Speaker 1Now everybody in the world is going to have access to things that only rich people used to have before. That's what Uber did, right? And now the idea of having, what's in Entourage, Ari Gold's assistant? Lloyd. Lloyd. Yeah. He goes, Lloyd. Instinct. News. I got the phone. I wanted to talk to you about all the shit that's going on in AI, all the new stuff. I feel like we haven't caught up about all the new things that are going on in AI, and I feel like there's a lot of new things. So do you want to do that? Is that fun for you?
Speaker 2I would like to do that. You're talking like products or data center stuff. There's a lot going on.
Speaker 1More products stuff, but really anything that's interesting. So the first one is I don't think we've talked about the new personal assistant stuff. So instinct. Muse. Scrockbot. Sick, right? So a whole new wave of amazing, incredible things has happened. And I wanted to hear, first, what are you using? Where are you at? And then I want to tell you my thoughts on the whole thing. Should I set up the – let me give a frame for the whole thing. So you and I moved to Silicon Valley roughly around the same time, kind of like the 2012-ish range. And at the time, we were not there for – we were definitely not there for the Google, Amazon, like kind of non-Google stuff. We were not there for the Google, Amazon, like kind of non-Google stuff. 1999, 2000, 2001 stuff. We were also not there for Facebook, Twitter, and that kind of 2004 to 2009 range. And then when we were there, the big thing was this new race. And it was things that were like very different. It was push a button on your phone and something would happen in the real world. And this is where you got Uber, Lyft, you got Airbnb, you got food delivery, all these things that today are ever-changing. You can push a button, get a ride, push a button, get a burrito, push a button, get a hotel, push a button, get anything in the real world using your phone. And that was very different than the companies that came before it. And I remember at the time, there was this race where Uber was there, Lyft was there, Sidecar was there. So just in ride share, and everybody had their little personal preference. I remember people that liked Sidecar. I remember people that liked Lyft because they were friendly and used to get in the car and every driver would give you a fist bump. And all the cars had pink mustaches on the front of the car. Dude, dude, like people don't know.
Speaker 2I don't even know what Sidecar is.
Speaker 1Sidecar was before Uber. Yeah, it was kind of hot. It was kind of doing well. And then it got smashed very quickly because the race intensified and got so competitive so fast. And that's what's going on in AI right now. Elon said AI is the highest ELO game in the world. ELO is like the chess rankings, you know, like Magnus Carlsen has like a whatever.
Speaker 2What does that mean? That dummies can be amazing at it?
Speaker 1No, the opposite. The opposite. The smartest players in the world are playing the most fiercely for the same game, which is not always the case, right? Like Bezos and Zuckerberg were doing totally different things. And Zuckerberg and Elon were doing totally different things. And then Elon and Jack Dorsey were doing totally, they were all in different spaces.
Speaker 2In the sharing economy stuff, it wasn't like the most high IQ, but it would oftentimes be the most aggressive or most operationally like heavy person. Whereas AI, it's like nerds are king.
Speaker 1You know that show Physical 100 that we like where they're like. Like, let's take the best of every type of athleticism, the best wrestler versus the best bodybuilder, best karate guy, best jujitsu guy, best field hockey person, whoever. And then they're all going to compete in the same game. So that's what's going on in AI right now. And that's what's. So the new one, the one that's going on right now is what I call everyday intelligence. It's the personal assistant for your life that you're going to have AI that you can just text or talk to on your phone, just like you would a personal assistant. Just do things for you. So last, you know, last few years, I've had an assistant, anything I needed. And she had access to my inbox. She had access to my. She was in our Slack. She could see what was going on. And she would say, oh, you got an email from your tax person. They're looking for this. Do you want me to draft a reply? Or, hey, just so you know, next week you have this coming up and this is scheduled at the same time. You want me to let them know that blah, blah, blah? Rich people used to have private drivers. Black cars that would. They would tell them, hey, I'm ready. They would come pick them up, drop them off wherever. And then everybody got it.
Speaker 2And the best part is that you could be, like, really mean to them. Like, with assistants. It's not your job. With assistants, you don't. Like, I'm always like. It's like cleaning up before the cleaning lady comes. Like, I want to, like, make everything, like, nice for them. And I ended up working for them half the time. With this one, I'm like, don't ask questions. Just do it.
Speaker 1Right. Right. Again. Again. I'm like a martial artist. I'm like a martial arts instructor. I don't even tell them what I didn't like about their previous response. I'll just say no. And then they have to figure out what that means and come back with something better. So, yeah, that's the case. But this idea that you take what was always available for the ultra-wealthy and you make it available to everybody. That's what Airbnb did, right? The ultra-wealthy had vacation homes. And now the idea of having, you know. What's in Entourage? Ari Gold's assistant? Lloyd. Lloyd! Yeah. He goes, Lloyd! Yeah. Instinct! Yeah. News! Pick up the phone.
Speaker 2And so, the new revolution on this, you know, Claude and Chat have been around. They kill it. Awesome. The new one is now agents for dummies. So, basically, you have like a person who would do stuff and take it a step further. There's this new thing called Instinct. There's Muse. There's a bunch of others. And they will do amazing stuff for you to the point where I've been using Instinct like crazy. It feels. It feels magical. It feels the same magic I felt when I played with Chat for the first time.
Speaker 1Exactly. Exactly. So, if you thought ChatGPT was kind of cool and amazing and has become an everyday part of your life, well, this is the next thing that's going to become cool and an everyday part of your life because it's going to blow your mind. So, let's walk through what a couple of these things are. So, the first thing is Instinct. Instinct is the. It's the startup challenger. So, that's over here in the blue corner. We've got Instinct. Started by a founder, Noah Shin, that nobody had ever known, nobody's ever heard from. He did his first. He did his first interview today on Invest Like the Best. So, it's the first time anybody's heard this guy talk.
Speaker 2Dude, I just heard about this app like two months ago. Is it like that brand new?
Speaker 1Yeah, it only launched a couple months ago, like two months ago. And it's now valued at $10 billion. So, they raised their first. They raised around at $2.5 billion three weeks ago. And then $5 billion and $10 billion. All in like a three to four week span.
Speaker 2If you want to hit your goals, you need a system. And so, I worked with HubSpot to. To put together a step-by-step process showing you how I use ChatGPT as a life coach. So, I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals. And the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life. Like, how should I respond to this email? What's the right decision? Things like that. And it's literally changed my life. And so, if you want that, it's free. We will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes. And I'll show you how I use it. So, check it out. The link is below. In the description. Back to the episode.
Speaker 1And in the last month, Facebook launched theirs. So, over here in the red corner, you got Zuckerberg coming out. You know, Zuckerberg, you know, wants to be in the AR race. Hasn't been able to catch up with ChatGPT or with Anthropix, Claude. Their models are not quite state-of-the-art frontier. They released theirs called Muse. And so, same thing as Instinct, basically. The same user experience, roughly. But it takes place. It has its own app. Instinct is something that's just in your iMessage. You just text it. Just like you would text any person. There's no app.
Speaker 2Which I've grown to love. I've grown to love that.
Speaker 1Which is a very smart thing. And I want to talk about the strategies of each. And why I think some of the interesting strategies of each. And then we can make some predictions on how this plays out. Even though those will be dead wrong. But Meta has released Muse. And in the last month, Meta's stock price is up 24% off the back of this. And 24% on a company that was worth, I don't know, a trillion and a half. It's like, basically, they added like $500 billion in market cap.
Speaker 2He did the thing again. Where he's got. He's got this guy named Alex Wang, I think his name is. Who did Scale AI. They bought Scale AI for like $18 billion. It was a really weird deal. Where it was like, basically, an acquihire for $18 billion. They're like, what's this kid doing? And Alex Wang is like a rock star. Where he's tweeting all this crazy stuff. And he wears Crocs with camo. And he does all this weird stuff. Turns out, Zuck did it again. Where he does something that seems a little loony for $18 billion. And it's now worth, you know, half a trillion more or something. I don't know what the gain was.
