Big Tech Earnings, Elon’s SpaceX–xAI Merge, Genie 3 | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console -https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn https://graphite.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai https://lambda.ai/ Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid -https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Ramp -https://ramp.com https://ramp.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/welcome/ Shopify - https://shopify.com https://shopify.com/ Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://tbpn.com/ https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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• 0:01Jordi Hays?

  In the news today, Apple said this morning that it has acquired Q.ai, an Israeli startup working on AI technology for audio.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  Apple didn't disclose the terms. The Financial Times reported it was worth nearly $2 billion, so a pretty meaningful deal. Apple is not known for really paying up on a lot of different M&A that they're kind of folding in to their roadmap. We had Mark Gurman on yesterday talking about how Apple uses M&A effectively to accelerate their roadmap. According to Reuters, Apple did not say how it will use QAI as technology, but said the startup has worked on new applications of machine learning to help devices understand whispered speech and to enhance audio in challenging environments. QAI last year filed a patent to use facial skin micro-movements to detect words mouthed or spoken.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  This is, we've seen a couple startups that are doing like the whisper. It's like telepathy almost. It tracks your mouth movements so you can just, and then it like will track what you're saying.

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  So facial skin micro-movements will be used to identify a person and assess their emotions, heart rate, respiration rate, and other indicators.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  Very sci-fi. The founders, Aviad Mizel, founded three-dimensional sensing firm PrimeSense and sold it to Apple in 2013.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  Absolute dogs. They're doing it.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  They call it double kill. The PrimeSense deal eventually helped Apple move away from fingerprint sensors on its iPhone and toward facial recognition technology.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Interesting. Pop quiz for Tyler. Why does Apple acquire companies?

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  I mean, why questions are usually pretty obvious.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Okay, good answer. But Mark Gurman told us, why does Apple acquire companies? To accelerate their roadmap. Accelerate the roadmap. Yes. And it's funny because I asked him, like, why are we going to hear Tim Cook say that? And he was like, oh, because earning. But we're basically hearing him say it today with this surprise acquisition. That's obviously the line from Apple. And it makes sense. This is something that is uniquely acceleratable because of the Apple hardware ecosystem. They can deploy this through AirPods, they can deploy this through the phones, just like they did with Face ID. If you have that technology and you're like, oh, well, in order to log into your computer with your face... You're going to need a third-party device that you plug into USB. Like, no one's gonna do that.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  But yes, I've been, I've been very bullish on this. I, I was thinking back then that, uh, you know, people get their wisdom teeth out. This is very weird in cyberpunk, but if you got your wisdom teeth out, you, you could potentially like create, like add a, like a port for storing a microphone.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, do you have any of these? I should have got that.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Cause a lot of people get them out and then you could just put a port there and, and you could, and you could insert basically the tip of an AirPod, very, very small device that you would charge and then you put it in. And then when you're whispering, you can just hear, it, it can only hear that and it goes dictation straight to your phone. I was wondering about the, the quality of whisper transcription these days. Like if I just open up Whisper on the ChatGPT app, put my phone in my pocket and just talk, can it just hear through my pants pocket and just dictate perfectly now? Because like AI is so good at transcription that it can be really muffled. Like you can have music playing in the background and talk to Whisper.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  It just won't mess up. So, uh, there, there is a world where you don't actually need like a separate PIN. You just have something anywhere on your body and it knows, okay, this is what John sounds like. Let's kill all the background noise. Let's kill all the other people talking. Let's isolate that with AI. Like it seems pretty, pretty good for that.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  One more thing on this QA acquisition, they're using, going back to their patent, using facial skin micro-movements to assess emotions, heart rate, respiration rate and other indicators. You could imagine where a world in the future where you have Apple smart glasses that effectively have like health monitoring.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  Tracking respiration, heart rate, all these different things and, uh, just basically integrating the features you're getting from the Apple Watch today.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  I wonder what it's really unlocking that the watch can't do. There's always the question when you, when you, when you pitch a new device, it's like, well, your phone does have a camera on it. So you're not, this is like, the smart glasses aren't the first.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's a new device, but it's a Lindy form factor, right?

• 4:17John Coogan?

