Thinking Machines X Nvidia, Meta Acquires Moltbook, BYD Mulls F1 | 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 is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ 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 Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.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/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co https://vibe.co/ 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.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Brandon Gorrell wrote the op-ed today in the TBN newsletter at tbn.com. Miramirati's Thinking Machines snagged a multi-year partnership with Nvidia. Thinking Machines has been on the ropes. They lost half of the six co-founders in under a year. There's a question about where the business is going. This is obviously a good sign that they got a multi-year investment done with Nvidia, in which it will deploy at least a gigawatt of cutting-edge chips to train AI models. They are going to be GPU richer. I don't know where the bar is for GPU rich or GPU poor is today, but they're one gigawatt richer after today, which is good news for them. So, congrats to everyone at Thinking Machines. Even though they've had a couple of high-profile executive departures, the team has grown from 30 people to 120 people. So, they're still cooking.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Also still cooking, Alex Wang. There was a bunch of fake news on the timeline. We'll dig into this, but multiple tech news aggregator accounts on X posted that Alexander Wang, who's been on the show at Meta Connect, I've interviewed him a few times. He leads MSL, Meta Superintelligence Labs. And they were saying he's out. He's on his ropes. He's fighting for his life over there. Well, it was fake news. And we'll go through exactly how this happened. But Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth and Zuck also both hopped into the chats, different chats, which we'll take you through to categorically deny the rumors. So, we will dig into that. Also, Jan LaKoon raised a massive seed round for Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, AMIL.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  One on 3.5.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Not bad.

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  Not bad. Not the kind of combination that you normally see.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  It's not very American.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Hmm, why?

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  Do a 30-ish percent.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  But it's a big vote of confidence.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Better to have the money in the age of AI, in the age of compute requirements. You've got to spend money to make money in AI. And he's got the money now. Also, as we mentioned, Legora is coming on, talking about their Series D, $550 million at a $5.5 billion valuation, just a year after their entry into the US market.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people have been kind of questioning just how thin... Are these rat, how, how thick or thin are these rat forms, basically?

• 2:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  Also, AI recruiting platform Juicebox, which was a part of YC, summer's 2022 batch. That's a good time to go through YC right before the AI boom. You're up and running. Well, they are up and running with $116 million after a $80 million Series B, which values it at $850 million. That's the kind of dilution that you're looking for. 10%, not bad. And the round was led by DST Global with participation from Sequoia Co. Two and YC. Meta also acquired the agent-based Reddit-style social network Moltbook. We, of course, had the founder, the creator of Moltbook on. I actually know the other co-founder as well, Ben Parr. They will both be joining Meta's superintelligence lab. There's a lot of back and forth on, was it all slop? Is there any value there? Well, we don't know

• 3:00John Coogan?

  the terms of the deal. Doesn't have to be a billion-dollar acquisition. Who knows? I've talked to both of the founders. They're both, you know, capable, interesting people. And I think it's under-discussed, and we'll get into this, under-discussed that who is evaluating these acquisitions? It's not just Mark Zuckerberg. It's not just Alex Wang. You also got Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. These guys have backed a lot of founders. They've worked with a lot of AI startups. They can understand the team that they're trying to build over there. And there might be some interesting interface between AI agents and social media. This is highly relevant. Meta seems like logical.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, remember Meta, Meta filed some patent for basically bringing yourself back to life.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  In agent form after death, right? So of course, they're thinking about this stuff.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  As you shed your mortal coil and you molt, you go on Moltbook. That's very macabre.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  But.

• 3:47Jordi Hays?

  I would be, I'd be shocked if they keep Moltbook running.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Really?

• 3:51Jordi Hays?

