AI’s Economic Impact, Warren Buffett Discovers YouTube, Mistral Launches “Le Chonk” | 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 Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ 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?

  I was leafing through GQ this morning. Tom Cruise is on the cover. It's a good addition. There's a funny anecdote in here that I wanted to share. I gotta find it. But they got the whole Tom Cruise spread, lots of photos. But they did a little back and forth interview with him and he's a course bro. He dropped a course, a private course. And we gotta get access to this. The question from the GQ interviewer, you have mentored a lot of younger actors. Glenn Powell has talked about watching a six hour instructional video about screen acting that you made, right? And Tom Cruise says, it was very basic. It was just something to have people understand, just to have a different concept of lenses

• 0:46John Coogan?

  and what the lens is and what the frame is, just the same way as an actor on stage.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  Being a global superstar for dummies.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically. He made a, he made a six hour, that's a course. He made a six hour video. Just the same way as an actor on stage or in the development of cinema where it started and what that frame means and how it Great success.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  And how to understand that frame.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Woo, thank you, Tim.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  There's just different layers of storytelling, of structure, but also to understand certain things so that you can forget about it. What else do you tell younger people, other people in your business? I listen first, what do they want? It's not me. I'm more interested in what are their goals? What do they want? And it's not just younger people. This is me when I was a kid. I'm going, what are you interested in? They say, really? I said, yes. What is this movie about? What is this?

• 1:38John Coogan?

  There's a bunch of other fun things in here, but I thought it was funny that there's a secret six hour training video on how to be an actor from Tom Cruise. We gotta get access to it. I feel like there's a lot of journalists that they get documents, they scoop things, they release things. But I've never seen anyone just be like, I'm putting down 10 racks for whoever can bring me the six hour Tom Cruise video. I'm putting it behind a paywall. I'm gonna monetize it, but there's a bounty out. Like Kevin Roos has the Dari Amadei, big blob of compute thesis from 2017, like this leaked PDF, sort of on the scaling law and the bitter lesson, basically. And I've never seen a journalist just be like, I know this document's out there. Like Eric Newcomer should just be like, bring me founders fund returns.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  I'll, I'll give you five grand if you got them, you know, because it probably maths out at some point.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  Five million.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  Maybe more, maybe more, yeah.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  To risk, to risk your allocation in the next.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I suppose that that would violate journalistic ethics to just put a bounty out for a document that you know exists.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  I will bribe you.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  For the truth.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  And it probably really, like I was thinking about the, the, the various leaks that go out, like some of them violate NDAs, but if they're, if they're secretive enough and they're squirreled away via Signal, like they probably don't trace back, they probably don't really trigger anything. Also, some of them just don't really matter. They will, you know, for a company is, might not be that frustrated about a particular leak. If it makes the company look good, but.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking, speaking of movies, the team saw a movie yesterday. Ben, could we get a review? Oh, you didn't go.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  Ben didn't, wow, didn't come, yeah.

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  Wow, Tyler, review.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  I saw it.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  Who saw it?

• 3:17Speaker 02

  So we saw it, Digger.

• 3:18Jordi Hays?

  Nick said that he was starting to look at his phone after like 40 minutes.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  Nick did not enjoy it. I thought it was pretty good. And so basically the reviews are really bad, right?

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  And famously, well, not famously, but like the box office is really bad.

• 3:30John Coogan?

  Not all the reviews are bad. I saw Mark Andreessen gave it a positive review.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  He did, yeah. And that was really one of the only like very positive reviews I saw. But yeah, I think the budget was like 160 million first weekend.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Tracking to like eight million, yeah.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Pretty brutal. I thought it was, it was good. It was very cool. Like the, like the framing of the movie. I, it's, it's, it's hard to like reveal too much.

• 3:51Jordi Hays?

  Arrogant review. I thought it was very cool.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  Did you go to film school? Like this, this critique is so nuanced. It's remarkable.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  I don't want to spoil anything. I don't want to spoil anything.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  What was cool about it?

