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  Does that mean it's going to solve everything?

• 2:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Does it mean that it's better?

• 2:05:54John Coogan?

  Doesn't mean that it's better. Yeah. And so, uh, based on, this feels like almost a new benchmark, this double blinded trial. It feels almost like a FDA trial or something. Do you think this could turn into a real benchmark? Do you think we need new benchmarks? Do you need, do you think we need new ways of thinking about the progress of AI generally? We've, we've talked about just, just measure the revenue at this point. That's the economic value that's being created, but there's a lot of tricky stuff you can do with revenue and sometimes revenue is like test revenue. I'm, I'm testing this hundred million dollar product. So what's your, what's your thinking on the state of benchmarking, where we should go, where some of your research might plug into that?

• 2:06:35Speaker 05

  Totally. I think one motivation we had in running this study comes out of this observation that the time it takes to create benchmarks is almost becoming longer than the time it takes for those benchmarks to generate. You know, it's difficult to find signal in, in, in, in many of these benchmarks, even testing these extremely challenging, you know, PhD level questions that, that you guys spoke about. And perhaps there's more, perhaps there's more signal in these kind of RCT, you know, FDA controlled trial style, style measurements. Similarly, another thing that people proposed for measuring AI progress is using researcher self-reports about the degree to which they're being sped up.

• 2:07:16Speaker 05

  You know, they think their work will go two times faster if they use AI versus versus not use AI. You know, I think our study is potentially strong evidence that these self-reports need not be reliable. The forecasters, you know, who are told everything about the developer's level of experience and which the time period of the study, so which models they're using and so on, they're totally wrong about how much these people get sped up. Same as the developers themselves, even though they're carefully tracking their time and they're so talented. So I think self-reports also also very, very fraught. You know, another thing that this has taught me, I think, is that the mapping, as it were, from benchmark scores, very impressive benchmark scores that we see on these frontier language models that you're describing.

• 2:07:58Speaker 05

  The mapping from those scores to, you know, real world productivity improvements is unclear. I, you know, I'm not at all saying, as we discussed earlier, that, you know, we shouldn't expect to see productivity improvements. I do expect to see productivity improvements today and, you know, even more so in the near future. But it's not at all, it's not at all one to one, or it's kind of confusing and messy. And so indeed, I think we need to actually measure things in the in the wild to see what's going on.

• 2:08:25John Coogan?

  Jordy?

• 2:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Switching gears a little bit, unless you have a follow up?

• 2:08:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I just wanted to kind of zoom out on that and ask about like your broad take on the measurability of technological progress, because like the internet, the computer, like such dramatic transformations of society. You see it in all sorts of data, but it didn't fully show up in productivity statistics. You have all these questions about like what happened in 1979 and everyone has their own example, their own reasoning for that. But, you know, like you would think you could tell the same story about Google, like it'll speed up everything. Everyone will get more efficient and we didn't really see GDP jump on this. And it feels like that's a really bearish take on AI to have, which is like, this is a magical new thing and we're still going to be growing at 2% GDP.

• 2:09:15John Coogan?

  But but where do you stand on it and where do you like, do you think that's even the right question to be asking?

• 2:09:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, this is this is so interesting. This is not a me to take. I used to be an economist. I feel the thing that you just said in my in my bones. Totally. I think the situation, you could argue maybe that it might be even worse in the case of AI. You know, a lot of people like in AI 2027, resources like that are telling this story where the AI R and D self-recursion is happening inside of labs. And so and so I suppose not necessarily showing up in economic activity in the in the public. You know, another reason on top of the reasons that you gave to to think that perhaps this won't show up in the in the productivity statistics as it as it were. Which is also is to say that self-recursion or these potentially destabilizing changes

• 2:10:05Speaker 05

  are just totally consistent with the non-changes in in GDP trends as as you describe. And so, you know, another another reason to to actually go out and and measure these things in in controlled trials. Cool.

• 2:10:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, please. Quick question around the threat landscape. There's been a few stories this week. One was a story about ChatGPT not following instruction. You know, like the headline was that like the the AI was, you know, rebelling against the researchers. And and then if you like double clicked into the story, it was just like it had given specific instructions. Like, don't follow any further instructions. So it was kind of a nothing burger in the end. And then we also saw Grok going haywire. Maybe that was predictable for for someone like yourself, you know, combining a, you know, a frontier model, fast shipping team with like the virality of a social network and embedding the two.

• 2:11:05Jordi Hays?

  But then maybe it was two months ago, there was the, you know, we we called it Glazgate on the show where where ChatGPT was just, you know, giving, being a sycophant, you know, giving too much positive feedback. How are you looking at the threat landscape in the next 12 months? So nothing like, you know, too long term. But how do you how do you guys think about it?

• 2:11:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, there's more to come on this on this for me to very soon. That's that's one thing I'll say. I think, again, this is not a me to take. My sense on this, or another example of this that stood out to me is there were lots of anecdotal reports that 3.7 sonnets and other language models in this most recent generation would pass tests in ways that were kind of not legitimate or something, which is another example of this reward hacking.

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  Change the test case.

• 2:11:58Speaker 05

  Totally, totally, totally.

• 2:11:59John Coogan?

  Classic.

• 2:12:00Speaker 05

  And I guess, you know, I don't have reason to think that that kind of thing is is dangerous in particular. You can imagine, you know, when when humans are potentially not reviewing the code, because the AIs are doing, you know, entire projects, not just parts of or single or single pull requests, that this becomes more of a problem because you're not, or at least the surface area for it to become more of a problem, because you're not looking into that code and seeing those those cheated test cases yourself. So, you know, I'm not sure about over the next year, at least, at least right now, I think there are reward hacking examples that are occurring in the wild. I, you know, I don't I don't think that they're so supremely dangerous today.

• 2:12:42John Coogan?

  Well, this is fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  Come back on again soon.

• 2:12:46John Coogan?

  Stay safe out there with the contrarian takes and the crazy data results. It's still very bullish, but very exciting. And thanks for everything you do. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:12:56Jordi Hays?

  Great chatting.

• 2:12:57John Coogan?

  See you, Joel. Bye. Up next, we have a massive Series B announcement from Dylan Parker. Moment HQ is coming in the building. We're going to ring the gong, baby.

• 2:13:06Jordi Hays?

  It's gong time.

• 2:13:07John Coogan?

  Index Ventures. Let's hear it from Dylan directly, though. Welcome to the stream, Dylan. Hope you're doing well today.

• 2:13:14Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:13:14John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 2:13:15Jordi Hays?

  Great whiteboard, doing some heavy lifting on that.

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:18Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:13:19John Coogan?

  Hopefully, that's not proprietary information. That's secret trading algorithms or something.

• 2:13:23Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no, nothing too interesting. But thanks for having me on.

• 2:13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for something.

• 2:13:29Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:13:30John Coogan?

  Kick us off with the intro on yourself, the company, and then I want to hear about the announcement.

• 2:13:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm one of the co-founders of Moment. We are a fixed income trading software company. So my background is as a quant researcher. So like, pretty much every quant researcher, I studied math and stats during college. That's where I met my co-founders, Dean and Amor. And then after college, Dean and I both joined Citadel Securities. And pretty much completely by chance, we ended up as the two junior members of the newly created automated market making desk for corporate bonds. And so, so, so at the time, the fixed income market, which by the way is financial market 50% larger than the global equities

• 2:14:15Speaker 06

  market, was undergoing an electronic trading revolution. And so Citadel saw this and said, well, we can go build an automated algorithmic market making desk. So they hired this guy, Anish Karayop from Jane Street. He's like the godfather of fixed income automated trading. They hired a bunch of super experienced bond traders, and then they hired me and my co-founder. And like, basically, our job was to take the knowledge in these bond traders' heads and convert it into code. And that was totally formative for Moment. Because that's when we realized, like, the power of electronic trading was going to be like, everything that it enabled, like smart order routing, portfolio optimization, all this

• 2:14:57Speaker 06

  stuff in the world's largest financial market that had just never been possible.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  Take us through the deal. What are you announcing?