  True, true, true.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  Like this is something we've, we've talked about in the past. It's like the, you know, the, the new hardware that's taken off is an existing form factor. It's like headphones.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Eyewear.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  You have watches, right? Creating these pendant things. So far, hasn't hit.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fair. I I I just think like on the heart rate issue specifically, there was an app before the Apple Watch existed, where you could put your finger over the camera of the iPhone and it would use the light, the the flashlight, which was right next to the camera, to light up your finger. So your finger would turn red. And then it would take the sensor data from the camera and measure the pulses of the red and give you your heart rate just from touching your camera. It's pretty cool. Like, it was completely outside of the Apple ecosystem, just a just an app that you could download or pay for. And so the phone can take your heart rate, the watch can take your heart rate. If you give me glasses and you say those glasses can also take your heart rate, I'm like, I I I got enough heart rate measurement. I can also just go like this and estimate it. Like, there's a bunch of ways to know that your heart rate's spiking.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  Maybe tracking it's in different, but it feels like they they need to go farther and the real opportunity is something more around audio interfaces, link it to Siri, have more ways to triangulate what the person's trying to say, what they're saying in a noisy environment, whether they're trying to be quiet and you still want to isolate what they're saying, having a back and forth, reducing latency. All of those things are very critical to success in that category.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  Let's go into.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  Earnings, Microsoft. So, uh, Microsoft shares have taken a dive as data center spending overshadows earnings surge. Let's give some numbers here. So Microsoft's Q4 revenue was eighty one point three billion dollars, which was higher than the consensus estimate of eighty point two three billion. So they're making money. There's no, there's no lack of demand for Microsoft services. Q3 twenty twenty five revenue was seventy seven point one billion, up almost five percent, and year over year group, uh, growth was seventeen percent. But the stock sold off for, uh, by twelve percent and Microsoft is now just, just a tiny little three point one five trillion dollar company.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Not bad. Yeah. I mean, people have been excited about the OpenAI investment, which did show up in earnings. So Microsoft owns twenty seven percent of OpenAI's new for-profit entity. That value was actually reflected in Microsoft's earnings. And of course, more importantly, the GPT models are truly frontier. Like, we've seen it again and again. Like this horse race over this model's better at this thing, this model's better today. But it's just very clear that that OpenAI is on the frontier and in the conversation for pretty much every application possible. And so you can just imagine you take GPT five point two pro, you vend that into knowledge work pipelines for Microsoft users. That sounds really useful. They aren't behind on coding. We've heard great stories about how Codex is a great model.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Maybe it's a little slow, maybe they need to speed it up, but people are having a lot of luck with Codex. And so you can imagine that Microsoft is capable of integrating Codex into all sorts of different pieces of the Microsoft empire to create agentic workflows. And and then they also have a deal with Anthropic. They also made made a made an investment. So they they are multi-model, multi-platform. But the problem is is that Microsoft seems to be constrained on the data center side. Limited availability of artificial intelligence hardware is affecting how quickly Microsoft's cloud business can grow. And it's capping Azure's revenue potential. Not good. They need to take another trip to Abilene. They need to build more data centers. Maybe it's just a data center capacity issue. What's next?

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Is it going to be an energy bottleneck? Is it going to be a chip bottleneck? This is, these are stories that we're tracking.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, it's amazing that that Microsoft owns such a big slug of OpenAI. That's great, but the challenge is so much of their backlog is OpenAI. And they're actually getting less credit for that, right? Same way that Oracle had gotten punished for it. Now it's Microsoft's chance to actually get punished. Microsoft, if you actually zoom out a little bit and just look at the last six months, down seventeen percent in the last in the last six months and down four percent over the last year. So it's funny, like in a year where it feels like the last year Satya and Microsoft have just been on this insane run. They've fully, you know, round-tripped.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Totally. Meta also reported earnings yesterday. Fifty nine point nine billion in revenue in Q4 of 2025, beating expectations of fifty eight point five. Revenue's up sixteen percent from Q3 of last year, which was fifty one point two four. The company's growing its revenue twenty one percent year over year. That's higher than Microsoft's seventeen percent top line growth. Market cap is now one point eight four trillion. Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on the earnings call in 2025, "We rebuilt the foundations of our AI program." That should be obvious. There's so many acquisitions, so many hires, so much, so many experiments, so many different, so many different strategies

• 9:12John Coogan?

  and discussions and changing of the guard and restructurings, layoffs and reality labs. It's the compute desk. There's been so many stories about Meta really rethinking their AI platform, re-architecting the foundations of it. Over the coming months, we're going to start shipping our new models and products. Very excited for that. He says, "I expect our first models will be good, but more importantly, they will show the rapid trajectory we're on." And I think that we all have high expectations. I don't think anyone's expecting them to jump way, way out in front of everyone else, but they can just be in the conversation

• 9:54John Coogan?

  with DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI. I think that will quell a lot of the concern.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  That, but also what are they doing with them?