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  Just give us like 30 seconds of spoilers. I'll bleep it out.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Okay, so basically.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  The bleep organ. The game decompilation thing is going strong. Ben Thompson was writing about it in Sir Techery today. There were some more knock on effects. He took it in a very interesting like legal direction about the, the implications of taking a video game, decompiling it, doing whatever you want with it. Obviously IP licensors don't like that, but there's not a lot that you can, that you can do to control that. And obviously open source models are coming. And there's a bunch of interesting knock on effects. I saw a really funny one. They're getting funnier, these mashups. I saw one where someone was playing NHL hockey in Resident Evil. Did you see this one?

• 4:46John Coogan?

  It was really, it was really such a good mashup because the guy's just like on ice skates and like flicking pucks at zombies. It was, it was pretty good. I was, I was into it. Again, probably not really something I want to play for five hours, but will I watch the 30 second video of it? Absolutely. But yeah, Polygon has been breaking this down. If you've been on X over the last few days, you've probably noticed that things have gotten very weird when it comes to modded video games. There are clips of Call of Duty operators doing kickflips and other tricks from Skate. People playing Black Ops 1 zombie mode in Skyrim, Miles Morales swinging through Gotham. Here's another to add to the list. Someone has gotten the Xbox version of Halo Combat Evolved, running in a web browser with multiplayer and split screen support.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  And the other funny thing is that it's not, they didn't, like apparently the Halo community doesn't like the PC release of Halo. So they ported the Xbox version to the cloud browser. It's like, you, you can really do anything you want now. And so Ben Thompson goes on to describe a little bit of what's going on. Games are written in human readable languages, C, C++. Obviously there's scripting languages on top of that, but then they're compiled into machine code. It's executable by the processor that they're intended for. For Halo, that's x86. You've always been able to disassemble machine code into assembly because assembly maps almost perfectly to this machine code. The difficult part, which takes humans years is decompiling assembly to C or some human readable language that then you can actually modify.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  But LLMs are really good at that. And so is it legal? Is it legal? The story conflates two different AI capabilities. The Fallout project appears to be a new game. There's no Fallout New York. Although using the name Fallout is likely a trademark violation. I think we were joking about the lawyers being really excited seeing all these going out because it means full employment. Decomiling is not in and of itself illegal. Saga, Sega versus Accolade held that disassembling code is fair use if it is the only way to reach unprotected functional elements and there was a legitimate purpose. And Sony versus Connectix extended the same reasoning to reverse engineering the PlayStation's BIOS.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  However, that is likely where protections and code that is derived from decompiling is by definition very similar, if not identical to the original code, which is covered by copyright. So even if you go and decompile a game and then you ship something that's like a mod, you're gonna get a DMCA notice. And this is already happening. Like something will go up, it'll get, it'll go viral and then they'll get hit with a, a takedown notice. This already happened.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Two hours later.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Is that me or is that?

• 7:22Jordi Hays?