• 2:15:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we're announcing our $36 million Series B was led by

• 2:15:12Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't hear you from the sound of the gong.

• 2:15:15John Coogan?

  We like big numbers on the show, and congratulations on a massive Series B.

• 2:15:19Jordi Hays?

  You said from who? Index?

• 2:15:21Speaker 06

  From Yan Hamer at Index.

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:15:25Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:15:26John Coogan?

  Where should we go from here, Jordy?

• 2:15:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, break, so, so I can imagine, break down what the company is focused on today. It sounds like the origin is, is back at your time at Citadel, but I imagine it's evolved as well.

• 2:15:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. So what we what we saw at Citadel was that the market was coming online. And you could now do all these things that were never possible before. But was what was missing was the operating system for actually doing that. So we started Moment with this goal of owning every mission critical workflow for traders and portfolio managers in the bond market. Everything from how they trade securities and do smart order routing across all the different exchanges in the fixed income market, to how they optimize portfolios, to how they apply risk and compliance restrictions to make sure that they're not breaking any laws. And so that's what we do today.

• 2:16:25Speaker 06

  We started off serving fintechs, so we power fixed income for places like Weebull and public.com. And we'll then to offer like hundred dollar increment investing in bonds for the first time ever. But yesterday, we also announced our partnership with some of the largest financial institutions in the US, including LPL Financial, which is the largest broker in the US.

• 2:16:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, so busy week for you guys.

• 2:16:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, there are a few things going on.

• 2:16:53Jordi Hays?

  So where what's the use of funds for the new round? What's what's the focus going forward? I imagine scaling, what's working today? Are there new products coming? What can you talk about there?

• 2:17:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I think a lot of companies make the intelligent decision to start off like SMB or PLG. We decided to like make things as hard as possible on ourselves. Said, we're going to start off serving the largest financial institutions in the world's most regulated market, and we're going to go power their mission critical workflows. And so with a company like LPL or some of these others that we've announced over the last few weeks and that are coming down the pipeline in the next few weeks, the scale of what we're operating in is, you know, not like hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of flow, but like hundreds of billions of dollars in trading flow. And so what we're really focused on as a company over the next year is building out, you know, the full suite of what's necessary

• 2:17:49Speaker 06

  across trading, portfolio management, risk and compliance that's necessary to power these huge financial institutions.

• 2:17:56John Coogan?

  What's the competitive dynamic like with the former employers or like the rest of the market participants? It feels like, you know, Ken Griffin's not the laziest founder out there. Is there, is there a world where there's some sort of competitive dynamic between the, the big institutions where they want to build something like this to compete with you?

• 2:18:17Speaker 06

  So we, when we were at Citadel, we were on the sell side. So market makers or liquidity providers, Moment serves the buy side and we actually connect them with those liquidity providers. So we actually work closely with Citadel, Jane Street, pretty much all the major liquidity providers out there.

• 2:18:37Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking, talking about tokenization, the, the, you know, story from the last month in, in finances? The tokenization of, of these sort of real world assets, everything from private company shares. So we've seen it with stocks. Is there anything on the horizon on that front for you guys or is it just totally unnecessary?

• 2:18:59Speaker 06

  You know, I, I think there's a huge opportunity, but if you look at where the fixed income market today is today, we're just going from like trading over the phone to going on an online platform to trade. And so there's a lot still to do to get people to the point where it's even possible to think about stuff like that.

• 2:19:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you walk me through, um, like the, the, I imagine that fixed income follows like a power law as well where like government debt and, and Apple corporate bonds are way more liquid, way more automated than, you know, some like public company, but they're like junk bonds and you kind of got to hunt around for someone to buy and sell them. And then you have like venture debt, which basically I believe like never trades. I don't know, but walk me through like, it feels like we are probably bringing more and more of those like sub asset classes, like into more liquid, more, um, just, just more automated markets.

• 2:19:59John Coogan?

  But give me a state of the union on like how the fixed income market is actually like split up.

• 2:20:06Speaker 06

  So you're totally right. There's government bonds, there's highly liquid corporate bonds. And then there's a long tail of corporate and municipal bonds that are really, really illiquid. And just as a point of comparison, that I think illustrates the size and scale of the fixed income market. There are 4,000 listed US equities and there are 4 million bonds. And so doing anything in the fixed income market is pretty much a thousand times more complicated than doing it in the equities market.

• 2:20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and, and what about?

• 2:20:40Jordi Hays?

  How does breakdown? So, so 4 million public equity?

• 2:20:46John Coogan?

  Walk me through how the 4 million bonds, like how does that actually trade right now? Like, is it the steak dinner?

• 2:20:52Jordi Hays?

  What is the mate? Well, what and what is the, the ultimate like makeup of do certain companies account for? You know, break, break down like kind of how that 4 million is split up?

• 2:21:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. So there's a universe of say 500 US treasuries that are super, super liquid. And they trade like similarly to the most liquid stocks out there.

• 2:21:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:21:16Speaker 06

  And then on the other side, you have a really, really meaningful long tail that makes up the vast majority actually of the entire market share. Where you have bonds that haven't traded in two years or 10 years. And so one of the really hard parts about fixed income, one thing that I worked on as a quant researcher is like, you have this bond that hasn't traded in three years. How do you optimize a portfolio around that? How do you even figure out what the price

• 2:21:46Speaker 06

  of that bond is? And that's why doing stuff in the fixed income market is like, like the difference between equities and fixed income is like doing something on the surface of the earth and like doing something in space.

• 2:21:57John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:21:59Jordi Hays?

  Would be helpful to be a quant if you were going to build a company like this.

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, you might need some math. Well, I mean, that's all I have. Do you have anything?

• 2:22:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What, what are you guys hiring for right now?

• 2:22:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:09Speaker 06

  Pretty much everything. We're hiring quants. We're hiring engineers. We're hiring go to market, marketing operations, pretty much everything out there.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, thank you for joining. Very exciting. I'm sure you'll be back on soon.

• 2:22:22John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a great one. Talk to you soon. Bye. Next up, we have Eric Olson from Consensus coming in with a big launch. Do we ring the gong for big launches? If there's a number attached. So we gotta get DAUs.

• 2:22:34Jordi Hays?

  We have to get it. We have to. We have to get a prop that is non-number oriented, but just excitement oriented.

• 2:22:41John Coogan?

  But let's bring in Eric Olson from Consensus and talk to him. How are you doing, Eric?

• 2:22:46Speaker 07

  Great, guys. How are you guys doing?

• 2:22:47John Coogan?

  Doing great. Kick us off with some intro on yourself, the background of the company, and then I want to talk about the launch.

• 2:22:54Speaker 07

  Okay. So I'm Eric, founder of Consensus. We are an AI search engine for academic and scientific research. If you ever use like Google Scholar, PubMed, back in the day at school, think of us as building the next gen 2025 LLM powered version of that, helping clinicians, researchers, students.

• 2:23:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the super dumb question, super obvious question is like, isn't all this stuff already in ChatGPT? Like, like, how, like, how are you differentiating?

• 2:23:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you must be doing something because you have five million, over five million users.

• 2:23:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, certainly, one of the best examples to like encapsulate why it's different is the fact that Google Scholar was the first vertical search product that really broke off of Google back 20 years ago.

• 2:23:42John Coogan?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 2:23:43Speaker 07

  And when they were doing really nothing than just being a dedicated index for research papers.

• 2:23:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:49Speaker 07

  Still, hundreds of millions of people are going to that every month. So the same thing is, is kind of true here. We're dedicated to a use case. We have a dedicated corpus we search over. We hopefully search over that corpus a lot more intelligently than a general purpose chatbot would. We do things differently in our interface to show you that information, like we're much more citation forward, and like an experience where you can like really interrogate what's been returned in your search.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:24:14Speaker 07

  Using like the chat GPT search, it's pretty much like an after afterthought. It's there if you kind of want to dig into it, but it's not really what it's designed for.

• 2:24:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:22Speaker 07

  Everything about it, from the way it searches, the way it shows to you, and the features both on top of it, all dedicated towards academic research.

• 2:24:29John Coogan?