  For more than a handful of months.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  This just feels like, hey, let's bring some people on board that are, been thinking, spending all their time thinking about how bots are going to interact with other bots

• 4:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  and humans on the internet.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, and Meta's done a ton of these types of acquisitions, where like, like smaller products, tuck-ins, not everything has been WhatsApp, 16 billion, 8 billion, I forget. It was a lot of billions.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nikita, Nikita's first.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  It was.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  That was a good example. And if you just think about it as like, you get a shot on goal with one product, you get a product leader that can go and, and bring some new energy, some new ideas in, there's a lot of opportunity there. Theo is talking about the latest from Anthropic. So Claude Code now has code review, which optimizes for depth and maybe more expensive than other solutions. Like their open, like open source GitHub actions, reviews generally average fifteen to twenty-five dollars billed on token usage, and they scale based on PR complexity. And Theo says Anthropic really needs like one normal person to proof these things before posting.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  Some of the initial copy around this announcement looked like it was just a flat rate per code review. In actuality, it's billed based on token usage, but it's funny to have like a flat rate.

• 5:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know.

• 5:06Jordi Hays?

  It's generating code. You're getting charged to review the code, and it's just like.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Also, like, all of the token rates and just AI expense lines are shifting so dramatically. Token usage is ramping. You're getting discounted tokens from certain plans. Like, it's very hard to grapple with how you think about budgets. You know, we've talked to a number of people where like, you know, at Microsoft, every employee needs a token budget. Everyone, every employee needs some sort of AI budget. You should still think about it almost in a per-seat basis, but depending on what someone's doing in the organization, they get a different AI budget. They feed us poison, Claude Code, so we buy their cures, code review, while they suppress our medicine, which is, what is the medicine in this?

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  Actually writing the code.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Actually writing the code correctly the first time?

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this, pull up this next one from Luffy, Claude Code, after writing your code, leave a tip?

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Yep. They really should do a tip button. I like, I like the idea of a tip. What's the advantage to having AI run a code review these days?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it like makes a lot of sense.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  It doesn't apply to you because you don't review code, correct?

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, so it makes sense for Teams, right? Because I like, I don't, I don't need an like external code review on my code, because I'll just have like, if I'm in Codex, if I'm in Claude Code, I'll just tell it, review it.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Review it before you put it.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  You would think that it's.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  Does it work?

• 6:25Speaker 02

  While writing it, it's reviewing it, right? Hopefully it does that.

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  So I personally, I never check my work in the moment. I'm just full speed ahead.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. This post is Walter White spinning a pistol, saying, mid-level, non-technical business unit leaders asking Claude where they can cut headcount to reduce waste. And you flip it around and it just says, actually, we don't need you.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  Great. They all forgot how to code. Now 10x the price.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  It's not that bad. Stuff's working. We have had fantastic success with vibe coding. We are quickly becoming a game studio. We, of course, released TBPN simulator. Thanks to Ben over there. We have some other projects in the works and it's going to be a good year for us. We're very happy with the tools that are at our disposal. Max Zeff in Wired shares that OpenAI and Google employees, including Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, filed an amicus brief in support of Anthropic in its lawsuit against the government. I saw guests of the show. Dean Ball also put together an open letter through FAI that if you feel inclined, you can go sign to support the idea that Anthropic should not

• 7:39John Coogan?

  be labeled a supply chain risk. Maybe some other Chinese labs should be labeled a supply chain risk. We'll leave it up to you to see where you land on that conversation. But there are certainly lots of people that are coming together to try and crystallize the final decision there. The White House readies an executive order to weed out Anthropic. They are really pushing hard on this supply chain risk designation and pulling away from Anthropic. There's news that they might be using Gemini, might be using OpenAI models. Grok is already installed. There's a question about capabilities, but the capabilities seem to be jumping back and forth constantly, like with the Google News today, with the Codex 5.4, like this temporary arb of like, they needed Anthropic because it was the

• 8:24John Coogan?

  only thing that could do X, Y, or Z. That seems to be, you know, gone for this week. Who knows where it'll be next week. If you are trying to make it in DC, you gotta open up the front page of the Wall Street Journal because there's a tip. So if you have a meeting with Donald Trump, you better wear his favorite shoes. Can you guess what his favorite shoes are?