  Getting hit with a copyright.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  Two hours later, you'll get hit by, yeah, copyright. So you have to take it down. There's, there's a couple of interesting things. So the actual value of these like decompiled games mashups, pretty limited because you basically just get a viral video. And you can't really monetize it because you're getting a takedown notice, but the, the, the training rollout for the AI labs, like the training data that comes from like having this fleet of like all these different game modders go and spend a bunch of tokens that they're basically paying for. Maybe it's a little subsidized, but like they're basically paying for all this decompilation. And then also the labs probably have RL environments for this type of work. And then there's tools for this as well.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Means that I would expect like the next version of models that is trained on all the inference that's happening right now. Because everyone right now in the game modding community is like, let me go point GPT Astra and Opus 5.5 at whatever game binaries I can get. So it's like, oh, I, I like Skyrim. I like Minecraft. Let's go decompile those. But then they're also doing it with all the long tail. So all of that's going into the next set of training data. So you would imagine that the models get much better at video game development, which is, which is cool. He also just talks about like how things will change over time, similar to, similar to what's happened in video.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  AI seems to exacerbate a lot of trends, including the shift to service based games. So he talks about like, in a world where if you send someone a disk or you send someone a executable binary, like they're just gonna decompile it and be able to do whatever they want with it, maybe you want to stream that game. So you, this was, Google had an effort for this. I forget what that was called. But Google had the ability to basically stream you a 1080p.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Google Stadia.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Stadia, that's right. So they would stream you the video output and you would stream them the controller input. And the game would run on the server. So you never saw any code. You just saw a video coming back.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  This is also how the Meta Quest Xbox edition worked. You were streaming the game in.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  That's right. That's right. And I think, I think Xbox has, has stayed with the cloud gaming a little bit longer. But gamers have always sort of pushed back on that. I don't like the latency. What if my wifi goes out? I'm just trying to play in a single player game, blah, blah, blah. And so it's possible that this is something where the game industry comes together and they're like, we really gotta fight these hackers. We gotta hide our code more behind more of a firewall, like that cloud streaming firewall. Or it could be something that they just like embrace and go the, the IP protection route. Yeah, I, it's hard to think that this doesn't go the way of generated text where like people still care about the, the posts

• 10:08John Coogan?

  and where they come from, effectively intellectual property. The instantiation of the actual product is less relevant than the story around it and the, and the people behind it and the, and the shelling point of like, we're playing the same game. Of course, people will do their individual stuff as well. But anyway.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  What else we have going on, John?

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Well.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  I am so glad to be past that subject.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Because you just don't like video games?

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I had enough. I had enough.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  You had enough?

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  I had enough.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  What about the racing segment?

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  Two days in a row.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  That's a video game.

• 10:39Jordi Hays?

  That's the final frontier.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're gonna be able to race anywhere you want.

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  Mustafa says, uh, coming in with a major white pill. AI won't take your job anytime soon. In 10 years, only 5% of what humans do will be replaced by AI. Let's see what he has to say about that.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  They're doing new media over at MAI. The Humanist Review of AI, they made a magazine and they have a number of articles. And, uh, they tapped MIT economist and Nobel laureate, Nobel Prize winner in economics, Darren Isomoglu, to write a piece about how AI will diffuse. And it's interesting because in this one, it's total white pill. But then he was on 60 Minutes and he's, and he's a little bit more black pilled. So we'll have to go back and forth. I think it's the same.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  Wait, that's the same guy?

• 11:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. We'll have to reconcile this. Okay? So let's see what Darren Is- uh, uh, Isomoglu says in the Humanist, uh, Review. It's a longer piece, but, uh, Mustafa Suleman, uh, summarized it here. He said, "He argues that we need to stop building AI to replace people and start building it to make them better at their jobs. 52% of Americans are worried about AI's impact on their jobs. The fear is overblown and it's steering how we build AI." I like the 48% of just confident people. Like, good luck.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  Good luck. I'd like to see you, I'd like to see you try.

• 12:03John Coogan?

  The type of work I do, yeah, I'm not in the training data. I'm not, there's no R L environment for what I do. Um, AI isn't in the productivity statistics yet. This was the famous line about the internet. It shows up everywhere except the productivity statistics. Most firms using AI aren't seeing real gains yet. Expect roughly 1.5% added to GDP over 10 years. Not a revolution. Electricity took decades to spread. There's so many reasons.

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  The problem is like, so, so the problem is like going back to our conversation, uh, with Sean Frank yesterday from Bridge. This is a company that's over 10 years old right now, growing 50% this year. Using AI across the entire business from demand planning to creative, to a number of other things. And the business is performing pretty much as well as it ever has. The thing is you, AI is impacting the whole business in different ways. In big ways and small ways. But you can't give AI credit for the growth because there's so many factors contributing, right? New products pushing to retail, all these different things. And I think you can still say that maybe most firms aren't using it to see, see real gains.