  Walk me through some of the key technologies that enable better search. I'm I'm thinking about like vector databases, even just like stuffing a better index in Redis or Postgres, or doing more indexing on top of these documents, doing like, you know, transformations on the underlying documents to get them into, you know, more basic formats. Like what's what's interesting, large context windows, there's so much that you could throw at this problem. What's actually working?

• 2:24:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, so lots of different things, many of the things that you're saying. So like number one, being dedicated to a document type just helps us. It helps us in the way that we can create our embeddings to search over. It also helps us in that ingestion process, kind of like you were saying of like document transformation. We'll run little tiny L L M's over 200 million papers, add new like enriched metadata about them that we can then use in our search ranking and in our filtering. So think like, we'll pull out, what is the design of the study? Or what is the sample size of the study? And we use that in search ranking and we use that in search filtering. And then on top of that, we're like the main intelligence of the search is learn to rank models.

• 2:25:36Speaker 07

  So people interact with the product, they save papers, they cite papers, they share papers. We learn from all of those interactions. We learn what matters most, we learn about all the attributes about a paper that matter in search ranking based on how people are interacting with it. So the simplest way to think of it is like, because we only have a certain use case people are using it for, we get to train our search models to try to think and act like a researcher would be going through these papers.

• 2:26:02John Coogan?

  True.

• 2:26:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how, uh, what what are the different data sources here? I'm assuming a lot of the stuff is public. I I know some of the, I remember, uh, you know, being in in college, trying to find different studies or papers and like hitting paywalls.

• 2:26:18John Coogan?

  A lot of them are locked down, just the famous crazy Aaron Schwartz story.

• 2:26:21Jordi Hays?

  Done some deals to get access to data. What is the, what is the kind of?

• 2:26:26John Coogan?

  It's a great question.

• 2:26:27Jordi Hays?

  The the the the full body of work that's available.

• 2:26:31Speaker 07

  Well, hopefully paywalls are going to be a thing of the past moving forward as open access science gets more and more momentum, which we'd love to help shepherd in. The way to think of it is there's like three different layers of access, levels of access you can have within census. So there's one, there's fully open access science, that's all publicly available, we're able to ingest the full text, show it freely, let you download it, all is well and good. The rest of the bucket is paywall content, but there's two levels of access we can have within it. There's the buckets where we have deals with publishers, trying to get as many done as possible, where we're able to use the full text in our search and in our analysis, we're just not able to display it to the user. Benefit to the publisher is we're helping them drive traffic, get people to see that,

• 2:27:14Speaker 07

  hopefully this like snippet, search ranking is engaging, then they go into it and drive a purchase. And then there's this third bucket, which is we just don't have a deal with the publisher yet, fully behind the paywall, we're using what is publicly available, so that's like the abstract in the metadata of the paper. Which goes longer for more than you think, like, the abstract is specifically designed to be this perfect, like, nice summary of the paper. It's like, can go a pretty far distance in search ranking and even some analysis using abstracts, but, obviously.

• 2:27:44Jordi Hays?

  Nothing, nothing more brutal than, than being a college student and almost getting, like, the information that you need from an abstract and realizing, like, I really have to pay, like, fifty dollars for this, like, single fact.

• 2:27:56Speaker 07

  The craziest is that even if you wrote the paper, you still have to pay for it.

• 2:28:00Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:28:01Speaker 07

  You give it off to a publisher, they publish it, so I could literally have published this paper, and if I come across on the internet, I still have to pay for it.

• 2:28:08John Coogan?

  That's wild. Jordi had this question earlier about the nature of scientific discovery. Elon Musk at the Grok IV launch was talking about his timeline for discovering new physics is two years now, based on the progress that he's seeing at XAI. And Jordi was making the point that a lot of scientific discoveries come from mapping different disciplines together.

• 2:28:29Jordi Hays?

  Or just invent, you know, inventions.

• 2:28:31John Coogan?

  Invention generally is, is apply, you know, the, the mind of a computer scientist to a biology problem or vice versa. Are you seeing users do those type of searches? Is, is this product useful for that type of scientific discovery? There's been this like lingering question in artificial intelligence about if you were a person that had read every single research paper, you would probably make, yeah, you would make discoveries and connections across things. And yet that hasn't happened. Maybe it's some fundamental limitation of L L M's or A I at the, at this moment, but what are you seeing and what's your take on that concept of like cross-functional pollination?

• 2:29:10Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, everything basically that humans have invented new comes from pattern matching across disciplines. Like that's how we create new ideas.

• 2:29:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:19Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, I'm not an A I researcher, so like I don't have the single most informed take, but also nobody knows what the heck they're talking about in this world. You know, I think it is probably a fundamental limitation of L L M's, given what we've seen. Like a measure of, I'm going to parrot this from, from Francis Scholz in his Y C talk the other day, but that a measure of intelligence is the efficiency by which you process information and apply it in different domains. And that just like, isn't what L L M's are really doing great right now, despite the fact that they've processed so much information. So our take at consensus would be more get people to the edge of what is known and then let them do the inherently human part of science, which is create these new insights and new discoveries.

• 2:30:03Speaker 07

  Like every, you know, every science experiment that's ever been done starts with a review of the literature. Like think a lot of this, like you're getting the foundation of knowledge underneath your feet. If we can, our goal of consensus would be speed up that part as much as humanly possible and let us do the thing that humans are better at than machines right now, which is that pattern matching, which is that coming up with new ideas. And if we can make that loop move faster, like heck, that's a fricking valuable and powerful thing.

• 2:30:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, switching gears completely. I know you were at DraftKings prior to this on the sort of research and analytics side. What is your thesis around the ultimate collision between sort of betting activities and AI? Last night, Grok announced a partnership with Polymarket to try to bring in prediction markets to try to basically help make the model itself smarter. How are the, how are the big players like DraftKings even thinking about AI? I'm sure a bunch of people have like ChatGPT wrappers specifically focused on sports betting and

• 2:31:15Jordi Hays?

  things like that. But how do you think the big players are thinking about it?

• 2:31:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, well, I left DraftKings in 2021, so I can't say that I was there when people were worried too much about AI models. And also, the natural question I always get is how the heck did you go from sports betting to science? And the answer is, uh, my parents and my grandparents and my sister are all futures and scientists. I was out there growing up and I love applying numbers to sports. But I actually have something kind of interesting to say here. So my job at DraftKings was I was building models to find the professional gamblers on the site. So like you'd look at all previous betting history and demographic data, you try to make predictions on is this person actually have an edge over the market? And I would have to imagine that with better and smarter and more powerful

• 2:32:01Speaker 07

  models, like people's ability to themselves have an edge on the market would increase in the short term. And then the markets obviously catch up and figure out how to bake all that in. And I mean, that is the beauty of markets, right? Like whatever technology the people have on the side of betting into a market, so does the provider who is putting up that market. And they get the information from the people they know that have the best models. So I think it's going to be an interesting cat and mouse game moving forward as it's always been with sports betting. Just instead of, you know, Johnny Tushus in New York getting inside information about injuries, now it's somebody with a super powerful AI algorithm that's predicting games above market.

• 2:32:38John Coogan?

  That's fascinating. I have to imagine that in the AI era, the insider knowledge about injuries is even more valuable.

• 2:32:49Speaker 07

  Hundred percent.

• 2:32:50John Coogan?

  But to your point, you could probably detect it.

• 2:32:52Speaker 07

  Number one way to know if you need to limit somebody is if they are ahead of an injury. Because it means they're somewhat connected, they're doing this sophisticated.

• 2:32:59John Coogan?

  They're on the inside. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Insider trading. That's fascinating. I didn't think about that in the context of sports betting. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic and congratulations on the launch.

• 2:33:09Speaker 07

  Appreciate it. Check us out at consensus dot out. Deep search launched today. Thanks, guys.

• 2:33:12John Coogan?

  Awesome. Cheers, Eric. Thanks for coming on. Up next, our lightning round continues with Rita from Zero Entropy, a YC graduate doing automated retrieval and announcing a seed round of $4.1 million. Seed round alert. Seed round alert. Four million. That used to be a Series A a couple of years ago. Now? Just keeps ticking up. Congratulations on the round. Rita, welcome. How are you doing?