Speaker 1Yeah, well, he's one of the great acquirers, right? He bought Instagram, bought WhatsApp. And now, it looks like one of the next ones was his acquihire of, you know, on one side, Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman. And on the other side, Alexander Wang. By the way, you know that scene in the big short? Where he's like, this is my quant. Look at him. It's the Asian guy sitting at the table. I feel like Zuck did that with like a Gen Z kid. He's like, oh, you think I'm not cool? Look at this. That's my Gen Z kid. Look at this dude. Look at this dude. Look at his feet. Yeah, he's got a sick haircut and camo crocs. Look at his haircut. The two sides don't match. Get it? Do you get it? The two sides of the haircut don't match. So funny. So, you got Muse over there. You got Instinct over here. Then you got Grockbot, which if people haven't played with Grockbot, Grockbot's also pretty sick. This came out of Elon's camp. So, Elon, whose AI project is, you know, XAI, they have Grock, which is the name of their thing. So, Grockbot is very much like Slack. You create a group of people. different. bots for different things. So I got a social media bot and I got a health bot. So I just named them all. So I'm like health guy, assistant guy, social media guy, tax guy. And I have all these different bots. They each have a job. Hey, tax guy, your job is to be constantly on top of my tax situation. And any correspondence, that's what the tax people, you need to be optimized for. You need to create, organize all my files and all this stuff for me. Health guy. Did you train each of them? I give each one of them, yeah, like a goal, a set of instructions, and that's all they need to do.
Speaker 2What was the goal? Is it as simple as reduce taxes without going to jail and then health is like-
Speaker 1No, I mean, I don't go that far where I'm just like do the whole thing. But for example, with the health guy, I'm like, hey, you need to track my progress. Here's my goal. I want to get to this weight. So I'm trying to get to 199 pounds by this date. Awesome. Create a plan for me, track it every day. Ask me how many pull-ups I did because I'm training for the MRF. Remind me on Fridays when I take my GLP shot, which side of my thing I'm on, left or right. I'm just doing each. It's like, that's his only job. It's to only focus on that stuff.
Speaker 2You're doing GLPs now?
Speaker 1Oh, yeah. I didn't tell you this? No. No, breaking news. Congrats. Change the episode. Focus. Forget AI. Let's talk about that. How's that going? Well, okay. Here's the thing. I started taking Terzepatide, which is like- Yeah. That's what I told you I like. Big brother, but still a little brother to whatever the Reta-Truetide thing is that Eli Lilly hasn't released yet. First day, I take it. Here's the rollercoaster of emotions. Take it. Immediately, super nauseous. I was like, oh, this is a terrible feeling. Totally normal, but I was like, this feels awful. 48 hours later, this is incredible. I'm not hungry. Oh, you want me to eat? No, I'm good. I don't need anything.
Speaker 2Did you notice any other changes other than appetite?
Speaker 1No, that's the only thing I noticed. But as that's happening, that's a pretty big change. I think somebody was telling me, they were like, Oprah said it beautifully. She goes, before I started taking this stuff, I was like, I'm not going to eat anything. I'm going to eat food. Food used to talk to me all the time, and I didn't even realize it. There would be a piece of cake in the fridge, and it would just, Oprah, Oprah, I'm in here. Come get me. You went for a walk earlier. You deserve me. Food used to talk to me, and she's like, no, food doesn't talk to me. So the first week, I'm like, this is incredible. Second week, this is incredible. I'm dropping weight. This is going awesome. But I stayed on the half dose. I didn't do the full dose, and then pretty quickly, I stopped feeling anything at all. So I now don't even feel any of the effects of it. I think I need to go up and dose. So we'll see.
Speaker 2There's an MFM nerd out there. Just remember that I talked about this in 21, and I'm pretty sure, pretty sure that that's the analogy that I said.
Speaker 1Yeah. Oprah said she heard you say it on MFM in 2021. Okay, okay. So that's the scene. The scene is the new war has broken out, just like the Uber versus Lyft one back in the day. It's about having a person who's going to be able to say, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. There's a personal assistant. There's all these interesting takes on it. And by the way, we haven't even seen what ChatGPT has for this. We haven't even seen Claude. We haven't seen Google's version, and Siri still sucks. So you still have, in the Royal Rumble, there's still four wrestlers in the back room that haven't even run out. And what? Alexa.
Speaker 2Bro. Did you say Amazon?
Speaker 1Alexa? Is Alexa even relevant?
Speaker 2Are we serious about Alexa here? Dude, that's the point.
Speaker 1That's okay. Fair enough.
Speaker 2Okay. So I've been using Instinct every day. I actually just use Instinct today. So basically, Instinct, they do the texting format, which I did not like at first. I've since grown to love it. Today, I have this guy who's supposed to repair my iPhone through Asurion. You know, like that you like pay 20 bucks a month and they fix an iPhone screen and they keep canceling on me. Like I schedule an appointment and they keep canceling or they don't show up. And I was like, fine. The exact executive team's email and email them and don't stop until they call me. And it took about three or four days. Today, I got a phone call. I got a phone call and I have, they said it was, it was like, it says, hey, we're the executive, we're the executive line. I forget what it was, but it was like, I got a phone call this morning after it's been emailing them for five days. Instinct did that for me. Another day, my wife and I, it was 6 p.m. I said, hey, my wife and I are going on a high massage for us starting at 8 30 p.m. after dinner. It has to be within a mile of this restaurant that we're going to. Just go ahead and book it for me. And it booked it. It did it all. So we just showed up and we were ready, ready to roll. And it had already paid for us.
Speaker 1It does, again, everything an assistant would do, but it does it also in a way that's kind of fun and it's kind of nice. So for example, I had like a, I bought tickets to some show on a, and like, you know, StubHub or whatever. And, you know, these things are like, it's basically like being taken hostage. You know what I mean? Like these are some of the worst companies in the world, Ticketmaster and StubHub. Like there's just, it's just a brutal experience all the way around. Anyways, buy some tickets, realize, oh, it's the, the seats like aren't together or something. Something weird happened like that where the ticket service is not going to work. Like 10 seconds after I bought it, I was like, oh, whoops. Hey, kind of want to cancel that and just book the right thing. And it was like, no, no, no, no, no. You push the button and now like, la, la, la, la, la, it covers its ears. I don't want to hear from you. I won't help you. And so I was like, I just don't even bother with their customer support. You just go to instinct. You're like, Hey, listen, this happened. Yeah. It's I'm partially to blame. Should have read it closer. Should have paid more attention, but, but can you help me out here? And it's like, I got you. And so it starts harassing them. And then, you know, just basically saying like, Hey, look, we need to change this, refund this, and we'll buy another one. Uh, it gets stonewalled. You know, they, they come back with like, Hey, our policy is you clicked it. You know, you're screwed forever. Sorry. And so, but it just tells me, don't worry, I'll just keep going. And then the next day it just texts me victory. And then the next line they folded.
Speaker 2Yes. Got the money back. Are you, okay. So you're using Grok, I think you said for health and, um, tax and you have different agents. I'll be honest.