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  But when you say that electricity took decades to spread, I just don't view AI as, it, it's not the kind of technology that, that takes a long time to spread when it works.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  And that's because we can use the internet, which pretty much everybody that's productive has access to, to spread AI.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  So, um, already, uh, just a few bullet points in and, and, uh.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  But the Nobel Prize winning economist has another example to push back on you with. He says, "If you don't like the electricity example, here's another one. Speech recognition." He said, "Turning speech into text has been an aspiration since the 1930s." And this is a harder one to grapple with than, than electricity. Because a lot of what was in place for AI is also in place, what, uh, a lot of the things that you're saying about why diffusion should be faster for AI was true for, uh, for speech recognition. So, uh, people have been trying to do speech recognition. You talk the computer types since the 1930s, going on 100 years of pursuing this. It became a huge step closer to reality,

• 14:22John Coogan?

  thanks to the work by American, by, by the American husband and wife team, James and Janet Baker, starting in the 1980s, when they founded the iconic company Dragon Systems. Dragon truly revolutionized voice recognition. And it would not be an exaggeration to say that everything else that has followed in voice recognition since then is thanks to the Bakers. Their breakthroughs, their breakthrough was to eschew previous attempts to build speech recognition systems based on syntax and meaning, and instead deploy machine learning techniques in order to build a pure prediction system, which would map speech onto the best match text.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  Already in 1997, the year Dragon launched Dragon Naturally Speaking, the first program that was capable of voice recognition from natural continuous speech. The mo- the momentousness of this was obvious. So in previous software, uh, including the previous product from Dragon, Dragon Dictate, you had to pause in between each word to let it process the gap between words. You no longer needed to do that with Dragon Naturally Speaking. This was 1997. I can vouch for all of this because, uh, Darren Isomoglu, the writer, uh, after developing repetitive strain injury in both arms in 97, he was an early user, even with the very slow processors of the time. Dragon Naturally Speaking was like magic.

• 15:46John Coogan?

  It would score close to 95% accuracy. I didn't know at the time that I would be a user of their products for the next 30 years. But what I immediately knew was that the processing power of computers improved. I could have access to much more powerful voice recognition software, enabling me to carry out my work despite a continued inability to type. By 2000, everything was going as I and others had predicted. The software had gotten better and with better computer chips, accuracy and functionality were improving at a fast pace. What nobody could predict was that in the next two decades, despite advances in the underlying technology, consumers would see little of the gains, thanks to a series of corporate disasters. Dragon was acquired in 2000 by a Belgian company, Learnout and Houspi, uh, that went bankrupt within months of the purchase,

• 16:32John Coogan?

  with its co-founders later being found guilty of corporate fraud. Uh, you hate to see that.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  Naughty, naughty.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  Uh, so Dragon was then purchased by Scansoft, rebranded as Nuance. I actually worked for a startup in college that got acquired by Nuance. Uh, very, very talented team over there, uh, which progressively deprioritized the consumer in favor of medical and enterprise markets. If you walk into a hospital today, you will see a lot of, a lot of doctors and nurses dictating notes, uh, even before the Whisper, uh, revolution that just recently happened. Microsoft acquired Nuance in 2022 and continued the same model. The result, voice recognition software on PCs today is only marginally better than what was available in 2000. Far less progress than the underlying technology would have led me to expect. But this disappointing history lesson is one of the reasons why even greater curation is warranted when making predictions

• 17:24John Coogan?

  about the fast diffusion of AI models today. Breakthroughs in the infrastructure of a new technology need to go hand in hand with the right kinds of applications built on this infrastructure. And then, of course, you need the right marketing structure to reach potential customer base, as well as inputs from consumers to act as the impetus for modifications and improvements of the applications. This is what we are not seeing for AI. This is what was completely bungled for voice recognition. What do you think?