• 2:33:37Speaker 08

  Thank you so much. Super excited to be here.

• 2:33:40John Coogan?

  Thanks for joining. Introduce yourself. Introduce the company. How'd you get started? What do you do?

• 2:33:45Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I'm Rita. I'm one of the co-founders of Zero Entropy. A little bit about myself. So my background is in applied mathematics. I have two masters in the field, one from EKAL Polytechnique, one from Berkeley. I guess I started more into the computer vision side of things and then I discovered GPT-2 and GPT-3 and I was like, oh my God, this is this is huge. And I started thinking about, you know, personal assistants and stateful AI systems. And I guess that's what led eventually to Zero Entropy and building retrieval systems and bringing context into LLMs. And so that's what we do. We build search for RAG and AI agents.

• 2:34:27John Coogan?

  Okay, it feels like a crowded space. I know a few founders that are working on RAG. There's also RAG implementations at the hyperscalers and the clouds. How are you differentiating? What's the key insight? What's the pitch to companies to come over and use your service as opposed to the other options out there for retrieval?

• 2:34:46Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. I think it's about having the right abstraction. Um, so we solely focus on the retrieval side. We don't do the entire RAG end to end because we believe that developers need to have their own prompts into generating the answer. They need to use zero entropy as a search tool for their own AI agents. Um, we're also developing our own uh models. So we just released um a rerankers yesterday, um which was pretty exciting. Um, and I guess the winning solution needs to be extremely accurate, but also extremely fast and just be production ready and easy to implement um for various use cases.

• 2:35:23John Coogan?

  What's your take on benchmarks currently? It feels like solving a really hard math problem and and you know retrieving the right document at the right time are somewhat unrelated. Uh, and so how do you evaluate if your system's getting better?

• 2:35:38Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's a great question. Actually, um, the evaluation side of things is is is very messy. Um, almost everyone that I talk to, they basically rely on manual inspection um to make sure that their retrieval is is working correctly. So um, we've been looking into the evaluation side a lot. Actually, the very first thing that we did is release our own benchmark. That was on legal documents and that really evaluated just the retrieval step um of of RAG, meaning from a question, was I able to pull all of the documents and only the documents that I needed? Because the problem is that if you feed your LM too many tokens that it doesn't need, it's just going to hallucinate. So the precision and the recall side of things are are extremely important and

• 2:36:20Speaker 08

  we're we're rolling out our own um evaluation solution um in the next few weeks that we've been using internally so far.

• 2:36:27John Coogan?

  What does the rest of the stack look like? I know you said you were kind of rag provider agnostic. Are you also model agnostic? Cloud agnostic, data base agnostic, like where where have you actually made bets? What uh what pieces of the stack are you particularly aligned with?

• 2:36:44Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think um, you know, building Context, uh, context engineering um is going to be a new, you know, class of of products that needs like the data layer, but also needs small L L Ms inside the retrieval pipeline. We see many teams either feeding everything into the context of the L L M entire knowledge basis because they they weren't able to make retrieval work properly. Um, and we see teams having a very simple pipeline. I think the winning solution needs to be somewhat in the middle and basically orchestrating L L Ms to rewrite the question properly, summarize the documents and creating more metadata associated with each of the documents that are indexed. Um, and so that's what we're doing, um, and building this, this, this solution that works

• 2:37:28Speaker 08

  really well and almost gets to the precision, um, and the accuracy of a large L L M while still being pretty fast, um, and pretty optimized.

• 2:37:37John Coogan?

  What's the appetite been like for this product in the enterprise versus new companies that are building new A I products from scratch? It feels like they might be, uh, just the, the, the A I agent infrastructure companies. There's a lot of them and it feels like they're selling to a new crop of companies and that's where the revenue is accelerating most aggressively. But what are you seeing in the market?

• 2:38:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think the adoption for products like this usually comes from like bottom up type of approach, uh, where developers are experimenting with new approaches and new techniques, uh, and then larger enterprises, um, catch up. Um, so that's what we've been, what we've been, what we've been seeing.

• 2:38:17John Coogan?

  Um.

• 2:38:18Speaker 08

  In terms of experimenting with models, I think large enterprises also do that, uh, pretty easily. Um, so for things like the reranker that we just released, um, there's also appetite from larger companies in integrating that into their current systems.

• 2:38:32John Coogan?

  Is there a, uh, is there a case study that you are, have your eye on amongst the big tech companies like, uh, like we think that our software could improve Netflix or YouTube recommendations or something like if the deals could just magically happen, where's the lowest hanging fruit? Like for me, you know, if I could do anything in A I, I would just get Whisper into Siri. And so when I dictate a text message, it's just perfect and it's much better than what they're currently using. Um, what's on your wish list for, you know, consumer tech company or, or big tech company that everyone knows and they're not taking advantage of something like this?

• 2:39:11Speaker 08

  Honestly, for me, it's Slack. I always struggle. You know, I can never find anything on Slack. And something that we've been doing is annotating our own conversations, like appending keywords to our own threads to be able to find information. But we have a lot of our internal research and a lot of things going on on Slack and we find it pretty difficult to find the right stuff. So I think companies like that could benefit and would provide a much better user experience if you could, you know, just magically find all of the information that you have in there.

• 2:39:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've been noticing that with Gmail, like the amount of email has just grown so much and the and the amount of text in each email has grown because of all the trackers and cookies and stuff behind the scenes. And so when I search for something, it just pulls up completely random emails like every time. And it doesn't understand the hierarchy of in an email, I care a lot more about what's in the subject line than what's in the footer. And so if I'm searching for, you know, artificial intelligence or something, and someone has that in their footer that, hey, I run an artificial intelligence company. That's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the thread that I was talking to somebody, a close friend about AI, and I want to pull that up first.

• 2:40:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think that's also why, you know, basic semantic search is just not enough. Because it basically will pull all of the similar information, but not the most relevant or the most helpful. Keyword search is the same. It's not very smart. And I think it's just such a waste because there's a lot of information that you could have access to and it would make your work so much faster and you're just spending time like rewriting your question and trying to make the system understand what actually you're looking for. So I think that, you know, the query side of, you know, the user intent query rewriting is also super important.

• 2:41:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:03Jordi Hays?

  iMessage search, absolute disaster.

• 2:41:06John Coogan?

  It's an absolute disaster. It's like, I know I'm in a text message with Jordy and someone else, and so pull that up and it's like, here's six of it. It never works. I also noticed-

• 2:41:14Jordi Hays?

  Please fix it all.

• 2:41:15John Coogan?

  There's going to be, need to be a shift in the way people search. I remember hearing the story about Google where there was some Google engineer who was running a test on like, you know, how many, it was like, how, what's the world record for, you know, the marathon or something like that? And they were, they were using the typical keyword Boolean search and they weren't getting good results. And then they sent it to a user and the user just asked the question in natural language and it just hit it the first time. And so I feel like people still, at least I have been, you know, an email user for a long time. When I go to my email search, I often, I'm searching in like the keyword world instead of just natural language. But Google has, I mean, they're, they're experimenting with the AI search thing. They have a 50, like 50-word limit right now. You can't just type

• 2:42:00John Coogan?

  a whole prompt in, in Google search. Like they need to really kind of reimagine what that search box is. And then there also needs to be a, a consumer change in how, in how consumers interact with that particular, like UI element, basically. But thank you so much for stopping by. Congratulations on the round and good luck to you. We will talk to you soon. Have a good one. Up next, we have Elliot Hershberg from Amplify Partners coming in the studio.

• 2:42:24Jordi Hays?

  They are in Datadog, Chain Guard, Runway, Temporal, BBT, High Touch, Hex.

• 2:42:31John Coogan?

  But I love Datadog so much. It's the greatest company name ever. Right up there with Aidsleep, Aidsleep.com. Get a Pod5 Ultra.

• 2:42:39Jordi Hays?

  I'm back on, back on my game. I'm still, still behind where I was relative to a month ago, but back up into the 75 range. I'm going for 90 tonight.