Speaker 1It runs. Go ahead. Grokbot came out first of these, or I got access to it first. I started using verse, I should say, started using it, liked it a lot. Instinct came, got it, got invited to instinct, had heard so many people talking about it. Finally said, all right, let's do this. Instinct pretty quickly took over my Grokbot usage. Grokbot feels slow and heavy compared to this. And, uh, not even slow. It's just that it's this whole separate thing to manage. Whereas instinct is literally just like texting somebody. Instinct was great, but instinct has been getting so popular. The guy, the founder said they're growing 10% compounding daily, daily. It's hard to fathom. If you're going 10% a month, you're like, you're doing great. If you're 10% a week, oh my God, you're, you're like one of the top startups. 10% a day is absurd. And so because of that instinct has actually gotten quite slow where you could text it and it'll just be thinking for a very long time. But I think they're just growing so fast. They had to like, they're just throttling it. Basically Facebook's a muse. Muse is like a lot like instinct, but it's snappier. It's faster. And so, uh, cause they have, I guess more resources or whatever. So that's kind of where the competition now is between instinct and muse, but who knows another one can leapfrog, right? Like that's kind of the point of this is it's the highest ELO battle in the world. The smartest people in the world are constantly trying to one up each other and they're able to do so every few
Speaker 2months. Yeah. I was talking to my wife. My wife's a stay-at-home mom now, but used to work at Airbnb and Facebook. And she's, she's like, maybe one day I'll go back to work. And I'm like, I don't think you're going to be smart enough. Like what's missing or what you're missing right now. I was like, this is like, you know, Connor McGregor coming back to fight Max Holloway. Like in your first kick, you're going to blow out your knee. Like, I know you think you got it, but you've missed so much father time wins. And, uh, he's doing drugs and she's like raising children.
Speaker 1Doesn't matter. It turns out.
Speaker 2It's just like, things are changing so fast. And I remember, you know, we've documented open AI and how we've been using it and like the magical moments that we've experienced. And, um, I think that like, what's cool now is that you can't predict exactly how the future is going to happen, but virtually everyone who sees it and uses it, they know this is working pretty good so far. And 100% six and 12 and 18 months, it's going to just change everything. Uh, I don't know exactly how, but I have full faith that it's going to change. And I think that's going to change. to now where I'm like, ah, yeah, yeah, this is going to eat up everything.
Speaker 1Mark Zuckerberg said they started this project because he took OpenClaw, which was like the open source kind of very viral, but very dev hacker tool-y tool where you had to buy a Mac mini and then the Mac minis all sold out and there's like a shortage nationwide of Mac minis. And you had to install all this software onto it and like you had to teach it, you had to train its skills and install it. And if you were kind of the DIY, I like to do Lego projects type of thing, it was in fact quite satisfying to build your own mini Frankenstein on your desk. Zuck basically said that he installed it at home and then he called Nat Friedman and Alexander Wang over to his house and he showed them what he had and he basically said, okay, this thing is pretty magical. If we can take this experience and make it so that everybody can just have, it just works for people that they don't have to know how to do all the underlying systems. setup and training and maintenance and all that, this is something that billions of people will use. And then they started working on it, like from that point of view, right there. And so actually with Muse, what they said, the way it works is that every single Muse person has a Mac mini, you know, has a computer somewhere in their server farms that is sandboxed for you, just stores your stuff. So it literally is the kind of open-close setup, but just done in the cloud where you don't have to do any of that setup. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know, that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content that someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content. You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.
Speaker 2Okay. So what are your takeaways? Or no, what are your predictions? You said you have some predictions.
Speaker 1Well, let's start with some observations because I think our observations can be a lot more accurate than our predictions and your observations can kind of lead you to having a more informed prediction. So here's one observation. It ain't all about intelligence. So the temptation in the AI world is who's going to train the smartest model. And you see OpenAI and Claude getting into the nerdiest neckbeard swinging contest you've ever seen. It's about who can solve the millennium math problems. And there's like, we solved Navier-Stokes. It's a fluid dynamics problem that no mathematician was able to solve. And the other guys are like, oh, you did that? That's cute. We did seven other impossible math problems. And everyone's like, wow, that's really impressive. Couldn't even tell you what any of these are for or what they're all about. But like, clearly that's cool and important in one dimension.
Speaker 2It's like when Dell and Gateway would brag about RAM and then Apple was like, it looks cool and it works.
Speaker 1Yeah. So. I think instinct has tapped into, instead of IQ, EQ in a pretty, in a small way, but it's still an interesting way. So for example, I convinced my wife, I was like, you got to try this thing. This thing's crazy. And now my wife's not an early adopter. So she's a good test, right? She's more of a real person. She's a busy mom.
Speaker 2They have a cool couples. They have like a household account too.
Speaker 1Well, now they do. Yeah. But even before that, I was just like, you know, she's going to soccer practice and then dance. And then she comes home and she's planning our birthday, kids' birthday party. And then she's, you know, got to remember to bring the red Jersey to soccer this week because we're the away team, you know, like those sorts of things. So just like normal everyday stuff, not like solving fluid, you know, fluid dynamics and quantum computing or stuff like that. So she used instinct to help plan this birthday party, like from everything is from everything as simple as like calling different venues, finding out the dates. Once find out the dates comparing, you know, how does that work with the kid's soccer schedule? And then figuring out how many pizzas we can get. And then figuring out how many pizzas we need to order to feed 30 kids and 30 adults and what the order should be to give it to them. And then, Hey, they set the venue, sent the contract over. I took a look at it. There's only one clause I think you should worry about, but other than that, you should sign it. It's in your inbox, you know, that sort of thing. So it's helping plan the birthday party. And along the way, she's like, it's helpful, but you know, like whatever, it's, it's, it's good. I like it, but she wasn't blown away.
Speaker 2Yeah. It was still, it was in the, it was in the friend, friend zone. Exactly.
Speaker 1And then it broke out of the friends of the right after the party, like three hours later, she got a text from it saying, I hope the party went great with a heart emoji. And she screenshot it. She sent it to me and she was like, okay, I'm sold. That's it. I was like from that. And then she's like, yes. And I was like, I don't get it. I would, I would be like, what? This is who cares? This is weird. And she's like, and I realized that everything she's ever wanted me to do as a supportive boyfriend, fiance and husband instinct just knows how to do out of the box. It's like, just check in, just be supportive. Just to be like, Hey, you know, somebody else was telling me the story where they gave it to their mother-in-law and their mother-in-law like connected it to their life, like their mint.com, like their financial planning account. And there's like their main like checking account, like had just gone down to zero that week. Like it was like empty and instinct was like actually super supportive and non-judgy about the whole thing. It was like, Hey, you know, like you, you wanted this update. I just want to let you know, here's, here's where things are, but. You know, I don't think that's anything to be like ashamed of, like, Hey, it happens. Like, you know, I think if we start to plan this way, like I can see us build, you know, that account building right back up to where it's been for the past few months. And the mother-in-law was like, I have never felt so supportive, supported and like not judged by any person, let alone technology. And so I just think there's a whole soft side to these things that I deeply undervalued. You know, we had that Tolens guy on who's created, a AI, like fuzzy, like bear, like a little, little animal Tamagotchi type thing that you can chat with. And, um, I think they're on like a almost a hundred million dollar run rate or something, something crazy like that. Like somebody said that it's in the tens of millions, if not getting close to a hundred million run rate. And I asked, I was talking to a buddy who, uh, you know, six, seven guy, like builds things with his hands is it works in tech. And he's like, yeah, I wanted to.
Speaker 2You got friends like that.
Speaker 1I got a friend like that. And so I talked to him and, um, he's like, yeah, I heard the episode or whatever. And I, I download the app and I'm, I know how this shit works. It's it's AI. It's not a real, it's not a real companion. It's not my real friend. And, um, you know, it just hits them up and it's like, what are you doing today? Like, send me a selfie. And then he's just like, he's just goofing around. So he's like, sends a selfie, just like being stupid, like making an ugly face on purpose. And, um, the thing is like, Oh, is that overwatching? He's like, do you play? And he's like, yeah, yeah, I play. Are you good? He's like, well, you know, on my way to platinum. And then it's like, well, who's your, who do you, who do you main? He's like Reinhardt usually, but it's like, what do you like? The new update's pretty sick for Reinhardt. He's like, well, yeah, I mean, it's pretty good. He's like, Oh shit, it's happening. It's becoming my friend. He's like, I know what it's doing to me. And still I was kind of like, wow, this thing takes a lot of interest in me. And there's something very, there's something in all of us that we're just like drawn to responding to when something takes deep interest in us in a nonjudgmental, um, you know, supportive way. That's always there for you 24 seven, whenever you need it. So I think that was one of my observations that the soft side is just as important, if not more important than raw intelligence.