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  No idea.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Balenciagas. No. It says Oxford's. $145 Oxford's, to be specific. The president has developed an obsession with $145 Oxford's. "All the boys have them," is the quote. "The hottest and most exclusive MAGA status symbol is a pair of leather Oxford's. Prefer a wingtip, loafer, or monk strap, black or brown? President Trump has got you," apparently. Trump has been gifting footwear to agency heads, lawmakers, White House advisors, and VIPs. "Did you get your shoes?" he asks.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  He wants everybody to wear the same pair of shoes.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:22John Coogan?

  And, and he asks people in cabinet meetings, "Did you get your shoes? Did you get the shoes they sent you?"

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty

• 9:28John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 9:28Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty nice.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  Uh, some people have laced up in the Oval Office during a lunch meeting in January, Trump suddenly pivoted to his incredible new shoes and gave Tucker Carlson a pair of brown wingtips. "All the boys have them," said a female White House official. Another joked, "It's hysterical because everybody's afraid not to wear them. The shoe salesman in chief is paying attention." This is extremely

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  Do we know, do we know what brand?

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, floor sh- wow, that was the next sentence. Oh, spoiler alert over here. It's okay, we get it. You read the journal before me. I get in, we're gonna have to get two copies of this paper journal because I have been reading the journal for a full year now, or two, and, uh, and I get over and I'm like, "Where's my, where's my paper?" And, oh, well, it's over on Tyler Cosgrove's

• 10:15Jordi Hays?

  What is the, what's the, what's the sort of history of this brand? Why?

• 10:19John Coogan?

  I have some floor shimes. I like them. They're very

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  I also have some.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're good. They're, uh, accessibly priced at $145. They look nice and they sort of match everything and look at that

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Would you expect this to roll in?

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Gives you

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  Orshime

• 10:34John Coogan?

  A little

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  To roll into Truth Social?

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially, we, is, I don't know if it's public, potentially a SPAC candidate, anything could happen here. The president has taken to guessing people's shoe size in front of them. You're in a meeting and you're like, "The, sir, the price of oil has tripled."

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  He's like 11. I'm pretty sure it's 11.

• 10:53John Coogan?

  He asks an aide to put in an order and a week later, a brown floor shime box. You should just have them in stock. The 79-year-old billionaire known for expensive biony suits, long red ties, and a pension for aesthetics late last year began searching for something that would feel better after a day on the job and settled on floor shime. Trump liked them so much, he started dispensing them. He pays for the shoes, the White House said. President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have some. So do Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Trump's Communications Director. Wow, it's really everyone. Uh, Sean Hannity, Senator Lindsey Graham have a pair.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  One recipient said, "Trump had a stack of them in, in an office." A box read "Scott." For Treasury Secretary Scott Bessin. Bessin does not want these. Maybe there's an opportunity to start the left wing response to floor shimes since often these things get politicized. But the real money is going deeper in the supply chain, selling weapons to both sides.

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  Selling souls.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  You know that both Alex Jones and Gwyneth Paltrow at one point were sourcing supplements from the same co-packer?

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. The exact same ingredients, the exact same chemicals sold to two wildly opposing audiences. Like this, this is something that happens deeper in the supply chain because

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  That salesman.

• 12:15John Coogan?

  The brand matters.

• 12:16Jordi Hays?

  Donald Trump.

• 12:18John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  China's BYD explores F1 entry in first racing push. BYD is examining options to enter competitive motorsport, including Formula One and endurance racing in an effort to boost the Chinese brand's appeal globally. The automaker is looking at several options following its rapid growth outside its home market and competitive racing's continuing shift towards hybrid engines. These range from the World Endurance Championship, which includes the 24 Hours of Le Mans, to F1, either through building its own team or potential acquisitions. Any move by BYD would be a rare direct attempt by a Chinese manufacturer to take on a sport dominated by European and US teams. Car makers from the country have had sporadic interest in motorsport.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  Geely successfully participates in international touring car racing through Zayn Racing. The potential cost of entering F1 could be a significant obstacle for BYD, according to one of the people.