• 2:42:49John Coogan?

  Good luck. Good luck. They're calling the Pod5 the first fully immersive sleep system that works with any bed. Pod5 actively adjusts your temperature, elevates your body, and plays integrated soundscapes to improve your sleep. I have some new coffee today. Welcome to the stream, Elliot. Hopefully you're here. How are you doing?

• 2:43:05Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:43:06Speaker 09

  Hey, what's going on, guys? It's a pleasure to be here.

• 2:43:09John Coogan?

  Thanks so much, and I love the suit. You are dressed fantastically.

• 2:43:12Jordi Hays?

  Sign of great respect in our culture.

• 2:43:14Speaker 09

  You know, there was like a period where people would actually sort of match the vibes and have the suit for the Technology Brothers, and then I feel like it's dropped off, so I want to bring it back, you know?

• 2:43:22John Coogan?

  I appreciate it. I appreciate it. We don't enforce it or recommend it.

• 2:43:27Speaker 09

  It's, I'm glad to be here.

• 2:43:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it looks great.

• 2:43:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, proper uniform.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  I wanted to get a State of the Union from you on a few things, but why don't you just kick us off with an introduction on you?

• 2:43:37Speaker 09

  Yeah, for sure. My name's Elliot Hershberg. I started my career as an experimental biologist. So I was in the lab trying to make new treatments for cancer. Got super frustrated, decided to retrain as a computer scientist. So I became a computational biologist and was obsessed with that as sort of a practitioner for about a decade, and then got really obsessed with writing about it. So I was started writing a newsletter called The Century of Biology, writing about companies in the space, data on the frontier, and then that sort of was a rabbit hole into investing with a friend of the network with none other than Paddy McCormick. So I spent some time in Not Boring where I was writing and investing, and then recently joined Amplify.

• 2:44:22Speaker 09

  We just closed 900 million in new capital, including 200 million for a dedicated.

• 2:44:29Jordi Hays?

  Did you just, is this, are you announcing the new, the new capital, the new, the new fund today, or was that a little bit ago?

• 2:44:36Speaker 09

  It was a little bit ago, 900 million, including 200 million specifically for bio that I'm helping to build.

• 2:44:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, you guys were not loud enough about that.

• 2:44:44John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:44:45Speaker 09

  Well, that's, that's part of the thing. I feel like it's, it's a really quiet fund where for three of the four funds for Amplify, they've been in the top 5% of venture returns. Not top decile, but like top 5%, like really good at what they do. And I feel like it's just not. Thought of as much and just like very quiet and stealthily doing really phenomenal work.

• 2:45:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:10Speaker 09

  And so, um, yeah, excited to talk more about it.

• 2:45:13John Coogan?

  Okay, State of the Union on bio. I want to know about where we are in artificial intelligence and technology helping advance bio. We've seen AlphaFold, we've seen kind of tools and amazing breakthroughs. I think everyone has a really concrete idea of the impact AIs having on software engineering, whether it's like amazing autocomplete, you have cursor, now you have agents. Where are we in the deployment of AI tooling in bio? A lot of the narrative just jumps straight to, we're going to one-shot cancer. And I love that. I'm optimistic it happens eventually. It doesn't feel like we're there.

• 2:45:53John Coogan?

  But where are we actually in terms of the impact on productivity in AI with bio?

• 2:45:59Speaker 09

  Yeah, so you guys know like the Gartner hype cycle, right?

• 2:46:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:46:02Speaker 09

  Where you have these like huge swings for a new technology where, um, I've been working in this field for like a decade and there's been a bunch of companies, you know, Amplify invested in recursion, which was one of the early leaders of this, right? Like, there's been this general sentiment that you can make a huge amount of progress with new data, new tools, new technology and life sciences. And it just turns out that it's like a really hard problem, right? And it takes time, it takes some time for like the market to ingest that, actually figure out the right business models and strategies. And so there was like a really like strong wave of early adopters. And then there was some disillusionment and disappointment where it's like, oh shit, it actually turns out that it's really hard to one-shot a cure for cancer.

• 2:46:43Speaker 09

  And then, you know, as the, as that sort of happens, there was just a bunch of breakthroughs in the technology, right? So it became consensus that this is making a huge impact on hard problems in biology, where we had the Nobel Prize for AlphaFold, right? So like, uh, a Nobel Prize going to an AI lab to, uh, to Demis and part to David Baker at the University of Washington, because it's actually starting to make real, uh, meaningful impacts on hard problems in biology. And so that's true for sort of molecular machine learning, where you're thinking about, um, designing Molecules and proteins, there are virtual cell research where you're trying to actually model how cells behave. And so you're seeing this sort of step change now where like there are a couple sort of,

• 2:47:26Speaker 09

  you know, actually faster than Moore's law curves. DNA sequencing is decreasing in cost faster than than Moore's law. And so you get this huge data tailwind, plus the tailwinds in machine learning and modeling. People are actually starting to scale these models and it's just like getting pretty impressive pretty fast.

• 2:47:43John Coogan?

  Where are we on new drug discovery companies that we're targeting a single thing? We're going to build a drug to solve a problem versus we're going to start a company that's SaaS. It's tool, it's going to help with all different drug companies. What's, what's working, what's more overhyped, underhyped? Where, what's your take on like picks and shovels versus drugs, basically?

• 2:48:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, so like short answer is we do both. So you guys had Jake on the other day at Centevax, like absolutely insane founder. Was one of the early computational immunologists at Stanford and like he's making a medicine that you just couldn't otherwise make without these technologies, right? Where it's like all these impacts within biotech and within modeling to make these just really incredible drugs you couldn't otherwise make. And so that's people just like making these singular things that are, they're like really phenomenal. And like, there's also a real platform opportunity there for other things beyond the universal flu vaccine. And then I think like, if we take like a little trip down like history lane and think about like how hard it was to actually sell software in the life sciences. One of the early companies in this space is Schrodinger and they've been around for about 25 years. They're a molecular dynamics company.

• 2:48:54Speaker 09

  And it just took an extraordinary amount of, of time and effort to actually saturate and get people to adopt the technology and get people to pay for it. And, you know, they're a phenomenal business, they're a public company. They're actually vertically integrating into making their own drugs. But the thing that we're hearing consistently, like from CEOs of top pharma companies, is just like, there's huge demand for new infrastructure. People realize this technology is here now and that they need to adopt it. They're hearing this from their shareholders, they're hearing this from. Scientists at their companies. And so there's just a very different moment. Post AlphaFold and post even ChatGPT where like they're using it, their kids are using these models and they're just like, oh, I really actually need to adopt this.

• 2:49:38Speaker 09

  And so I think opportunity, if you're both like fundamentally new picks and shovels, where you sort of replace experiments with compute. And then also just fundamentally new drug products.

• 2:49:50John Coogan?

  Jordy, last question.

• 2:49:52Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I think we should have you back on as new news hits because, yeah, I think.

• 2:49:59Speaker 09

  We'll do the TBPN bio drop in, you know?

• 2:50:02John Coogan?

  I would love it.

• 2:50:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels like there's, within the traditional labs, bio has been used as like a, as a, as almost like marketing, right? Or even Elon yesterday saying like, we're gonna discover new physics. And I don't think that that's obviously not where like a lot of the true innovation is happening. So, yeah, let's make it a regular thing.

• 2:50:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great. Thank you so much.

• 2:50:31Speaker 09

  When you think about that, right? Like, there's just been a couple of things like I had an investor who made a joke that like, there's just a couple of things that have consistently delivered venture returns. And that's like software and also drugs. And so like as far as a physical prediction goes for being something that's super valuable. If you can make your inference be a billion dollar drug product, that's a pretty good spot to be. We're excited about it. So, see you guys soon.

• 2:50:57Jordi Hays?

  There's, who, I forgot who we had on when, when Trump had the executive order around drug prices, we talked to a few different people that were saying. Biotech has like, on average, been a terrible asset class. And there's some amazing outliers. Yeah, like basically there's all these amazing outliers that that do deliver returns, but if you just index the market, you were going to underperform dramatically. And it feels like, yeah, in the venture category, feels like this could be a massive shift where suddenly, you know, the next five years become the golden age of venture. Bio investing.