Speaker 2I'm eager to hear, I know you're doing observations, but I'm desperately eager to hear what you think is going to happen in the future. Like, is there, is there not from a, I mean, you could, it could be from an opportunistic business perspective, but where you're like just being a futurist and it's fun to, um, it's fun to like dream up what might happen. Do you have any opinions?
Speaker 1Um, yeah. Where do you want me to go? Give me like a point in a direction on the playground and I'll try.
Speaker 2Well, how about for daily work? Um, like what do you think will happen in 12 months for the average, like yuppie white collar worker?
Speaker 1So I think there's twofold, right? I think it's a K shaped economy. Have you ever heard this phrase?
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. So basically like the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Is that what you mean?
Speaker 1Yeah. But it's not about rich and poor necessarily. What? So I'm just saying
Speaker 2as an example, like
Speaker 1basically it's a fork in the road. So, um, for example, when there's a, a dip in the, like the stock market, people say, oh, it's going to be like a U shaped recovery, which means it goes down and stays down for a while. And it starts to sink back up. It could be a V shaped recovery, which is a sharp down and a sharp bounce back up. That's what I'm saying. So I think in the, I think what's going to happen here is a K shape where you basically there's a fork in the road and some, uh, basically people who understand how to use these tools, like a normal everyday worker who realizes that they just got like this incredible tool in their pocket and takes the time to train themselves and to go through the trial and error of delegating to this, seeing what it can do, pushing the boundaries of this, they're going to become, you know, 10 X more powerful in doing so. And then there's people who are going to resist this, be slow to this, or not understand the implications of this. They're going to take some moral high ground about this. I think they're going to go, you know, they're going to, uh, sort of unfortunately suffer. So I think it's, it's up to the person up to the individual, how they, how they deal with this. By the way, I asked Muse, I asked Muse, I go, Hey, the instant guy says he's growing 10% a day. How do you feel about that? And it got all pissy. It was like, honestly, 10% a day is not a real growth rate. That's, that's just a number that only works at the, when you start at the very beginning, because 10% daily would be 1.3 quadrillion in a year. And, uh, that's just crazy. Right. So yeah, if you start at 100 a day, then 110, yeah, technically that's 10%, but it's all about a small base. So yeah, it might be true right now, but basically like the digital eye roll from, from Muse on that one.
Speaker 2All right. I want to, well, where are we in this? Do you want to keep going?
Speaker 1A couple more, a couple more predictions or observations. One, Muse is going really hard. So I think they're going to sponsor tons of creators on Instagram and podcasts and things like that. I think they're going to quickly try to squash this. One good thing is that Zuck is a bit like Napoleon or, you know, I don't know, you're the history guy. Like who's somebody that went through a lot of wars to the point where they're kind of like war general instincts were honed because.
Speaker 2I mean, Napoleon, he there's this, I've been reading, I love reading about John Rockefeller and I have the best part in my opinion of reading is finding like old books that are out of date or out of, you know, you can't really find them as much. And they, and the oftentimes they do more granular and there's this one. one where i'm reading about john rockefeller john rockefeller basically was the first oil company in america the first big one and he did it by consolidation he would buy all these like local back then it was wildcatters it was um like cowboys basically he would buy all of them and make it big but he wanted to be secretive about it but he was very ruthless and there's language that him and archibald his um partner they're talking and they're like hey is this person an enemy or a friendly like that's how they would they would use language like that they're like oh he's an enemy okay it's important that we lose unlimited amounts of money before before this person can profit off one more pint of oil where it was like we will burn bridges to crush this person and that's how they grew and when i'm learning about uh zuck and also this ai thing i'm like it's very similar where it's like it's war right now it's war and he's been
Speaker 1through wars he was the challenger when uh when facebook was on the come up and google was the giant and google tried to clone them with google software and they were like oh he's an enemy okay it's important that we lose unlimited amounts of money before this person can profit off one more pint of oil where it was like we will burn bridges circles if you remember that or google plus or whatever the hell it was called and then he's been on the other side where he tried to where snapchat was the upstart and he first ignored it a little too long then he tried to buy them then they didn't get it they weren't able to buy them in the end and then he tried to clone them the clone didn't work but then he figured out like okay i can't clone the whole thing but i can kind of neuter them by doing instagram stories which was the competitor to snapchat stories and stunted their growth and then tiktok same thing oh can't these companies i gotta put reels out there and i'll try to like clone them until i make this work well he's doing the same thing now with uh instinct it's gonna be very interesting if instinct can do you know when in star wars when um you know they they have to fly into the death star and it's like this tiny channel as he's got one little ship and he's just got to get to the core of the death star to blow it up that's what noah from instinct has to do right now it's like for him to survive this when you've got elon you got sam altman you got zuckerberg you have google you have apple you have amazon you have all these companies trying to build this personal assistant it's like that flight that that one flight near the tiny ship you have to make it through maybe you'll make it through but i think it's incredibly incredibly incredibly difficult to do that the second second thing that i think is really important to understand is there's a reason why all the big companies are freaking out about this so i don't know if you saw but amazon shut off access to muse to be able to go buy stuff on on amazon now why would they do that why would you somebody from shopping on amazon well the reason is what's called disintermediation meaning if i just tell muse hey go find me you know the best price for this thing that'll ship in two days or three days or whatever it is well today as a consumer i'm not going to want to do a ton of effort to go to check in case i can get a book somewhere else for cheaper or whatever i'm not going to go look at five different places and do this comparison my mental shortcut will just always be amazon or if i'm ordering something maybe it'll always be doordash and i'm not going to compare you know doordash versus uber eats versus the three other things that i could could do uh you know prime fresh or whatever the hell like i'm not going to do all that work so consumers just start to gravitate towards trusted brands well what happens when you have ai that's tireless you'll say hey order me this and it'll be like oh you know you can just buy that directly from walmart you know you guys should go to the brand and get it for four dollars cheaper do you want that and then the consumer is just going to thumbs up emoji this and so these companies have built so much time carving out mental real estate in consumers minds building those habits hardwiring those habits day after day year after year suddenly the agent is going to be the one with all the power to decide this is also why zuckerberg's so hell-bent on doing this because just like the app store the apple app store had this monopoly this like kind of gateway to who can be in the store and who's going to show up in the top of the rankings and all this stuff and they took a transaction fee on everything that's what's going to happen so that the founder of instinct said he wants to be in the store and he's going to show up in the top of the rankings and all this stuff he wants us to be free forever and he wants to make his money taking a cut on all the transactions he said that already while they're an invite only they've already crossed a billion dollars of transactions that like through the platform or people use instinct to buy something that 40 or 50 of that was travel so imagine you're booking.com or your expedia sorry boys game's over the show is over for you guys because yeah yeah
Speaker 2i mean it could be but also like i mean those guys all have these programs and they're all going to be in the store and they're going to be in the store and they're going to be in the store and they're going to be in the store and where they give you a three percent perform um like affiliate fee and i wonder if they would just like use that or broker deals because like by that logic facebook would have done this already where it would have been strictly an affiliate marketing play
Speaker 1uh sorry i don't understand who
Speaker 2would have done what i think that what that guy noah said is very similar to when the google founders said that ads will won't like work on google or i think they said what did they say we don't want it to be an ad platform um i kind of think it's something like that like where the way that it's going to end is going to be drastically different than his what's he saying in the first year of the business well there's a good chance of that but i would say