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  Whole lot of mumbo jumbo, John.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  Okay. Let's move over to 60 Minutes because Darren Isomoglu takes the other side of his own argument, arguing against himself with Brendan Foody from McCr.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Job category on LinkedIn. And just as machinists once replaced artisans, Brendan Foody insists he's creating a career of the future. Out of work? Fear not. Come crane AI.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Literally all of the top 20 economists in America, they would say the exact same thing, which is that there's going to be more jobs in 10 years than there are today. You're a top economist in America. What say you?

• 18:25Speaker 05

  No.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  One of the greatest edits ever.

• 18:28Speaker 05

  I don't know that could happen. What we are living through with AI is unprecedented. The first phase of the industrial revolution.

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  You're positive this is the same guy?

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:38Jordi Hays?

  In this article that we agree.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Wait, I, I, I don't think these article, like these two things are incompatible.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Break it down for us.

• 18:44Speaker 02

  So the article is.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because he is saying 5%. 5% of the things humans do are at risk.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  No, he's saying that right now, if we keep building AI the same way, it will replace workers, but we need to build it a different way that like empowers workers. That's what the article, like the headline of the article is, "Will AI Replace Workers? Not If We Build It Right." He's saying like, right now, on the course that we're doing right now, it's going to replace workers.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  So we need to shift courses.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  Right? I, that's what I.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  And, and, and his argument from an economic perspective is like, that will actually increase productivity, that will be better, not just because higher employment is good, but also higher economic growth is good. So we should be trying to solve problems that cannot be solved by people right now with AI, as opposed to just.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Just displacing, yeah, just moving stuff around versus like doing net new thing.

• 19:30John Coogan?

  Okay. I like that.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  I believe that's what he's saying.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  You're a top economist. What do you say? No.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  And here's the thing.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  Top economists have never been wrong on anything. So, you know.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  It does feel like it's a critical moment. There's been so many people building up to like 2027 is going to be the crazy year. 2026 is going to be the last normal year. Like, like something has to happen in 2027 to, that will answer a lot of the questions that have been being asked over the last five years, you know, since GPT-3 basically, uh, which is like RSI, super intelligence, serious, serious move on GDP, serious like showing up in the statistics somewhere other than just debt. But, I mean, at the same time, you see like weird things happening in, uh, in financial markets, like gold is spiking and like, it's hard to put that on AI, but there's still like, like there's, there, there's pockets

• 20:24John Coogan?

  of like, okay, there's something odd happening that you might in retrospect attribute to the AI boom. Anyway, what do you think of Jeremy's take? What agriculture did to our bodies, AI will do to our brains. Make us stronger and taller. I think he's being negative.

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  I think he's being negative. Didn't it in some way make us like, you know, weaker because we're, you know, consuming more grains versus, you know?

• 20:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, some agriculture made us a lot taller and stronger, but then made us fatter for sure.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Because we over consumed. And so, yeah, if you're over consuming information, it's brain rot. Yeah. But a good, uh, good encapsulation of the, of the thesis. Anyway, where do you want to go next, Jordy?

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we got it. We, we got to talk about Warren Buffett because he's just like you. He's just like you, folks. A viewer's guide to Warren Buffett's nightly trips down the YouTube rabbit hole. Uh, Glenn Close clips, 1950s commercials, Uzbekistan's version of America's Got Talent. The legendary investor can't resist the algorithm either. Feeling guilty about spending hours each day watching YouTube? Don't be. Warren Buffett is right there with you. Glenn Close clips, commercials from the 1950s. Paul Anka videos, the famed investor can't get enough. Buffett enjoys speeches by complete unknowns. He's a fan of Berkshire Hathaway's own content, too, proud of how it performs on the video platform.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  He watches it all nearly every evening, usually from a recliner in his Omaha home. Warren's range is broad, says Sharon Osberg, a close friend and frequent viewing companion. It can be the silliest things. Buffett also goes down random rabbit holes, just like us. The next day, he'll come into his office gushing over a moving amateur rendition of my way. In August, Osberg visited Buffett's home in Omaha. They spent hours on YouTube, grinding. He, we watched a really good documentary on Roy Cohn, she says, and Uzbekistan version of America's Got Talent. That would be Uzbekistan Got Talent. It's unclear, easy to remember.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  Buffett, who recently turned 96 and stepped down as Berkshire's chairman, declined to comment on his YouTube habits. What's up with Sharon just blowing up, blowing up his whole routine? If I invite a friend to my home.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  You're doing algo docs, son.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  If I invite a friend to my home to watch YouTube videos with me for hours and hours and hours and go down the YouTube rabbit hole, and then a week later, you're calling up the journal, spilling, spilling the truth about my, my, my video consumption, my rabbit hole habits.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  I feel like, I feel like Buffett had to be like, I want you to tell the journal.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  You think it's astroturf?