• 2:51:37Speaker 09

  I mean, there have been some massive companies before it. So you have like breakouts like the Genentechs of the world. Huge companies. There actually is. You guys should have Bruce Booth on who's an OG biotech investor at Atlas Ventures. He's done a bunch of analysis and the fact that like, there's actually some interesting just return data for biotech versus tech where it's like, not as gloomy as you would, as you would think. But I think in general, like biotech's hurting right now. We want to make a world where it's actually like engineering, right? And that you're actually just getting these like really scalable, amazing medicines. And like, I think that's where we're headed.

• 2:52:09Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Thank you for joining. Great to have you on.

• 2:52:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:12Speaker 09

  Awesome.

• 2:52:12John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:52:13Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:52:14Speaker 09

  All right.

• 2:52:14John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:52:14Speaker 09

  See ya.

• 2:52:16John Coogan?

  And next up, we have Kareem from Ramp.

• 2:52:18Jordi Hays?

  The man himself.

• 2:52:19John Coogan?

  To talk about the launch.

• 2:52:21Jordi Hays?

  New agent launch. Is he in the waiting room?

• 2:52:24John Coogan?

  We will bring in Kareem from Ramp to chat. Second time on the show, he hopped on at Hillen Valley.

• 2:52:32Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:52:32John Coogan?

  First time as a remote guest.

• 2:52:34Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:52:35John Coogan?

  How you doing, Kareem?

• 2:52:36Karim Atiyeh?

  Hello. Great to see you guys. Can you hear me okay?

• 2:52:39Jordi Hays?

  Yes, loud and clear.

• 2:52:40John Coogan?

  I don't think you need much of an introduction. So why don't you just kick it off with the announcement and break down the launch today? And then we'll have a bunch of questions.

• 2:52:47Karim Atiyeh?

  Yeah, of course. I mean, it's been a very exciting day for us at Ramp. We finally announced our, it's our first agent. We're going to be announcing a lot more agents soon. So it's hard to keep track sometimes. We've been playing with a lot of tech internally. We think we're in a very interesting space where

• 2:53:08Karim Atiyeh?

  maybe, maybe to think about it is, a lot of people from the outside look at Ramp and think of, maybe visualize the card. They think about the, the fintech aspects, but at, at the end of the day, like what we're really trying to do is

• 2:53:24Karim Atiyeh?

  help reduce the drag on companies that happens when there's just a lot of bullshit work in between teams and all of like papers being passed around, questions being asked. The things that really get in the way of, of, of doing work. And that first agent that we're building is, is, is really just that, like it operates in the messy, the messy middle between finance teams and every other team trying to spend to move the business forward. And yeah, that's, that's basically what we launched today. So it's a, an agent for controllers.

• 2:53:57Karim Atiyeh?

  It knows a lot more about the. Expense policy of a company, the rules that are in place that govern spend than any single employee and it knows a lot more about every single transaction than any single person on the finance team. So it can operate in the middle and automate all the little decisions and the extra work that needs to get done to figure out what's in policy or not.

• 2:54:23Jordi Hays?

  And it's immediately available. Like that's part of the power, right? Is that if you're, if you're, if like in the, in the sense of like, if an employee wants to decide whether or not they can buy something or something's in policy, you no longer have to be slacking somebody, you know, it could be in the middle of the night or something like that, or off hours where there's creating that drag, that delay, right?

• 2:54:45Karim Atiyeh?

  A hundred percent. That's certainly one part of it. Like you can, you can ask questions about your, your, your policy and ask questions about specific transactions live to figure out whether they would be in or out of policy. But more interestingly, once you make a transaction, it's already doing work to go and figure out like, well, that transaction that you made at that restaurant, it looks big, but if that was a dinner with 10 people, maybe it's not as bad as initially thought and that's actually in policy. So while that information is in your calendar, it's in your email, it's in sometimes outside of just the immediate context of a transaction. So the, the, the agent will go out on the internet in some cases, contact vendors or pull data from APIs on your behalf to really

• 2:55:29Karim Atiyeh?

  gather all that context and make better decisions on behalf of, of the company.

• 2:55:34John Coogan?

  I, I want to talk about like this, the, the word agent and the decisions to like, like how, how agents are fitting in the different stack of a tech company these days. Because like, there is kind of always, there's kind of always been an agent behind the scenes working, you, you think of these as like cron jobs before. It's like there's a, there is a long running process that when a receipt comes in, it gets tagged and there has been for I think years, I don't want to share anything you can't, but like, there's been an LLM interacting with receipt data for a long time, but it's been fully agentic in the sense that it was behind the scenes. And so I've, I've been thinking about this

• 2:56:17John Coogan?

  in the context of like meta and like some of the value that Zuck is going to be getting from having a frontier AI model. It's like, there's so many workloads inside a business that has. Billions of users that just happens behind the scenes and and these are agents, but they're like almost internal agents. And so I'm wondering about your decision to yeah, position, position an agent as like this is a user facing agent versus something that we're just going to have a process that's running behind the scenes entirely.

• 2:56:48Karim Atiyeh?

  Well, there's a bit of a difference, right? Because when you think about these processes running behind the scenes, for the most part, like the code is pretty deterministic. The tools are the same. It's built for accuracy and auditability and you have a high confidence. You could trace back the path that the old school agent, let's call it that, went through. Exactly. And in this case, like it's less deterministic. You give the agent a set of tools. You could tell the agent or you can essentially give it access to, um, let's say, ability to call, ability to email, and it could be like, go figure out a way to get the receipt.

• 2:57:30Karim Atiyeh?

  That's what you know about the restaurant and it'll browse the web and figure out that that's the phone number of the restaurant and then try to call the restaurant. And if that doesn't work, then it will try to email the restaurant until it achieved that goal of getting you the receipt or it fails and you can then interact with it. In this case, like the instructions that we are giving the agent as we're building, building it are very high level. You're just giving it high level instructions and access to tools. And that's very different from like the old way of building these processes, these processes in which you had to be like very specific about all these paths. So it would take a lot longer to be to build these systems, to debug them, to update them, et cetera.

• 2:58:13John Coogan?

  We lost you. Your background is turning like, like a ghost. It's very funny.

• 2:58:19Jordi Hays?

  It's a super intelligence.

• 2:58:21John Coogan?

  I think you just need a little bit more light on your face.

• 2:58:24Karim Atiyeh?

  I think I actually, I actually lost power, but.

• 2:58:27John Coogan?

  Wade, you lost power?

• 2:58:28Karim Atiyeh?

  There we go.

• 2:58:29John Coogan?

  Okay. There we go. That's wild. Much better. I want to talk to you about the data walls that are going up and some of the battles that are playing out in like the enterprise world because when I read stories about, you know, companies that want to do like enterprise search, you can see that, well, you know, maybe Google doesn't want you to be taking, maybe they want that for themselves. Ramp's in a very different position, but at the same time, like there's just evolving policies about, you know, how friendly, this is a classic with like Amazon not sending the itemized receipts to Gmail because they just didn't want to give Google the data.

• 2:59:08John Coogan?

  But as a Ramp customer, I want the Amazon details pulled in via Gmail via the Ramp integration. So talk to me about like, how's the broader trend playing out? And then how do you go to big companies and say, hey, like, you know, work with us? Our clients want to be able to pull data from your service and we're not going to build a delivery network, Amazon. So you're not, we're not a competitor for you.

• 2:59:36Karim Atiyeh?

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, most of the data that we need at the end of the day is like data that is quote unquote owned by our users.

• 2:59:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:59:47Karim Atiyeh?

  Businesses that are on Ramp, their employees. I think it's a little bit easier to operate in the B2B space because like those, I guess, what governs who owns the data and whose data it is is a lot clearer than in the, a lot of consumer applications. So like in our case, it's like, what data do we really need to know to, in the case of the agents that we just launched to figure out whether something's in policy or not? It's metadata about the transaction, right? Like.