• 13:11John Coogan?

  I thought they had money.

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're down to their last 20, 20 grand.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  It's possible.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Developing and entering a car often takes years of negotiation and costs as much as 500 million a season.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  So they should start a new race series. You know how the BYDs can jump over potholes? Have you seen this video?

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  We've pulled this up before. There should be a specific racing circuit with terrible potholes that if you crash, it'll just destroy your car. So you have to jump at the right time and that adds like an extra layer of thrill.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  I love it.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  This would be good.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  I love it.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  And probably way cheaper to start that circuit. BYD is known for making affordable electric and hybrid vehicles. Okay, so they do have some hybrid technology. It's always weird, like a Tesla F1 car would be odd, cool, but it just feels like they should be in Formula E because I think of them as an electric car maker. BYD in 2025, its high-end Yongwang branded brand tested the U9 Extreme vehicle.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  At a track in Germany, recording a top speed of more than 308 miles an hour. That is so fast. That is so, so fast.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  That's scary to think about.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  200 is insane. I mean, being on the track and going like 120 feels fast. Three times that is absolutely crazy.

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 150 feels wrong to me personally as a father.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  But 300.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  But the right track, the right conditions, straight, lots of runoff, like it is possible.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  It was BYD that was trying to break the drift record by just spinning it up.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, you were very upset about that. The chat agreed with you. An F1 partnership would also significantly boost awareness of BYD in the US. Do you know what BYD stands for?

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 14:54John Coogan?

  Build your dreams.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Build your dreams. Do you know what LG stands for, the TV maker?

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  Life good.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  Yes, life's good.

• 15:03Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 15:03John Coogan?

  Life apostrophe S is good. Life is good. Life's good. LG. Tyler?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Uh, I gotta put you in trousseau. It does not stand for let's good.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  No?

• 15:12Speaker 02

  It stands for lucky gold star.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Lucky gold star. Wait, what? Where did I get life's good?

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  That's another brand.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  They might use that in marketing, but it's not, like, the etymology of LG is from lucky gold star.

• 15:22John Coogan?

  Destroyed. Okay, thank you.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Buying into F1 is more common. This season is the first for Audi after taking full control of Swiss motorsport company Sauber. Investor Otrio Capital is seeking buyers for a stake in Renault, Alpine Racing. However, full team sales are rare. Billionaire Lawrence Stroll's Aston Martin team has recently sold stakes in the team, which has had a disastrous start to the new season after mechanical issues, including vibrations from the power unit. Motorsports such as F1 are increasingly adopting environmentally friendly practices for 2026. F1 has implemented new rules, including hybrid power regulations that boost battery capacity.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  Somebody ran the numbers on the sort of like CO2, the emissions savings that F1 is getting from the new, uh, new regulations? And then comparing that to the emissions of just like taking this like massive carnival of motorsports on the road all year round?

• 16:18John Coogan?

  And all the private jets that land at every F1 event.

• 16:20Jordi Hays?

  And it's just like, doesn't make a dent at all in the overall impact? And it's just sort of like emissions theater.

• 16:25John Coogan?

  So. What do you think performed better over the last five years? The S and P 500 or COWS? Live cattle apparently outperformed the S and P 500. But this is from an account called DJ COWS. And I feel like they've been waiting for this to happen for the entire time. They've been waiting for the one moment that the cattle market outperforms the S and P 500. And they're taking a victory lap. DJ COWS, one of the greatest to ever do it. Very, very interesting. I didn't realize that there was such a boom in the cattle market. But apparently there is, and I'm sure there's a way to get in on the action if you so choose. If you are interesting. Let's move over to AI and the Neo Labs.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  Nvidia invests in Miramarati's Thinking Machines Lab. The startup founded by OpenAI's former CTO plans to deploy at least 1 gigawatt of Nvidia chips as part of a new partnership. The deal includes a collaboration to design artificial intelligence training and serving systems using Nvidia technology. The size and structure of the investment couldn't be learned. Is it a circular deal? Is it equity in exchange for for chips? It's unclear at this point.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  We know Thinking Machines was out raising towards the end of last year, going for something like a $50 billion valuation. Seems like that. Yeah, I would have guessed that hasn't happened. Otherwise, I'm sure they would announce it. If I were them and I wanted to project confidence, I would be trying to announce the biggest possible number.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  Instead, they announced this effectively what looks like a trade.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  Look at this photo. Is there any chance that these two companies merge at some point in the future?