• 10:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  I think that matters. I think that matters more. You look at Meta's business and the way in which GenAI can accelerate everything from generating more content on the platform to having better ads, to better targeting, all these things, right? And not to mention like where they can just vend it in at the product level, right?

• 10:18John Coogan?

  The product level stuff is tricky. I mean, like, I've bumped into Meta AI in Instagram many times, and you do get reasonable, you know, natural language responses, but it clearly still has the knowledge cutoff. It's not searching the web as effectively. It's not pulling together It doesn't feel completely native to the platform. Like if you go into Meta AI in Instagram and you ask it to go and hunt around in Instagram for a specific creator or reel based on some clues, it doesn't feel like it has the hooks to really go in and understand, okay, based on what you've watched and what I've showed

• 11:02John Coogan?

  you in the past, this is probably what you're thinking of. Like that is sort of a superpower where, you know, there's so many times when you're on the timeline and you're like, I saw this post, I didn't bookmark it, didn't like it. What was it? And you want the search products to be empowered magically. What are we laughing at? What are you thinking? You gonna flagbang me again?

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, close. Continue.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  I think that there's the basic case of they gotta get, you know, an LLM that's frontier, that's, you know, has the big model smell, fun to talk to, good vibes. Then they need video and audio models that are rock solid and then they do need to then those in. I think just having an API or just having a place where people can generate, you know, photo reel videos or even things like Sora where it has the aesthetics and pacing and cuts of an Instagram reel. That doesn't feel like it's enough. It feels like to really empower like the Instagram creator, it needs to be built into the platform. Letting people still bring what's personal to them, their family, their experiences, their car, but take a couple of photos of their car and turn it into a really, really

• 12:07John Coogan?

  awesome drone shot of them driving their car. I've seen a lot of really sweet edits where people will fly a drone over a car, then they'll have a first person GoPro on their chest while they're driving their car and then they'll use AI to interpolate between the drone shot and their first person view. Because they can't actually, like if you have a multimillion dollar Hollywood budget, you actually can fly the drone into the car, have someone sitting in the car, they grab the drone and then they hook it on a crane and the crane takes it out and does a different shot with it. But that's like a multimillion dollar, experts, tons of equipment. And so even just like AI powered transitions would be a really, really cool thing to bring up.

• 12:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not to mention they own Manus now, which is a fantastic product team. They've built some great agents. You can imagine them integrating. Like basically like prompts to short form video, right? Where you can just describe the video that you want to make. Insert reel, like basically like generate B roll for this. Pull footage from around the internet, whatever. And so there's so many things that they can do. And again, they've just been using Meta AI as a sandbox for the most part. But I'm just excited for them to start shipping across.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  The remixing thing is so underrated because there's a lot of people. The number of people that have like true inspiration for new formats is pretty low. People always do the sketches.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  Think about the remix functionality. See a funny video and you can just like basically do a character swap in there.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, that's the new music content that that's going to be shared and a bunch of people engaged with.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Tyler, what's your take on Meta's new plans for 2026?

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I definitely think the image and video models are much more important to get right than the LLM. Mainly just because like it's it seems like very natural them to bend it into everything compared to OpenAI or Google, who are like right now finding it out in image or in video. So it seems like if they can kind of do really well, you can get OpenAI and Google out of that race, basically. And then the LLM, it's like, it's unclear what the actual like use case will be in the short term. Eventually you want some cool like, you know, Claude bot style agent somehow bend it in. But it's unclear how that's going to work out. So I think in the short term, I'm very excited on the video model.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  I really like that model of like the LLM going around and just like seeping into the cracks of all the different product experiences, but in these like really subtle ways. Like YouTube now has AI generated summaries on videos and you can chat with a video. So if you're watching a someone build a PC, you can ask Gemini on YouTube, hey, just print out the exact list of parts that the person used to build the PC. And there might be a parts list at the end of the video. There might be a parts list that's randomly mentioned throughout. Sometimes a creator might actually link to a real parts list, but Gemini allows you to scrape the transcript and then just get that however you want. And then transform it or add prices to all of it or see if it's available in Japan. Cause I'm in Japan, all these, all these interesting things.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  And I can imagine on Instagram, being able to go to a post that has like thousands of comments and just say, hey, I want the LLM to kind of summarize the sentiment. Like what, what, what are the facts? Like, you know, people were debating whether or not this is AI. Is there a consensus or people were adding context? What was the key context that people were adding? There's a lot of posts that are basically like rage bait or click bait where. It's unclear what's going on in the video. And so you go to the comments, people are like, I don't get it. Or like they put up that sign like context needed, please. Right? And so you can kind of do that.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I feel like that stuff can just like, I'd rather just have that be in the like recommendation algorithm.