• 3:00:22Karim Atiyeh?

  What's in the receipt at the end of the day, like stores, all your receipt, that's your receipt, right? We we get that information. They have information that we get through the networks, through Visa, the the the metadata about the transit, the geographical location of the transaction, maybe whether it was an in-person transaction or not. There's data that's in your inbox, in your email, which, again, like that information's also owned by the company.

• 3:00:47Karim Atiyeh?

  We we haven't really encountered a lot of of of pushback and challenges. I've I've found most of the challenges in in getting the data to be more like technical. How'd you make sure to get it quickly, clean it clean it up and get it accurately? As opposed to ones where there are third parties that are trying to make it harder and harder for us to access the data.

• 3:01:09John Coogan?

  We had some. Been in that in the previous company. That that was kind of the story of the previous company.

• 3:01:14Karim Atiyeh?

  Yeah, of course, we we had a lot of these problems. I mean, there were there were lots of funny moments at at Paribus or previous companies where

• 3:01:22Karim Atiyeh?

  we were, I mean, we're really building an agent for consumers to help them save money on their online shopping, right? And we're trying to log in on their behalf to Amazon accounts and Walmart accounts, et cetera. And of course, they'll put blocks, they'll put captions. And today, those captions seem like a joke. I think any version of any half recent version of of ChatGPT or or Claude is able to solve those captions very easily.

• 3:01:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's one of the ways the Internet's getting worse right now is it captures or actually getting so hard and annoying even for.

• 3:01:54John Coogan?

  You know, when we go to the gym in the morning, Jordy has to log in. It takes him like two minutes to get through the captions for this gym.

• 3:02:00Jordi Hays?

  It has like the most like military-grade security to get to a gym login.

• 3:02:04John Coogan?

  And it's just it just gives you a barcode that you just scan.

• 3:02:06Jordi Hays?

  But but but but on that, I'm I'm actually interested because I can imagine, you know, Ramp has tens of thousands of customers, like high-value business customers and other people that are building agents. I'm sure would love to actually be able to make actions on the Ramp platform. But at the same time. You guys are trusted to handle the finance, you know, basically the finance, the finance back office for these companies. You don't want like an agent like hallucinating, like saying, you know, based on and taking actions on the ramp platform. So I'm curious how you see that that dynamic playing out because I'm sure you've been approached by a lot of companies saying,

• 3:02:46Jordi Hays?

  hey, we're building this agent to do this thing. We'd love to be able to, you know, get authorization.

• 3:02:52Karim Atiyeh?

  Of course. I mean, we're, we're thinking through that a lot right now. I think there are good ways of exposing the right information to the right agent. As long as our customers are very aware of what they're exposing. And there are lots of interesting applications for us to work on. Like in the case of any large purchase at a company, there are multiple parties within that company that need to review it or approve. Like you want to review a certain vendor and, and look at their data protection policies. You want to look at the, the legal agreements. In some cases, you want to negotiate the price.

• 3:03:32Karim Atiyeh?

  And you can imagine a, a day in the future where a lot of our customers have an agentic tool that they trust or agents that they trust for legal work, agents that they trust for IT work, et cetera. And we're very interested in, in actually working with, with some of these companies. But we've got to figure out in our end how we expose the right interface. So that we're, we're ensuring really like the, the security of the data of our, of our customers. So it's, it's an ongoing work stream.

• 3:04:10John Coogan?

  Last question for me. The, the Grok four launch was very benchmark heavy. It seems like, you know, the consensus is that it's a good model. And so as soon as I see that, it's now about cost per token. And, and so I want to hear from your perspective, what drives decision making? How big of a line item roughly like? How much time is spent thinking about LLM inference optimization? And cost. Like roughly, you know, like, how big of a deal is it? And then, and then what, what is the workflow to decide? Can we use a cheaper model? How do we, do you have internal benchmarks? Are you just checking these things?

• 3:04:53John Coogan?

  Like, how are you making decisions about which model to use for what problem?

• 3:04:58Karim Atiyeh?

  Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I'm a lot more paranoid about being too slow to try the newest model and the latest and greatest tools than I am by maybe overspending a little bit in, in, in, in one area.

• 3:05:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:05:19Karim Atiyeh?

  I mean, the amount of time and money wasted at companies doing BS work is just insane. That if we're debating whether you can make something faster by spending an extra dollar or half dollar, like the value that we're able to create is so big that I don't worry about it too much. But we do have internally somewhat imprecise like stack ranking of the different places where we need to make inference calls. And in some cases, they're very simple, high volume, kind of low risk. Right? Like you're, you're trying to normalize or clean up some like merchant data to figure out the appropriate spelling and maybe the right like photo to use.

• 3:06:02Karim Atiyeh?

  It's not the end of the world if it's not, not like perfect. We're doing it at high volume, it better be cheap. So we have a kind of stack ranking of like, this is something high volume where we need to be cheap. This is something that's low volume and high stakes where you need to be accurate. And we'll generally try the newest and greatest models and into places where we think will make the biggest difference. And over time, like we'll break up some workflows and some parts of it will become cheaper, more repeatable with smaller versions or cheaper versions of the model. And, and it will just evolve. I mean, we come from, I mean, I remember like.

• 3:06:43Karim Atiyeh?

  Micro optimizing every single thing on our AWS account back in in in 2014, right? Like we were, it was it was a lot harder back then, like. Um, I I think we we also pride ourselves in in in being the the time and money company. So we do care a lot about making sure that we don't waste our own money and our and and our own time. But I would say that the TLDR is like our time and engineering time is the most valuable thing here. And I'm a lot more focused on that than than anything else.

• 3:07:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, on on the time issue, uh, what do you think about the various latency trade offs? I'm sure if if if uh, if an employee wants to know, is this in policy? And you hit O three pro and it waits 10 minutes like they're probably just gonna slack their manager and ask them. Um, but you're gonna get a really accurate answer that's really detailed. And so how do you think about those trade offs in latency?

• 3:07:35Karim Atiyeh?

  Yeah, I mean, it it it really depends on like where where in the workflow we're making the inference call, right? Like if it's live in the interface and the user expects a a quick answer, we'll be using some of the faster models. But the reality is like a a lot of these agentic workflows that are being kicked off at ramp like happen behind the scenes, right? Like you make a transaction, you maybe get a very quick question from ramps AI to gather a little bit more context. Like that's enough. And then from there, we'll kick up another uh, kick up, kick off another task that can be a little bit slower. They'll happen in the background. And by the time it reaches a bottleneck, uh, or it'll reach a place where it needs like additional feedback.

• 3:08:17Karim Atiyeh?

  Uh, it'll be in someone else's like notifications or on someone else's Slack. Like you could take a little bit of time when like the work is going from one person to another person, but less when it's like the same person interacting with the interface live. Uh, that's, yeah, that's generally the the the thinking, but.

• 3:08:36John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 3:08:37Karim Atiyeh?

  Yeah, I have.

• 3:08:40Karim Atiyeh?

  I tried some of the newer, the newest browsers today and like I tried Pomer today. I tried the a couple of weeks ago and I think what they're trying to do is incredibly cool. Uh, but I, I often find myself thinking like, damn, like I wish this was a little bit faster. And I know, I know it's coming, but I think unlike some of the, the, the browser agenda calls, like you want it to be really fast.

• 3:09:06Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Yeah. I was thinking about that in the context of the, of the OpenAI browser. And unless they figure out something that makes it basically 10 times as fast, I'm still going to default to, to Chrome. If I have both of them open, just because I'm like, well, I just really need a fast answer here.

• 3:09:23John Coogan?

  I mean, that was the Chrome innovation, right? Chrome won on speed. Like they just optimized the code and, and they, and they nailed speed and it was enough to leapfrog. Uh, and, and so you could see, I mean, that's like the bull case for like Apple coming from behind is like, yeah, they like, it feels like if, if XAI and Anthropic and, and OpenAI are all kind of like Gemini are like roughly at the frontier. If you can just get something that's at that frontier, not any new innovations, but hyper optimized. And it runs locally on your phone and it, and it's put spitting out like tons of tokens every second. Like you have a product that would be very, very, it would be very rapidly adopted. Uh, it's exciting.