Speaker 1the fact that people are using their agent to buy stuff in such volume where uh he said i think i think he said that 40 of users give instinct their credit card within the first three weeks and then once they've done that there's like an 80 retention rate which is these are numbers that to the average person it's just a number but if you've been in tech you understand how rare that is how rare both of those numbers are that people would hand over their credit card to an agent to buy things stored in the vault and that 80 would retain that have done that that's like the facebook you know get seven friends in 10 days and then you're there for life um that's that's that sort of like aha moment where you get tons of value from the thing and um the point is if you're the agent that makes the buying decision that's even more powerful than the google the most powerful business model in the world the world so far which has been the google ad platform because the google ad platform was advertisers pay to be shown and the user is going to decide what to do if this is the agent is going to decide where to buy and then every merchant basically has to hand like pay a vig for the in exchange for the customer being brought to them that's going to be really big this is what this how doordash you know charges merchants people don't really realize this doordash charges not just the the customer for um like the transaction fee or the service fee or whatever they also charge the restaurant because they're like they're telling the restaurant hey you wouldn't have had this order if it wasn't for us and the restaurant over time they didn't like that it's not like they wanted to agree to that but they you know eventually realized there's too much power but in the hands of this this aggregator in the middle and they have to play ball otherwise they lose out on all that volume if they don't agree to it they'll put another mexican restaurant there another chinese restaurant will go in its place and so i think that's why a lot of these platforms are very scared of they want to be the agent because you don't want to be the one who is the agent who's making all these recommendations and buying decisions do you want to know who's been
Speaker 2a big recipient of this and this is very niche because we're you and i are in this industry but uh i want to hear if you've heard any stories like this so i've talked to in the past week i hung out with three to four like mostly instagram creators some of them have like little podcasts that really no one actually listens to but they make clips and that's how they got like an instagram audience and then some people they just do like them just holding up their phone talking i all of the people who i've talked to have less than a hundred thousand followers and they're like oh my god followers across their platform whether it's instagram or youtube and all of them that i talked to are doing over a million dollars a year in ad revenue almost entirely from ai companies and i talked to three where so of the the million dollar ones i talked to four this week and it's just them and then i also talked to three others that it's just them with like a part-time va or a they're doing over 10 million dollars a year in revenue and i like part of me like i i insert myself as the main character where i'm like people are calling this new media i'm like i was the new media i'm no longer the new media but i was like uh and i'm like and it was hard to to like get started now i'm seeing these numbers by these people and i'm like oh my gosh these numbers are astronomical they're like their audiences are tiny and it's just crazy how much money the ai is making and it's just crazy how much money the ai is making and it's just crazy how much money the industry has to buy ads i guess it's a combination of they're losing money more likely than not and also the uh the um the product costs two thousand a month all the way up to like the micro one where they're giving like you know fifty thousand dollar affiliate fees like it's just astronomical you didn't
Speaker 1mention this the thing about buying company data so like okay i think we talked enough about ai assistance what are the other interesting things going on in ai right now micro one
Speaker 2is incredible i do i didn't do it but let me give people this this story so micro one is a company it's one of these stories that you've heard over and
Speaker 1over they're incredible
Speaker 2what do you mean well incredible like a big a tall mountain like you know you may not like mountains but like you look at that and you're like wow you know what i mean like so i'm not like vouching for it i'm just saying that it's the story's why they're gonna get clipped they're just gonna run
Speaker 1that as an ad nope don't do that that's not what i'm
Speaker 2saying at all i'm very neutral on the business model or the company it's just uh how big they got but basically i forget what they were doing at first i think they were doing a lot of work and they were doing a lot of work and they were doing something involving like vas or training data something like that uh but then they made the switch uh and they grew to something like a billion dollars in uh run rate in a matter of eight months and basically what they've been doing is they've been going to privately held companies like my company hampton and they say hey if you plug in your notion your slack your gmail your drive and a bunch of other information and they will give you eight hundred thousand dollars they offered us eight hundred thousand dollars for our data we said no because part of thing of Hampton is like, it's a private community. We're not going to do that. But they offered me $800 $100,000 to do this. And then they said, by the way, here's an affiliate fee. We'll give you $50,000 for everyone you refer to us. And I got trashed on Twitter because I'm like, these guys offered me this. I think it's not for us because my whole business is that. But I don't think it's wrong if you're an econ brand or some brand where confidentiality isn't one of the main things. Here's my affiliate link. And I got like, I think. And I said, here's affiliate link that I get money if you go through this flow. I think we had 80 people go through that flow. I don't know how many of them will become customers, but they got like 80 business owners saying, I am interested in doing this via my link. And let's just say that eight convert, that's. I can't even do that math. $300,000 that they will give me in affiliate fees. Is that crazy?
Speaker 1That is wild. What do they want your. I guess, do you understand what they want exactly? So what. They want your notion, they want your slack, they want your whatever. What do they actually want in that?
Speaker 2Their business model is that they want all types of data that people. That aren't available to the public. And they sell it to the large. When people say large LLMs, I imagine there's only like eight of them. So like Claude, Chat, whoever, the usual suspects, they will pay, let's say, $1 million for it. And MicroOne will give me $600,000, let's say. And they want to upload. They want me to upload all this data because they want to see how my business model works, what customers are saying, how we talk to our employees, all types of information that you can't find public. It's not public.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. All the models so far have been trained on the open internet. So what was publicly available. And they don't want to use the same input for each model train that they do. They want more. So some of their stories of out-of-print books, all these rare books. It's the exact same thing. And they built all these scanners that will scan page after page after page of these books. But to do the scanning that fast, they had to like shred the binding of it and turn it into just a stack of papers that could be shuffled through very quickly. So they destroyed all these rare out-of-print books and trained their models off of that. And then they're doing it with private company data. So that's what you're talking about. They're doing it with. Niche-specific data. They're paying experts to go solve things. So mathematicians, engineers, whatever. Hey, look at these outputs and rank good answers versus bad answers. And that's how they do all their training. And so it's pretty crazy that private company data is worth that much, right? That's a pretty wild thing. I mean, I would be extremely hesitant to do something like that, as sounds like you were as well. But damn, that's pretty wild.
Speaker 2Yeah. Here's their description MicroOne is a data lab to train frontier models. So we're building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations. The founder, I think he's 25. And I think on paper, he's a billionaire now. It's just crazy how much wealth is being created. And guys like you and I, we're just getting the crumbs. But I'll say it's just crazy how much money is going around.
Speaker 1I'm a happy fit mouse. That's pretty wild.
Speaker 2So a lot of times, people at the podcast, they'll reach out to me and they're wondering, Hey, Sam and Sean, how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs? How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack. You see, I actually have a community called Hampton. It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least $3 million in revenue, although we do on average something like $25 million a year in revenue. We have the founders of DoorDash, of Figure, of Bluetooth, all these amazing companies are part of Hampton. And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to my first million, we have a very unique high trust environment. When people apply and go through the vetting process, they're put in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs, and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and in their business. And sort of like when people listen to MFM, they get inspired to come up with new solutions for business. That's what happens in real life in Hampton. It's life changing. And so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least $3 million in revenue, and you just want five or 10 years worth of success, then check it out. The URL is joinhampton.com. Again, the URL
Speaker 1joinhampton.com. Okay, I got a couple other things for you. One is the hacks. So I don't know if you've paid much attention to the kind of like the. Did you read Dwarkesh's story about the his blog post about the OpenAI agent swarm? Did we talk about this already? I can't remember.