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think, I think, I want you to take this.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  You think he's paying?

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  I think he's trying to, I think he's as locked in as ever. I don't think he's doing anything for entertainment. He wants the other allocators to get comfortable. You know, I can spend a few hours on YouTube every night. Meanwhile, he's studying the blade every single night and all of this.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  Giving him the benefit of 4D chess.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Occam's 4D razor.

• 23:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is Occam's 4D razor. This is what he's doing. Makes sense. What do you think of the new passport? People were going back and forth on it. Paul McGregor was saying, if I was redesigning the cover of what is arguably the country's most important public document, I'd first hire both the best typographer and crest designer money can buy, then fiddle about with the layouts probably. Um, and Joe Gebbia fires back, hi, when you're done finding, when you're done fiddling, please send me resume of top crest designer. Make sure they can do better than the 1782 official national anthem. It looks like a very.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  National emblem.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  National emblem. Um, yeah, the redesign looks like a very tasteful and moderate iteration. Like, I think people are reacting to this. Like, it's like, now it's all gold and it has like a bear and an eagle fighting on it and it, it features like the UFC octagon, um, which like, was sort of where people's expectations are for these types of things. But this feels like a very normal.

• 24:24Jordi Hays?

  UFC branding on the passport.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, no ads is a big step backwards.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I will say that the passport text where it's kind of sans serif, all caps, and there's like spacing, that does look like AI slop, kind of.

• 24:39John Coogan?

  It does.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  This is like very common when you just have.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  Too much, too wide of kerning is your problem.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  Okay, the kerning needs some work. Yeah. It does read a little odd.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty high stakes graphic design.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  It is.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Most stuff, you're like, yeah, we're going to make this, you know, pamphlet for a conference and nobody's going to read it. And if they do, they'll look at it for a second. The passports, like, we're going to make, you know, a hundred million of these and then they're going to carry them for a decade.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  Representing the country globally.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  They will be inspected many times.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  I'm not, I'm not into passports. I don't, I don't want to leave America. It's like, not a good thing. They can just get rid of them. Just stay here.

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  What else we got?

• 25:26John Coogan?

  Oh, Le Chaton Fat from Mistral.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  Le Chonk. They're calling it Le Chonk.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Le Chonk, yes. Uh, they're leaning into the jokes, Mistral AI, the French Neo Lab. Is it fair to call them a Neo Lab or are they just a lab?

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  They're just a lab.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  They're just a lab, right? They're pre-Neo Lab.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, yeah, I would say so. Because they're kind of like.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  You would call them pre-Neo, pre-Neo Lab specifically?

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Uh, let me actually consult our nomenclature.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  Okay. Oh, I think they were like National Lab or something like that, up there with Lawrence Livermore. Uh, but they launched Mistral Large 4, AKA Le Chonk. One trillion parameters, natively made it multimodal, 49 billion active parameters. It is the best open weight model from US or Europe, or Europe on aggregated benchmarks, state of the art on critical workloads, including cyber defense, manufacturing and finance, and it surpasses closed frontier models on visual grounding. Forged in Europe, end to end.