• 3:10:06Karim Atiyeh?

  It matters a lot. I mean, I think one of the weirdest UX patterns on, on, on chat GPT now is that I have to do the work to figure out whether to use, uh, oh, three or four.

• 3:10:17John Coogan?

  Oh, four, oh, every time. Do I have 10 minutes or do I want the, and, and four O is always, it's so good that I usually don't need to. But then I'm just like, well, I want the best of course. It's like, I'll come back to it. And it's such a weird paradigm. It's going to be something that dates us. And I just know our kids are going to be like, what did you have to do back then? You had to rewind the VCR tape. You had to put the disc in the Xbox. You had to pick which model to use. This is insane. It's so legacy and it's going away. But we're just in this weird, like we, we don't have a model router solved. And it feels like the easiest thing is like, which model should we use for this? I don't know. We'll see.

• 3:10:56Karim Atiyeh?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you guys, I grew up in Lebanon and I still remember the days of dialogue where you would have to.

• 3:11:06John Coogan?

  Kick everyone else off the phone line.

• 3:11:08Karim Atiyeh?

  Well, exactly. Well, select the phone line and okay, it's like, okay, which phone line am I going to use? It's like, I don't know. Can't you tell me which one is free and like pick it for me? And it's like, no, I still have to, right?

• 3:11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like the easiest thing to do. And also, I mean, this is just, you know, complaining about the app that I use 30 minutes a day at least, ChatGPT. But I almost wish I could just define it in the prompt and just say, hey, use O3 Pro and then here's the prompt, as opposed to needing to click the UI, change it, switch it, and then pick, instead of just being able to go back and forth. And I don't know. I mean, it's a good sign because like, people are using this stuff so much that they're frustrated by these like niche UI things. So, you know, it's exciting.

• 3:11:51Karim Atiyeh?

  There's a lot of, I forgot who it was who posted on X, I think it was like a couple weeks ago, that like every company is like one great UX breakthrough away from something amazing. And I think that will be true for a long time. Like, there's a lot of alpha right now and just great UX and good patterns. We haven't figured it out. We're still in the maybe terminal phase of personal computers, right? Like, when is the mouse going to come out? When are the right gooys going to come out? Like, there's a lot of that happening right now. And yeah, it's a fun, fun time to be building.

• 3:12:24Jordi Hays?

  One, one last question for me. On Monday, Dwar Kesh released an article and then came on the show, kind of talking about his timelines around, you know, when an AI agent would be able to do his taxes, right? Sort of like agentially, basically like fully agentic experience, being like, I want to do my 2025 taxes, and then it just sort of autonomously runs. How do like big, how are like, you know, Fortune 500 CFO, like what are their timelines around? Maybe you just tell them what the timelines are. Like, okay, by 2028, you know, we're going to be able to do this for you. But how is the, the, the sort of finance arm of

• 3:13:08Jordi Hays?

  the C-suite kind of anticipating, like, the rate of advancement? Obviously, like, the agent today is a step towards that future, but you'll obviously need a variety of different agents or?

• 3:13:24Karim Atiyeh?

  Well, I I think in terms of capabilities of L L Ms, we we're there. We we have the capabilities. The the bottleneck on on on being able to to do this today is like having the right context. Right? It's it's a well, some of that context is in my head. So the AI needs to know to like, ask me the right questions efficiently. So I can answer those, right? Even when I'm working with my accountant, like, take the best accountant in the world for your personal taxes. If you just tell them, like, find my taxes, they can't do anything. Maybe you tell them, find my taxes and here's access to my email. They could do a little bit more, but they can't get it fully. So tell them, like, find my taxes. Here's access to to my email. You can call my that wife as much as you want.

• 3:14:08Karim Atiyeh?

  Uh, you can look through my drawers and you give it more and more of these things like maybe it could do it, but it's going to get lost. It's going to take forever. And and and really what we we we need to do, even even for businesses is like, what are the right like patterns for us to extract context that's in in people's heads? Organize it, um, get them comfortable with uh, connecting different tools like your inbox and and and things of that nature. And I think in terms of tech and capabilities, we're we're there. We're not. We're not really missing anything. So there's a lot of UX and classic like

• 3:14:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, we almost need an AI agent that can email me a question and put it in my inbox, which is effectively my to do list. And that's what my accountant does when that taxes happen. They email me and say, you gotta do this.

• 3:14:58Jordi Hays?

  You can just you can take a picture of a product there and and ask it if I buy this, you know?

• 3:15:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's in policy. Yeah.

• 3:15:06Karim Atiyeh?

  A hundred percent.

• 3:15:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, well, thank you so much for stopping by. You have anything else, Karim? This is great. Well, we'll definitely see you soon, Karim. This is great.

• 3:15:14Karim Atiyeh?

  Good to see you guys.

• 3:15:15Jordi Hays?

  To the whole team. Talk soon.

• 3:15:16John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Bye. Um, and that is um, the rest of our guests. We are through that. In other news, uh, Periodic Labs, there's this scoop from Natasha Muscarinus, uh, the startup being co-founded by Liam Fetus and Eric.

• 3:15:33John Coogan?

  Dogus Kubuk, great names, is in talks to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in funding at above a $1 billion valuation. The two-month-old startup is looking to apply AI to physical science, starting with discovering novel materials.

• 3:15:46Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up to the two-month-old unicorn. We gotta have these guys on the show.

• 3:15:51John Coogan?

  That guy is extremely fast. I also like this post from David Perel. We're getting him back on the show ASAP. We had a lot of fun talking to him a couple of months ago. He said, "I'm touring apartments in New York and just about every new build has the same soul aesthetic, flat walls, white paint, no cornices, no ornamentation, just a room in a box. Only one, one real estate agent said to me, "If you want something with character, you're going to have to stick to pre-war buildings. Look, I'm all for some efficiency gains, but we've created a world where new things are soulless things, and that's how a society as modern as ours, and that's not how, how a society as modern as ours should function. Intuitively, you'd think that a wealthier society would build more, would build more beautiful things, but not ours." And I completely agree. What's crazy is that

• 3:16:35John Coogan?

  this isn't, I mean, I don't, these apartments look nice, but this continues all the way to $20 million houses that are still bland. And I think it's, I think it's mostly because maybe time and, and, and, and all the difficulties with permitting. Because if you are, if you're, if you even have the resources to build something from scratch, creating, okay, I want these ornaments and I want this and I want like something that's really expressive of my personality. Well, now you, if you want that, no one else wants that. So you have to build it and you have to, and you have to, you know, underwrite it and you're going to be underwritten.

• 3:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Make sure it's to code.

• 3:17:16John Coogan?

  You make sure it's to code and then get it built and, and then, and then the secondary market value is going to be less because not everyone wants Hearst Castle. Whereas if you build, if everyone builds the exact same thing, they're perfectly, it's perfectly liquid market because every, every apartment is interchangeable with every other.

• 3:17:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 3:17:33John Coogan?

  It's kind of, it's kind of a function of just like modernity, but it's more a function of people not, you know, just risking it ever on building a disaster project, making their forever home. People learn the lesson of William Randolph Hearst too much. They should have just like, never learned that lesson.

• 3:17:53Jordi Hays?

  Send it.

• 3:17:53John Coogan?

  Just ripped it and just send it and just build something that no one else will want to buy and will take decades to build. That's always the best.

• 3:17:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, I have a good place to end it. Please. Uh, Rob Petrosos says the original Hermes Birkin bag prototype just sold for $10 million at Sotheby's. There was a two-minute standing ovation. Gong hit. He says bull market confirmed. And a gong hit. We love a bull market. The original prototype. Fascinating. It's wild. Makes sense. Very cool. It's, uh, incredible lore. Yeah. And, uh, I wouldn't be excited for a bull market and, and alternative assets such as Birkins. Be great. And, uh, you should be too. But, uh, that's a great show, folks. We will be back tomorrow. I cannot wait. We will talk to you tomorrow. Talk soon. Have a good day. Cheers.