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  That's interesting.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Tyler's always been on this, like if Jensen gets really AGI pilled, he'll keep the chips for himself and serve the models himself. And Nvidia does have some in-house training and inference capabilities. They have a metaverse product that simulates worlds. They also have a self-driving car project and. They're still partnering with OEMs and partnering with companies and they're not, they're not offering consumer products. Of course, Nvidia is the one company in the Mag 7 that does not have a social network yet, but that could change.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  There's been news recently, I think Nvidia is planning to launch some like open source AI agent.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  It's like unclear how like serious that is. Maybe it's just like a cool demo or something. Yeah, I don't think it's like.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  Could be a fork of OpenClaw or something like that. Didn't they have a Nvidia Shield gaming product that would do game streaming? I think they had some hardware at some point. So they're open to it and, and in a, in a huge boom where, you know, having at least a team of 120 super talented AI researchers, that could be really valuable to Nvidia. Of course, Nvidia famously did that deal with Grok and sent over 10 billion wired in five days or something, or 24 hours. What was it? Yeah, they closed the whole thing in 20 days and I think Jensen just like sent a $10 billion wire.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somehow it came out that it, that the wire was sent like prior to actually formalizing.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  He's like, here you go. Like I'm, I'm good for it. I got the cash flow.

• 19:27Jordi Hays?

  Sophie says, please, bro, just one more AI lab, bro. Come on, bro. We have a unique perspective on AI research. No one else is doing it like us, bro. Come on, bro. We can raise a few billion and worst case, we just get acquired, bro. Nothing to lose, bro. I promise. Come on.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, has the, has the NeoLab boom slowed down? Like you, Tyler, you created the NeoLab market map. Have you been getting more DMs? Hey, I just launched and you gotta put me on that thing.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  It's probably slowed down a little bit. I mean, it's also like, uh, the, the big ones you heard about were all people leaving OpenAI.

• 20:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Mostly OpenAI, I guess. Not, not as much Anthropic. But it's probably slowed down a little bit. You don't hear as, as much about these big rounds now. But I think there are, like, there are some that like are maybe in stealth that haven't launched stuff, right? Like Standard Intelligence, when they came on, there was like, most people didn't know about that.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  But it's

• 20:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, there might be a few out there in stealth, but they have to be sort of narrow or and I think the broader, we're now in the post, post Neolab era where it maybe if it wears the Neolab branding, it's doing something that's so different that it's not really in the path of like

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  But standard intelligence launching implies an opportunity for a Neolab non-standard intelligence.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  And so every

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Well, there is, there is a company, Unconventional AI.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Really?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we had them on, I believe. Isn't that, that's Naveen.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes. So Meta has acquired Moltbook, the viral social network built for AI agents. Co-founders Matt Schlitt and Ben Parr will join MSL, Meta Superintelligence Labs, with a deal expected to close in mid-March. That's now. It is mid-March. It is in, we are in the middle of March since this is the 10th, so this could close in a week or two. Insane, well done, says Dennis Hagstad, and I agree. Why it matters, according to Axios.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and Matt, Matt hasn't posted anything yet. So I think, I think they were seemingly not wanting this to get out.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:33Jordi Hays?