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  Forged.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Deployable from Europe via our, our own Mistral cloud infrastructure available to all via API today. Working with cybersecurity partners privately. Open weights release end of October. So presumably they'll release the open weights for like the cyber nerfed version, I would imagine, something like that. I don't know. Uh, anyway, uh, what is your review? Tyler, do you have any other, uh, data to share about Mistral's progress?

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I mean, it looks very good. Um, I think it's like very much on par with the kind of frontier of the open source. So like the Chinese labs, it's like very much a contender. It's not necessarily like destroying all of them on, on every benchmark, but it's like certainly if people are worried about, um, using Chinese open source models because maybe downstream, there's going to be some like legal ramification or whatever.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Like, this is a very good choice.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  It really does change the open source, closed source debate because.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think Mistral and Reflection, which is kind of the, the American open source lab.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Like, we're now starting to see like, okay, these models are actually like quite,

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  quite competent.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  And Reflection, uh, came out with, it's called Beam yesterday.

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, not tapped in. They're like, sorry, sorry, I can't, I can't hear, I can't hear you. I can't hear you.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  It's called Beam, yes.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, we, we can come, come back to that. But, uh, great, great to see them getting a, a new model out.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  And Leo has the, the, the funniest benchmark of them. Says, it's pretty funny that it seems the one thing Mistral Large 4 is actually leading on is a benchmark about regulation. Another EU banger. Uh, Harvey, Harvey's legal agent benchmark, uh, is up to 15%, uh, whereas other models are down at between five and 13%. Uh, interesting. I, I wonder if that's, uh, intentional. I wonder if there's actually anything to read into that. I, I really have no idea, but, uh, it's certainly, certainly valuable. Uh, I'm sure Harvey and all the other, uh, legal companies will be excited because we, I mean, we read the whole thing about Harvey, uh, their margins being in a really rough spot for a minute

• 28:39John Coogan?

  when they were overly, uh, overly reliant on like the most expensive frontier models. Now there's a ton of price competition between OpenAI and Anthropic. And then obviously there's a bunch of pressure from, uh, open source models. So the, like, it, it, it's the true, it's truly the, uh, create the benchmark that you want the, the labs to hill climb. And they just created the benchmark for like their exact workload and then they're able to do it.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  Sushi Commander says, what are you talking about? Both Bean and Mistral, Beam and Mistral Large are a generation behind the latest Chinese leading model. So putting you in the true zone, Tyler.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  I mean, you can look at benchmarks. It's like, yeah, it's not leading them. It's like among one of the contenders. It's not the frontier.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's like in, in line, but a lot of the, a lot of the, like, the most recent round of, of Chinese open source happened like a couple of months ago, which is always rough. Cause like you catch up to the frontier and then it's like, well, you're going to take another six months to get something out where they're going to only take another two months to get something out. So that window, but there's so many other geopolitical implications that, uh, lead companies to go one way or another. So we'll see, we'll see. Um, Olivia Moore has some data on what's happening in the battle for consumer AI dominance between ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. Uh, A16Z pulled the data across web and mobile plus

• 29:58John Coogan?

  consumer revenue. Uh, ChatGPT is at 2X Gemini's scale and 6X scale on web and 2 and 1/2 Gemini's scale and 14 times Claude's scale on mobile. Interesting. I mean, I guess that makes sense. More consumer focused, you're, you're pulling there. Uh.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  The main thing here is just look at, look at the run from Claude.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:19Jordi Hays?

  You know, it was.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  I mean, we saw this in the App Store, right? Like you would open up the App Store and like Claude was at the top for a while and then, and then fell down and now, um, ChatGPT is back on top and they're just going back and forth. It's the, the, the war for the frontier is just trading shots back and forth, back and forth.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  Right now, Muse still at number one. Vinted, who we're working on, is number two.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Vinted is still number two.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  So dominant.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  The folks over at Vinted are, are really doing a fantastic job. Thank you for tuning into TVPN today.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Fantastic show. We'll see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific.

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Goodbye.