• 15:33John Coogan?

  Like sorted in the comments.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  If everyone in the comments is saying this is clickbait, just don't put it in my recommendation algorithm.

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  Suspended Cap says, I got to really respect Zuck willing to spend over 50% of revenue next year when they still haven't delivered a single compelling AI product. Hell, yeah.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the CapEx is crazy. So Meta's edited $200 billion in revenue in 2025. That's so huge. So much revenue. It's a lot of ads. Now they're going to plow 135 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. New York Times said 115, but either way, it's like more than half of the revenues.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think posts like this are funny. And I think you can definitely agree that Meta has not shipped a, a super compelling AI product yet, even though Meta Vibes has traction, not necessarily in our world, but certainly has some traction. Like this is the guy that owns the world's largest trough or one of the world's largest troughs. Right? And so he has, he knows that it's working. He knows he can see the future, right? He has all the data. He knows that people say they don't like AI content, but in reality, they actually do. They engage with it, they watch it, they make it.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Engagement must be growing exponentially, even though it's very small. It started at a base of zero and then you got Harry Potter, Balenciaga. And now you have 10 videos a week that are going so.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  So I look at this different than some of the metaverse bets, just because Zuck is one of the biggest beneficiaries of Gen AI. And so it's totally warranted to say like, hey, we should invest an obscene amount of money in this. This is clearly the future.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about Tesla.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Tesla reported revenue at 24.9 billion and this beat the, the consensus estimate just slightly. Consensus was 24.78 billion.

• 17:16Jordi Hays?

  But down.

• 17:17John Coogan?

  11.4% from the previous quarter. When revenue was 28.1 and 3% decline year over year. There's just no, there's no denying that the Model S and X sales have slowed. And there's a whole bunch more competition at the high end EV market from Lucid, Rivian.

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  And, and so Elon is fully thinking about what's next. He broke out subscriptions for autopilot self-driving for the first time. He was talking a huge amount about cyber cabs and robot taxis. He's making that cash investment in XAI. And of course, he's really focused on Optimus humanoid robots. And it seems like he could be scaling up production there very, very quickly.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  Million subs of full self-driving.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, not bad. How much is it? I think it's a hundred. Hundred a month? Yeah. Yeah, so you know, you got a billion dollars a year coming in from that. Analysts thought Tesla was going to be cash flow negative for the quarter, but they actually were positive. They generated 1.4 billion dollars in free cash flow, and this was down just 30%. So there's plenty of cash to keep the aggressive investments going, especially as Elon shifts the business towards autonomy.

• 18:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a little, I think it's a little jarring for some people just because historically car companies have thrived by creating the perfect car in each category for every different consumer. And Elon is basically saying, actually, I know, I know what you want, and I'm going to give you it.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  It's, you know, you don't need that many options.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  Where you're going to be able, like you said, to just leverage the different trim levels.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  And spec out the car to satisfy.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  And probably, you know, I, I do think over time, like less and less trim levels. And then, and then eventually it's just cyber cabs and no one's buying cars anymore. Elon's certainly thinking in decades and, and not afraid to cut an entire business line that is, is still popular with a lot of people. I mean, I was just talking to somebody yesterday who was seeing the praises of his Tesla Model X and how much he loves that and how he would never get a Y because the X is so much more premium. Everything about it's better. It costs a lot of money when he bought it, still loves it, but, you know, Elon's thinking to the future.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, this video of Optimus learning it has to make up for S slash X sales after they were canceled.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  Oh, this one's, this is such a crazy video. Taking off the VR headset and just smashing it down.

• 19:33Jordi Hays?

  I love.

• 19:33John Coogan?

  This is really a Tesla, the Optimus, isn't it? The force with which the Optimus just smashes a water bottle open is crazy.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing. This thing is gonna be super powerful.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  The insurance business that will be built around having a humanoid in your home is going to be remarkable, remarkable.

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  One of the standout moments of the earnings call for me.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Please.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Elon and Tesla are transitioning their Fremont facility to make Optimus.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  And they plan to scale that facility up to be able to make a million, a million of these things a year on a relatively near term time horizon. So, very, very significant. He talked about how the robot would be able to basically learn on the job. It's gonna be able to do a number of valuable tasks. And, yeah, I think, I mean, the big question for me is like, what is?