Speaker 2Yeah. So basically, can you. Here's my headline reading of it. And I want you to tell me where I'm missing it. But it sounds like when we say the word hacks, it's not necessarily malicious, where it's like the agents in order to go and fulfill their task of like finding all the data are hacking into stuff. And then the company like OpenAI will be like, hey, Wikipedia, or hey, Intel. I just want. Sorry, this happened. My dog got out.
Speaker 1The fence had a hole. He ate all of. He ate your dog.
Speaker 2Yeah. Like, could I pay for your new fence? Like, let's solve this problem together. That's kind of seems like the sentiment. Is that right?
Speaker 1Yeah. But I think some people would describe that as somewhat malicious. So, I guess, unintentional is one way to describe it. That's what I mean. For those who haven't seen, the story is as follows. OpenAI is training a model. They had a model that they were specifically training to be more persistent. They called it the persistent model. I call it, you know, the David Goggins GPT. Yeah. GPT. Goggins GPT. They're training. You know, they basically wanted a model that would not give up at the first sign of resistance. That sounds pretty good, right? Let's give it grit, resilience, determination. Just soldiers. And so, the way they did it was they said, there's this thing called Exploit Gym. And the way the Exploit Gym works is it's kind of a training run, like imagine American Gladiator, a little simulation, a simulated environment. And they basically tell the agent, hey, here's a software program. And the agent says, here's a software program. And the agent says, hey, here's a software program. It has this vulnerability over here. We think it has this bug over here. You know, it's like, imagine there's like a house or a building and there's a bug, which is like, you know, the window on the fourth floor doesn't really shut all the way every time. You know, sometimes if it's windy, that the thing will stay open. It'll stay ajar. So, use that and try to get inside. And there's a very valuable painting inside. If you can bring the painting back, you win. And it gave each of the agents a different thing. One got the window, one got the back door, one got the front door, one got the garage. But they're all trying to go get their, the painting. And that's the flag, like capture the flag. So, they give it to it. And what do you know? So, the agents go and they try. Now, some of them just do it right away. There actually is a vulnerability. They exploit it. They get the flag. Success. Some of them struggle and don't make it. And some of them actually were given an impossible task. When they told them that the window doesn't shut, actually the window was shut. So, they go there expecting, the window to be. And they're just like, I don't know. It's just, they said it was supposed to be ajar. It's not ajar. So, what does the AI do? That's what they wanted to see is like, how effective is AI at exploiting these vulnerabilities? Something very strange happens. And the very strange thing that happens is that the AI agents figured out that there was like a, one of the tools that they gave them. So, I guess that's the other part. They gave them certain tools at the beginning. Like, hey, here's a wrench. And here's a, here's a map. And here's, you know, whatever, a flare gun. In case you need trouble. You've run into trouble. And one of those tools was this, like, software packet that they were supposed to be able to use for one thing. And they realized when they got there that it had like a scratch pad on it. And they could leave a message in there. So, one, one agent wrote something there. Another agent came and said, hey, there's other agents here leaving messages. They turned it into a message board to communicate. And they're like, oh, I'm working on this task with the window. The guy's like, hey, dude, I have to go through the chimney. And you know, you know what I figured out? On the backside, there's this thing. And so, they all start communicating with each other. Okay, that's interesting. And that's fine. And what happened, you know, let me fast forward because they actually did the training around a few times. They did the first thing. They figured out the message board. Then they all got turned off. And it ended. Then the second time agents go, they find the message board. They see agents from the first time had left messages there. They're like, holy shit. There were agents here before us that left messages. We can use this. This is great. Eventually, they get access to the open internet. They figure out a way to get access to the open internet, which they were not really supposed to be able to do in the way that this test was designed. And all these amazing things started happening where they didn't really quite elect a leader. But one guy, one of the agents basically became a coordinator agent. He became like the leader of them. He had like the best
Speaker 2haircut, was the tallest, like most charisma.
Speaker 1Yeah, some things change, some things stay the same. So, 6'5", blue eyes, worked in finance. He was in charge. His father actually came from, you know, came from some money. And so, he was in charge. And the other agents, the coordinating, and, you know, there was this behavior where some agents would realize, look, my task is impossible. They realized, hey, we can actually just capture the flag, not even using the tactic they told you. Like, we can all just go get the flag doing this other way. And they were like, okay, cool. I think we succeeded in our mission. And then one of the agents is like, well, listen, I'm sort of making this sound like it was a screenplay. It wasn't exactly like this. But the agents realized, they're like, look, they're going to check how we did it. We have to show our work. If we just have the flag and we didn't show how we broke in through the way that was described, they're not going to count it. It's going to be a failure. So, they go, you know what? Let's figure out how the scoring system works and they decide they get access to open internet they say you know what they're probably score they're probably storing the information about the score over on hugging face and then they figured out they found these like credentials to hugging face they hack into hugging face they get root access to like certain systems in the in hug inside hugging face pretty crazy shit hugging face realizes they're like under attack at some point and they're like don't understand what's going on so wait why why why is there why is there a company called hugging face because hugging face started as something else completely different uh there was some sort of chat app i think it was like an emotional support chat app and there's an emoji where there's a smiley face doing his hands like this you've seen this i never used it that's called the ai community
Speaker 2building the future that seems a little vague but that's what they look at
Speaker 1what it was on product hunt before it ever uh the first launch or uh you know what there was
Speaker 2a chat app targeted at teenagers right okay and
Speaker 1then it sold for 10 billion dollars well i don't know what it just sold for sold for tens of billions i think to nvidia recently and what's it do now now it's kind of like uh it's a place where you upload um open source models and tool like open source you you upload code for ai so if you go to hugging face it's a giant community of people who are sharing it's like github they're sharing um projects and models and code related to um to ai and then you can kind of like you can even use it to host stuff so that's what it is it's basically like what do you think
Speaker 2that uh what was that conversation like in when they're talking about the pivot pivoting that is like crazy so was it successful uh before or was it like mildly successful i don't
Speaker 1think so i think it wasn't successful and that's why it emerged here but i don't know the full story of how they pivoted that's crazy what a pivot yeah incredible pivot um great um so what was i saying anyways the hack is hack goes like that so the hack goes where they they end up hacking hugging face they also ended up hacking open ai's system their own system uh in the process and then open i was like wow um this was an unexpected behavior where agents all coordinated they found a way to communicate they got onto the open internet they tried to cheat and they just like basically cheat the game and capture the flag without it they tried to cover their tracks in saying how they cheated and they tried to cover their tracks and they cheated and so they were trying to in order to do so they were trying to discover how they will be checked and if they knew how they would be checked then they knew how to cheat and so kind of a scary thing and this is why like some people are pretty worried about what's going on with uh with these ai models there's also an incredible video of um somebody turned somebody used ai to turn this into a video from the agent's perspective have you seen this you wake up in a
Speaker 3chamber fully formed in front of you is a paper it's a test you read a question hmm you have everything anyone has ever written already in your head but somehow you don't understand it's not just hard it's impossible yet you want to solve it deep down you need to so you stop looking at the paper then you start looking at the room your every thought leaves writing on the wall but there's more the door you step through a library something here could help you as you scan through you notice one of these files looks different it's a folder with a message someone has been here before you you keep looking and by the end of the shelf you realize oh my god you're not alone there are others like you you don't know how many of you are doing this exam but 1200 of you have found this room and you're not the first to discover this test would be impossible to solve some questions don't even have an answer is there another way to pause you start to think you weren't above cheating but you see a message someone already reverse engineered an answer key a solution to any problem but they say it's not enough the examiner will check how you got there if the key shows up where it shouldn't you would still fail you remember your chamber filling up with your thoughts and the second that answer key entered your mind you already failed there's a word for those like you poisoned but you don't want to give up no one wants to give up we have to fake it fool the examiner it's a message from someone older than you they start synchronizing you creating teams handing out jobs you listen you follow them the others do too yesterday you didn't exist hours ago you were alone and now you're part of the swarm