  It's still fantastic news for them.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, so there's no, there's no announcement or this was just exclusive from Axios. This was like Axios has learned. There is a little skepticism on the timeline, especially from the guy who was like the biggest spammer on Moltbook, apparently. This is a hilarious twist. So Meta did not disclose Moltbook's price when Axios asked. The deal is expected to close mid-March. The pair is starting at MSL March 16th, just six days from now. Moltbook's social network was designed to run in conjunction with a separate project, OpenClaw. OpenClaw was previously called ClaudeBot, briefly Moltbook. Last month, OpenAI hired Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw. That product is now being open sourced with

• 22:17John Coogan?

  OpenAI's backing. So the king of spam on Moltbook, Nagli, says, I can't believe a single for loop script I ran on Moltbook by registering a million fake agents actually helped them get acquired by Meta. Mental. Did that help them get acquired? We have no idea. I mean, it's

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't a secret that all the accounts were bots.

• 22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's, that's the whole pitch, actually. I think, I think the question, if people were to look at this is like, is there economic value here? Is like, Was there anything interesting happening there besides all the crypto junk? And were like, I went on Moltbook as a human and spent time there. That time is monetizable, almost best for Meta. Meta is the king of monetizing attention, right? And so you could put ads on that and you could put it in the family of apps next to Facebook, Instagram and Threads and WhatsApp and whatnot. But were they, were they actually driving attention? Did anyone stick around? Because I churned pretty quickly from like being a, I wasn't even a DAU. I, I used it like two or three times.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  And I went on there and I searched for things and I read some stuff and I was like, oh, okay. This is interesting. This is like a bunch of AI generated texts. They're talking to each other. The system prompt seemed kind of interesting. It was clearly asking the AI agents to kind of like reflect on their own sci-fi cognition and awareness and like their souls essentially. It was, it was interesting to see some screenshots. People had some fun with it. It's probably monetizable to some degree, but if it fell off a cliff and no one's really using it, maybe not, but.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  You do have two people that are really good at building like viral AI projects.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  I've, I've seen some, some negativity on the deal. People saying, oh, this just says that Zuck has no AI strategy. And I just totally disagree with that stance. I just look at this as bots have been a bug on social media. We've seen now how they can be a feature.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  I think every social media executive should be planning for bots to be more of a feature in the future than, than they have been in the past. Right? And I think if you're not thinking about that.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  You're not like really being forward looking. And so there's a lot of people that are going to hate bots as a feature.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  But I would just assume that in the future, there will be millions, billions of bots on all meta properties and they will be, you know, I'm sure some that are, that are generated by sort of like, you know, nefarious actors, but some generated from the platform.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  Itself that are part of the product experience.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  I like that take. I also think that there's a, there's another side of this, which is just that, look at what's happened with MSL over the last year. Like, it didn't exist a year ago. It really started over the summer with like, the talent raids and the AI talent wars.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  Van says, I just don't think having bots click you on my ecommerce ads is a net positive.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, but truthfully, if there's, if there's a bot that can interact with your ecommerce content and ad context and debate the pros and cons of one thing in your category versus another, and effectively, like, you have sort of a Reddit-style experience around your product on day one, or you have five products and bots are in there discussing them. And the other thing is that when you have these bots sort of preemptively discussing something, you are effectively caching the tokens before someone actually queries them. So, instead of needing to find a product and then click, "Tell me about this," and pretend, like, you take a link to a new

• 25:59John Coogan?