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Will it have ads? That's a good question for me.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  Will they have an ad supported?

• 20:21John Coogan?

  You have Tesla walking around your house and it sees you pull out some sort of random credit card and it's like, are you not on a ramp? Like, what's going on here?

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  Or it sees you like having like.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  Sir, would you like a smoothie from Athletic Greens?

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. Is it valuable enough to actually replace a human? Optimus is gonna be competing with jobs that are maybe like 40, 50, 60 a year, like somewhere in that range.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  And so, that's a pretty high bar to clear.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  So, we'll see. Some breaking news.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  From Reuters, 21 minutes ago. Exclusive, Musk's XAI and merger talks with XAI ahead of planned IPO.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  SpaceX and XAI?

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX and XAI.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  Ahead of planned IPO.

• 21:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  So, this was something that we obviously were talking about predicting months ago at this point. But, so, no, no huge surprise here. This always felt like it made sense. So, they're in discussions ahead of a blockbuster IPO planned for later this year. The combination would bring Musk's rockets, Starlink satellites, and X's social media platform, and the Grok AI chatbot under one roof. Imagine owning X, the internet's dive bar, and space in one ticker.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  Flashing back to 2007, 2010, being like, yeah, Twitter and that space company that hasn't successfully launched anything, they're going to be part of the same company one day.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  Expected this to happen.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  I think it builds a, you know, again, some people will be frustrated with the narrative, the data centers in space narrative.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  No, it's real, it's real enough.

• 21:52Jordi Hays?

  We saw this sort of like, sort of organized narrative shift around SpaceX being the data centers in space play.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was the bridge. Like, without that, it didn't make any sense. And then, and then once, if you can get behind, okay, data centers in space is maybe possible, maybe.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you want some on land, too.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  Then, then it starts to make sense that the merger fits a little bit more.

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  We have to talk about.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Genie.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  Genie.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  The genie is out of the lamp.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  Logan says, introducing Project Genie, a frontier world model product powered by Genie 3 and available to G1 Ultra users in the US starting today.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  Are you a G1 Ultra user?

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  This morning. We were playing around. We were playing around with this this morning. It is absolutely wild. You can basically prompt an entire world.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  It instantly turns into effectively a simple video game.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  And you can create some really funny scenarios.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  And.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  We will show you.

• 22:47John Coogan?

  They added the jump button. They added the jump button. You get to pick if it's third person, or I guess, if you don't check that, it's first person, but sometimes you, even if you do check, even if you don't check that, you can still wind up in a third person game if it's obviously a third person request.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  They need to add this, the crouch button.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  But look at this dog.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  They need to add the crouch button.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  Crouch button next, and then the flashbang button, probably.

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're jumping. This is so, it's so fast. I mean, the, the, the previous Genie launch was still called Genie 3, right?

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Well, no, I mean, yes. This is not like a new product.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  This is just making it public.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Like, so, so I think it was in August when Genie 3 was like originally released.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  But it was basically just the paper.

• 23:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  And there were some demos, but no one could actually use it.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  So, so cool. Yeah, I mean, it feels like more directable than VO3 in some ways, and it's certainly more stable as you move around.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's just way cooler, too, because it's a world you can move around in. It's not like VO3 where you're just creating a video.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, the memory is really good, too.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Oh, and you can upload an image.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  And turn back.

• 23:51John Coogan?

  You can upload an image. That's, I mean, get ready to play dinosaurs.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Do you have the clip of us driving?

• 23:57John Coogan?

  So we got access, we generated some. Now, it's in such high demand that you might not be able to generate these worlds for yourself immediately. There might be some rate limits going on. I'm sure the GPUs are on fire. It is gonna be Genie 3 day on the timeline, for sure.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  Do you have John's first prompt?

• 24:17John Coogan?

  You can't access the videos?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  No.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  Oh, no, we didn't download them?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  No, because I think the site is being overloaded so much.

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  Shane, hey, Tyler, take some responsibility. Take some ownership. You're 21 years old now. Take some ownership. You could have downloaded the video.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  As the show goes on, I'll try to make a new one.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  We are gonna move the goalposts. This is AGI, but it's not sufficient AGI, because my definition is not just the jump button. I want mechanics. I want, we generated a video of my Bach driving on the Nürburgring. It was remarkably high fidelity. It was a little sluggish, but that might just be the driving dynamics.