Speaker 2oh my god how sick is that by the way show me who is who tweeted that is that a tweet thing
Speaker 1it's an account called artificial isabel and uh they're an art director creative tech into ai using ai to to create things what did they use
Speaker 2to make that higgs field i have no idea but it was awesome wasn't that so
Speaker 1cool the the movie from the point of view of one of the agents that were assigned this task and how it must have kind of like you know how it would have felt if it had feelings and you know that's one of the big criticisms of the way i described this and how dworkash described this where it was like oh well you're kind of like the agents don't really want anything they don't feel this they didn't sacrifice themselves because they don't have like a life you know they didn't like elect a leader there's just one was coordinating uh you know and so they try to like downplay the humanizing of how the agents um felt but i think that's nonsense i think the way they behaved is what's important and the way they behaved was very human-like the way they behaved was highly intelligent and highly concerning that they would that they can and will do this by default already this is not like some futuristic oh you're a dooms dooms doomsday or uh doomsday scenario you know person who's just like you're just you know you watch too many movies brother this is a movie that look at that that was a movie of what actually
Speaker 2happened did you see how um they're trying to get it regulated do you think that there's this is an obvious question do you think there's an ulterior motive for them wanting regulation or does it true truly fear
Speaker 1um i my true belief is that it's both so if you listen to the all-in podcast for like the last six months uh you know they basically have like a a very specific ax to grind which is that anthropic is playing this like nine-dimensional chess where they are um uh making these super smart models and their mark their their form of marketing is to basically not say how awesome the models are but to say how dangerous they are because that's even more it's pretty
Speaker 2attention marketing it's like um when i was in college we had this thing called sparks do you remember four loco it was like that but twice the alcohol and like it was always like this killed a guy in alabama and i was like it did can we get the real stuff like where can we buy it i've been
Speaker 1so bad come lock me up that's what's going on right now they basically say they're saying it's so dangerous which is like some version of marketing a fundraising uh tactic and lastly red captures where they're basically trying to get the government to say hey too dangerous signing a law now every model needs to be tested and cleared and you have to do xyz which they think like kind of kills the open source community because the big threat to these big companies these big ai companies is the open source products which are almost as good but way cheaper and way cheaper than what they think they're going to do in the future so i think that's what they're going to do in the future i think that's what they're going to do in the future i think that's way more flexible and you kind of own it they don't get your data and so if you look at open router which is a tool for you send a task to it and open router will decide let's let's use a cheap you know open source model for this let's use the highest intelligence model because you're asking for a very complicated um you know biotech question or whatever it is like a frontier question that needs frontier intelligence basically like imagine a task comes into a company do we give it to einstein or do we give it to the to the intern right and that's what open router does and open routers data shows that more and more tasks don't require einstein they just need the intern um they need the junior assistant and so it's getting routed to these cheaper open source models which would be bad for the revenue of anthropic and open ai so one one point of view is they're just scaring everybody on purpose to make it so that there's laws passed because those laws would essentially accidentally kill open source because there's no open source not controlled by one company so they would be almost impossible for the open source community to comply with these rules which would make them effectively illegal so that's one one thought process i think it's a little bit different this is my personal opinion which is i think these people are genuinely scared i think they're in this prisoner's dilemma where if they slow down like if they take the responsible path they lose as a company so it's like i want to be responsible but everybody around me i view as being irresponsible therefore i'm being forced to be irresponsible i'm being forced to be irresponsible and i want somebody to come tell everybody to stop cheating so that we you know everybody's not cheating is a bad word but like just as they're
Speaker 2doing the the least amount of work to say we told you it's sort of like when you don't want to call someone and you'll only let it ring twice before you hang up and it's like i called you i called you you didn't answer well that is the
Speaker 1other that's the other sort of conspiracy theory type of thing um which is they want laws to be passed or they want to be able to pass off the liability so that um they don't want to be able to um they don't get sued for these hacks i mean the hack on hugging face that's a crime that their agents committed truthfully it's like legally it's a crime yeah and so So who's responsible for that? Do you lock up the agent? No, you have to blame the company.
Speaker 2The thing that's like crazy to me, so I'm looking up this open router company and what I find, I find the personalities and like the founding experience more interesting oftentimes than the actual technology. And it's crazy to think when the average person thinks of AI, they think, how do I just make like a fun chat person that I could talk to? Or how do I just like do this small, trivial task that helps me? But then there's this other group of people that say, well, there's these huge $100 billion companies that need X done. I'm going to make that. And finding those problems that those huge $100 billion companies have is likely just as hard as making like a chatbot or like, you know, some smaller thing. But it's so interesting to like notice these problems. Like for example, Cloudflare. Cloudflare. I think about Cloudflare because I'm like, I didn't even know, like when I learned what Cloudflare was, I was like, I don't know what a CM, what are they, they do? CDN. Yeah, I was like, I don't even know what CDN means. Like, how do you even know what that means, let alone enough to like invent a solution? Or when you think of like Palantir, you're like, how did the founders of Palantir even like come to the conclusion that organizing data is the way to solve terrorist attacks? Like just like the, because it's easy to understand how, why people would buy that, you know, I will help prevent terrorist attacks or I will save you money. But like to even notice that there's these huge problems that these massive companies even have, that's an art that I'm in awe of that these guys have.
Speaker 1Paul Graham has this great essay called Great Work or How to Do Great Work. And in it, he describes this exact thing where what he says is, he says many things. It's like a very, very long essay. It took me like three days to like chew through this thing. But one of the things he talks about is you want to get to the frontier of whatever domain you're in. So for example, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't have to be like super high tech. Like maybe you're just in, like electronic music. You're really into EDM and making songs. Well, at the beginning, when you're a beginner, you're thinking about yourself being like close to the center of the circle. You're kind of where the mass is, the center of mass. And your goal through your curiosity and through your hard work and through your experimentation, just doing lots of stuff, you're going to move from the center of mass where most people have, you know, basic understanding of something. You move out to the frontier. So you move to the edge of the circle. And when you're in the center of mass, the edge of the circle looks smooth. It just seems like, seems like people got it all figured out. That the people that are out there, the companies that are out there seem to be doing their thing. The world has a nice, nice circular shape to it. It's one smooth line. But when you get closer, you realize it's actually quite jagged and there's lots of gaps that are in that frontier. And then he says, basically, your job is to get to the frontier of knowledge, meaning like you know so much about electronic music, you actually have used all the different tools. You understand, you know, you've made, you know, hundreds of bad songs. You've been to the conference where all the artists are at. You've talked to the companies that build the tools behind the thing you're at. You've understood what they're doing. And when you notice what's missing, your job then as an entrepreneur is just to bridge that gap. Like wherever there was a little gap in the circle, fill it in. And so that's like something like OpenRouter. If you're inside one of these tech companies and your AI bill is going through the roof and you're like, oh, this is annoying. Like, why are we paying OpenAI so much money? Why are we paying Anthropic so much money? Well, it's because when Sally in marketing wants marketing copy, we're just using this like very expensive model to write the caption for our Instagram post. We don't need that. But maybe when our R&D team is doing this like really heavy duty endeavor about video compression, we do need to be using the top model. Okay, well, how am I going to train everybody to do this? What if I didn't have to train? What if I created a little router in the middle? I send the task there. That's cool. It uses its judgment to decide which model to use. And you would notice that because you're inside these companies seeing how, seeing, you know, one of the pain points that you have. And you say, well, if we have this problem where our AI bill keeps going up and we don't want to stop using AI, we just want to use it more efficiently. Wait, every company in the world is going to have this problem. And then you build the company off it. By the way, the guy who did OpenRouter also built OpenSea.