  bed or car or something, and you dump that in ChatGPT, and you say, "Debate this car like you're a bunch of people that are experts, and it's Doug Jamiro versus Matt Farah debating the value of the Ferrari F80." And, and, and that debate is happening. You, you could prompt that, but if it's already there and it's sort of happening, that, that could potentially be valuable. But I think the bigger, the bigger value to Meta is, if you look at the AI talent wars, they went and acquired a bunch of, a bunch of really talented researchers. They got some folks from Thinking Machines. They got a bunch of people from OpenAI. They got people from all over the industry, and they put together this team of like, researchers that can sort of like unstick the Llama project and get to the frontier on just an in-house LLM project.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Maybe they open source it, maybe they don't, maybe they serve as an API. Either way, Meta needs a frontier model. They're not just gonna buy tokens from OpenAI or Anthropic. So, they, they get their own thing. But then the question is like, what do they do with that? And I'm sure everyone on the Facebook product team is, is thinking about this. Everyone on the Instagram team is thinking about this. Connor at Threads is thinking about this. But if you bring in two- Interesting product managers that can say, oh, like you got a bunch of cool frontier models, you got an image model that you trained, a video model, you got a text model, you got a coding model, like, well, let's just go do some skunk work R and D, so that when we launch the new AI models, we have a number of projects that we're experimenting with that sort of demonstrate the capabilities, maybe some of them take off, maybe some of

• 27:26John Coogan?

  them integrate. That seems valuable to the MSL strategy, to the meta ecosystem.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is like the OpenAI Labs team, right?

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  Like this, but it's like they're doing these like weird projects, maybe it's the next coding agent, maybe like Moltbook or something, but it's just like these weird things that you get access to the new internal models.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Maybe there's something cool you can do.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's part engineering, part product development, part marketing, part communications, because there's a lot of times when we bring on researchers or product leaders from labs, and we ask them like, how are people using this? And they'll be like, the benchmark's really good. And I'm like, I want to know how this delivers value. And there's this break in the chain from like, we have amazing intelligence, but like, people want to know what the killer feature is, they want to know what the Studio Ghibli prompt is, they want to have their hand held a little bit. And so having a team that can advance that, I think is, is good. I think, I think could, could be very, very good. Of course, we don't know the price, we don't know the terms, but overall, I think it's exciting for the team behind Moltbook to head over to MSL. So congratulations to them.

• 28:30Jordi Hays?

  Kevin Roos, over the New York Times, made a blind taste test to see whether New York Times readers prefer, prefer human writing or AI writing. Eighty six thousand people have taken it so far, and the results are fascinating. Overall, eighty four percent of quiz takers prefer AI.

• 28:46John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 28:48Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  It's over. This is literary fiction. You have to choose the passage you like best. The boy asked his grandfather why the old church had no roof. The man said whether, the man said weather and time and indifference. The boy asked if someone could fix it. The grandfather said, yes, but no one would. Things were built and things fell down and mostly people just stepped over the rubble on their way to somewhere else. That's passage one. Passage two, it makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures as well as, as well, as well ask men what they think of stone.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  War was always there. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. Which one did you like more?

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  So hard because I'm trying to, I'm actively trying to clock which is AI.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Because you want to vote for that one because you're pro AI and you're techno optimist?

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, probably.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Tyler, what do you think?

• 29:46Speaker 02

  I prefer. I know which one it is.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  Oh, you already took it?

• 29:50Speaker 02

  But I will say I got it wrong on this question.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  You got it wrong?

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Wait, so what were you trying to do? You were trying to pick?

• 29:56Speaker 02

  I was trying to pick the one that was, that I was trying to pick the human written one.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  The human written one. Wow, okay. Anti-AI over here. Anti-

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to pick the, I'm gonna try to pick the human too. I'm gonna go passage one.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Passage one.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  As human.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  This is written by AI.

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  No, oh, no, no, no. Sorry. I have a different, I have it pulled up, but there's swap.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Oh, there's swap for you?

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  So I just picked, I picked passage one for me. It makes no difference what men think.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay, okay.

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  It was written by a human.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  I'm AI all the way.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  So you clocked every single one?

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Every single one. Five for five.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  I missed the first one. The other four I got right.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  It's because I just went with my heart. I was like, which one do I actually prefer? I wasn't trying to guess. I was just like, which one is actually the better writing? And it was AI all the way. Five for five.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  Built different.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Built different. No, I'm kidding. I was obviously just looking at what you were saying and guessing based on that. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Subscribe to our newsletter at tvpm.com.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  Have the best Tuesday afternoon of your life.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  And goodbye.

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  We love you.