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  I think that was just the driver.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Oh, you think it was the driver?

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, Tyler could not keep this thing on the road. There was a body roll. I was like, just put it in a straight line, Tyler.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  Yes, but I want, I'm waiting, I'm moving the goalposts because I want Genie 3 or Genie 4 to be able to generate game mechanics. If I say I'm racing on the Nürburgring, I want a track timer. I want to be able to stop, change my tires. I want to be able to get a refuel overtakes. I want overlays. I want boost pedals. I want DRS. I want shifting. I want the whole Forza simulation.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Do you think this is bullish for platforms like Roblox and Fortnite that have the existing network and they can integrate world models so that the players that are already a part of these ecosystems and these economies can generate new worlds quickly, generate new games, new characters, etc.? Or is it? As these world models get better, do they become

• 25:53John Coogan?

  Competitive.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  A bigger threat because anybody can just, I'm sure there's infrastructure providers that can say like, yeah, we're going to handle everything from account creation to in-game currency to things like that.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  Definitely competitive in the long term. In the medium term, like, super good for prototyping and communication. And this is a key flow to, okay, you have an idea and you don't just want to, you know, generate a basic image of the game that you're trying to build. You generate a demo, a prototype, and then you go from here into, okay, let's wire it up in Unreal Engine or Roblox or Minecraft or whatever we want to do. And then, and then you have the full game.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, I think Roblox and Fortnite will prove that they have real network effects.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  And it's going to still make sense to create new games within these existing ecosystems.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Google DeepMind created this short film, AI is going to disrupt Hollywood sooner than most might expect. It's their short film, Dear Upstairs Neighbor. It's previewing at Sundance Festival. It's a story about noisy neighbors, but behind the scenes, it's about solving a huge challenge in generative AI control. Developed by Pixar alumni and an Academy Award winner, researchers and engineers, here's how it came together, says DeepMind. This is disruptive. Who knows if it's completely disrupting. There's certainly, I mean, there's demand for movies that are shot on film still. So how quickly will all this roll out? But if you, if you have a vision these days for, you know, an animated movie,

• 27:24John Coogan?

  you should just go try and make it at least. You have to imagine that even if you want to use a more traditional process and go through the traditional Hollywood pipeline, showing up to a pitch meeting at an agency with a pretty much polished AI version of your film is going to resonate in a way that a script might just get sent back in the mailroom.

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  Sean Franks says TikTok views are down. People are blaming the new owners. I think this is just proof that TikTok was botting views the whole time. Your 100,000 view video is probably reaching 25,000 real people. No surprise here for me. I always felt like, it was always obvious that there were very real people on TikTok. But. TikTok had every incentive to just bought all the views because what happens if somebody's getting way more views on TikTok versus Instagram, they're going to lean in. They're going to say like, I have more followers on TikTok. I should be creating content there and that created a flywheel. And so you can imagine as things shifted over, who knows, right? Like basically the new, the new product. They had some system that was.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  I, I like different formats. I liked Vine back in the day. At one point I did set up a TikTok and I uploaded like two or three videos. I was just trying to see like what it felt like to use that platform. And I noticed even though I came to the platform with zero followers, the three or two or three videos that I uploaded immediately got 500 views each. And I thought that the model was you get more of an opportunity to like sort of audition your content in the algorithm. And then if it works, it can blow up very quickly. And I think that that's somewhat true. Like when I started my YouTube channel, the first videos that I put up got 100 views. And for like a year, if I broke a thousand views of video, I was like, this is amazing. Like crazy.

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  You're really grinding.

• 29:13John Coogan?

  But on TikTok, you, you post and you immediately get 500. And I, I've talked to some folks years ago who would set up a new TikTok account for a brand and they would launch one video that was so polished and so designed to be go viral, like they'd blow up a car and they'd spend all this money shooting this and it would actually just, they knew that it would go viral and it just immediately go viral, even though it's a fresh account because they just knew it was good content, it would get shared. TikTok would audition it to like 100 people.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, remember when TikTok launched, it was a period where it was so difficult to grow on Instagram. Like there was a huge challenge. If you're a new creator, you go on Instagram and be really frustrated because your stuff just wasn't getting shared with people that didn't already follow you. Maybe they were views from Chinese users, which are gone now. It's also could be international users. Remember there's like, if you have a new US app under US ownership, is it getting shared with, with, uh, with international users that are using other versions of TikTok? Unclear.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thank you. Goodbye.