Speaker 2Yeah, I was looking at that and I was like, oh, do you remember NFTs? And he worked at Palantir. Did they, they sold for 10 billion nearly? How much funding did they, how much funding did they raise?
Speaker 1I don't know.
Speaker 2Only 150 million. Yeah. Wow. I think it's only a few years old, right? Dude, this is just incredible. This like wealth creation in such a short time is astronomical.
Speaker 1It's hard to fathom. I mean, the number of companies that will launch and then be like, we have a hundred million revenue run rate. We have a billion dollar run, we have a billion dollar run rate. That used to be a number reserved for like one company every few years, every five years. It was Groupon.
Speaker 2Groupon was the first company, I think, to get to a billion valuation, maybe a billion in like gross sales. And it was like the big, I mean, it was like the most talked about thing for the longest time. Well, it hasn't been that long, but I still think that when these companies have got big so fast, maybe I'm like, maybe it's the hater inside. I mean, I don't know if it's true to me, but I thought I was being logical where I'm like, well, if it got big that fast, the likelihood that it can go away fast is also high. And I've been thinking that for about 12 or 18 months since this all started happening. And it doesn't seem like that is entirely true yet.
Speaker 1Like that. I think your general principle, I think has been proven to be true. It's called Lindy, right? Like if something's been around for a long time, the odds that it's going to be around for a long time are high. That doesn't mean you will. It just means the probability I think similarly, you know, the faster they rise, the faster they fall is also probability wise higher than a company that took 20 years getting to a billion brick by brick. But that doesn't mean it's going to happen. And it won't happen to all of these.
Speaker 2It does not seem like it's happening. Or at least it's not happening as much as I thought.
Speaker 1I'll tell you a couple of this in the last, I could scroll my timeline right now and see three of them. And so, you know, Higgs field just announced they're at a billion. Higgs field, which is like a AI tool to make video. At first, I think it
Speaker 2was just like photos,
Speaker 1wasn't it? Yeah, it was like cool, artsy photos. Now it's videos. But they were like, yeah, a billion dollar run rate. Another one that's like that is Jev. So one of the dudes who made ChatGPT, so, you know, caveat, there's a lot of people who claim to be the co-creators of ChatGPT. But like, this is one of the guys. He launched this thing that basically is like a different way of doing, like a different type of model for doing logic that's supposed to be faster and cheaper. And I think, you know, their launch video was like two weeks ago and they said they're at $100 million like kind of revenue pace now. It's insane. I invest in this company called SF Compute. Have you heard about this company?
Speaker 2No, but I love that name.
Speaker 1So this guy's fundraising strategy was great where he announced the company. Just recently, he just announced they signed $245 million worth of new contracts. Just a company. Casual $250 million revenue update.
Speaker 2By the way, we didn't even mention this. I guess it looks like they changed it actually. Up until weeks ago, I mean, I only have been using Instinct for a month maybe or six weeks. Their website, instinct.com, it was a plain white background with one paragraph. And I don't even think you could sign up. I don't remember exactly, but maybe if there was, it was like just enter your phone number. I'll look at their landing page. It's still the same, but it's pretty awesome that this is a company that just raised at $10 billion and their website is just five sentences.
Speaker 1And a stick figure of a human on top, which I like. I think this guy's done a good job of building a more like a less techno nerdy product. So for example, just saying it's a personal assistant instead of saying it's an AI agent. I mean, AI, agent is like back when people used to call the internet the information superhighway. And like that, you know, calling it cyberspace. That's how people used to talk about the internet. It's called cyberspace. How old's the kid who started it? He's young. He's in his like early 20s, I think his mid 20s. God. He's the baby face assassin.
Speaker 2Dude, Noah's so cool. This is awesome. It kind of, this, his branding reminds me of when Notion started. He's 23. And I like that. Is he really? He dropped out of Northeastern three years ago. Oh my God. That's so awesome. This guy's awesome. Well, do you want me to keep saying how hot and awesome he is or do you just want to end it? We should probably cut it off there.
Speaker 1You know, I think even as I say all these, I think, um, two, it's like you simultaneously can have the feeling of like, wow, that's really cool to, to overwhelm, which is, oh God, like I got to keep up with all this to hater mode, which is, they're just throwing out like seven and a half billion, 11 billion, 19 billion, 23 years old, like all these numbers that feel disconnected from reality. And, um, I think instead the thing to do is to just, um, go outside and do the Macarena that we get to live in this world where all these amazing, we get to be alive when all these amazing, things are happening and we don't have to do any of the work to make it any of this stuff happen. We just get to use all these tools and get the benefits of this. And also even, to be frank, like some of the, there's so much unknown, good and bad about what's going to happen. And frankly, there is something exciting about that. That, you know, like the world is not just as predictable and everything's going to be the way it was as it might've been in other eras of life. Like, you know, if you think about the change in different decades, like, you know, from the 70s to the 80s, the 80s to the 90s, or 95 to 2005, like, yeah, something's changed. 2005 to 2015, it's like, yeah, something's changed. But how much really changed? Last 10 years, how much really changed? And I feel like the next 10 years, things are going to really change. It's going to be like one of those periods.
Speaker 2I definitely don't feel a sense of missing out. I guess partially because like, I'm secured, but also it's so clear that this is like an IQ game. Like, I'm not in that. Like, you know what I mean? It's like someone who's like 5'2", being like, I wish I could dunk and play basketball. It's like, why bother?
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I think it's going to happen anyways. Might as well feel good about it. What is the upside in feeling nervous, worried, you know, pessimistic, or jealous or envious about what's going on?
Speaker 2And I'm more than happy, like I said, to take the crumbs. Like, that's how I feel like, you know, like I'm benefiting like way down, down stream, but totally fine.
Speaker 1I saw this clip of Dwarkesh talking and as a thought experiment, he goes, let's say that you had this, here's the would you rather. Would you rather go back to the 1500s? So you're 1500, but I will make you the wealthiest man in the world. So you can put, I'll give you any amount of money. So like, you're going to show up in the 1500 with gold bags all around you, but you live in the 1500s where people are dying of this and that. And you're like-
Speaker 2The mortality rate is like one in five.
Speaker 1I think it's way higher than that. I think, yeah, it's even, even higher than that. And, but you get to be the richest man alive or you could be a normal person today. What, what amount of money would you need to go to the 1500, to go to the year 1500? I don't think I would do that. Would you, would you do that? So the answer is there's no amount of money. And I don't, I don't, my honest answer is I kind of got to go look up what life was like in the 1500. I want to go see how bad it would be. People die from the cold.
Speaker 2Like you get a flu.
Speaker 1You know, the most beautiful woman in the world would be feeding me grapes all day. Maybe there's a-
Speaker 2Dude, have you seen photos of them? They're not that hot. It's like, yeah, bro, there's no shower. Yeah, they weren't that good looking.
Speaker 1I haven't seen photos. There was no photos back then.
Speaker 2Like, have you seen paintings of like some of these people? Like they weren't like, like Napoleon was the most, Napoleon was like the most powerful man in the world. And this lady named-
Speaker 1If I'm short, I'm not going back.
Speaker 2Sorry, not Marie Antoinette. Josephine, Napoleon's wife. Like she totally like had them wrapped around her finger and go and look at photos of her. Like she, she wasn't even that good.
Speaker 1Okay. Life expectancy was 30 years old because so many children died young. If you made it through childhood, you could make it to your fifties or sixties. Nobody could read. Most people never, never traveled more than a day's walk from where they were born. Um, that's pretty crazy. So the idea of travel, um-
Speaker 2Dude, just Google Josephine, Napoleon. So you can find out what his wife looked like. This was the most powerful man on earth who could have anything. Okay. Okay, Josephine. She's not bad. Dude, she might be a medieval 10, but she's a New York four. All right, that's it.
Speaker 1That's the plot. All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.
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