Emil Michael

“There was also this other thing that would happen, so this is like, 2000, I think this really started in 2014, 15, et cetera, is Emile and I would meet up with Mark and Ben at this, Super undercover restaurant.”

“If you could synthesize that information so they can make that decision, and you're using more sources by definition almost, the data and choices are going to be better choices.”

“The idea of taking one person and giving them the power of 10 people makes them better at what they do by an order, potentially an order of magnitude.”

“But in terms of agents, we've had some agent pilots at our enterprise level. Remember I was talking about the enterprise corporate level? Just to do the mundane things we have to do every day. But those things are not sort of where we're at the war fighting le…”

“And we've written that there's a 35 page directive at the DoD that talks about Human oversight and how we manage these systems, and we're constantly updating that and making sure we have the right controls on it.”

“And to protect your exquisite targets on your side against a very cheap drone, you have to use expensive countermeasures. And so the lesson there is how do you turn the dial from, maybe we should have more mass attritable, Weapons like drones or counter drones…”

“The original sin was In the past administration, choosing one AI provider and having no options, because it is a gargantuan effort to get these software things onto classified networks.”

“So these companies are talking about their things in apocalyptic terms, which make it necessary for us to judge the management teams, judge their actions, Look at the terms of service. Understand how they fit in our supply chain. This technology is like nothin…”

“How many, the upgrade cycles for these things are now compressing to now three-ish months. So every three months you have a new set of model weights, a new set of guardrails, a new set of bugs in the way the model behaves, the way it hallucinates or doesn't ha…”

“I think the notion that a First Amendment claim is going to hold up is, is, would be shocking, because that means that the government has no choice to make.”

“As I understand it, Emile's ownership of shares in that company was blessed by the Office of Government Ethics.”

“We're trending toward artificial general intelligence, a substrate, a layer, something that'll touch everything, but we're way behind in AI at the department.”

“We got them down to six and there were the places where I thought we had the greatest opportunity for change and for growth and impact on our combat power and for our industrial base. And that was a starting point. An applied AI was number one”

“In 90 days, I think we've had 1.2 million of the three million people at the department. Use some form of AI when that was, that number was 80,000 before I started.”

“Well, they came up now because as I started to look at the contracts that had been written during the last administration for the use of AI. I had a whole, holy cow moment because there were things not well beyond what you've been hearing in the press in the l…”

“And then second, after the Maduro raid, one of the primary vendor for this had raised the question, senior exec about whether their software was used during the Maduro raid, which is one of the most successful op military, military operations of our lifetime. …”

“So that set off a series of events of, whoa, are we single-threaded on a vendor who's concerned about how we're using their software after the most successful military raid and the terms of service do not comport with the future world? We've got to get other p…”

“It can't, the software, the soul, someone's soul of their model, their constitution, which is not the U S constitution. Can't be dictating our command and control environment and telling generals and war fighters what to do and not do.”

“This is just the one thing the primes have an advantage on is not the inventiveness. It's the production and manufacturing ability to scale what they do with what they've initially built.”

“And I think that's the next stage and you're going to see companies start to cross that chasm here in the next one to two years.”

“The culture there again is to never say no. And I've tried to move it to faster yeses, faster nos.”

“In terms of boots on the ground, there's no scenario where we have some protracted boots on the ground, Afghanistan, Iraq too, like scenario.”

“So then that culminated in the Tuesday kind of dramatic meeting with Hexeth and Secretary Hexeth and me and Dario with the Friday deadline that, that got blown.”

“These, the leaders of these companies say they're going to cause 50% white collar unemployment.”

“Boeing wants to use it to build fighter jets. I can't have that because I don't trust what the outputs may be because they're so wedded to their own policy preferences.”

“It was really the, you worry, I worried about them shutting off our system at a moment of need or them messing with our system at a moment of need. Those were, we were scared.”

“It's a criticism on me because it's not like Trump, President Trump dipped in and he's like, hey, Emil, by the way, those guys didn't get me any money. You can't use them anymore.”

“And I was trying to work with them. Why would I spend three months trying to negotiate with them to get to a symbol standard if I would've just said, okay, guys, you're out.”

“There's more defense tech venture capital than ever by, you know, three X more than last year.”

“Generally I do think warfare is going from big carrier ships that cost twenty billion dollars and a decade and a half to build To mass attributable, low cost things.”

“One of the reasons the primes are such a small number, it's not the only, but it's one, is they learn how to contract with the government. They learn how to go through the bureaucracy, and that became a competitive advantage.”

“Emil Michael came out Friday night and said, it was five, 13, 13 minutes past the deadline. I'm trying to get in touch with Anthropic. I try to get on the phone with Dario. Dario says he's in a meeting.”

“And Emil Michael had said that, ah, Anthropic wanted to block searching over public databases as well.”

“So I cut them down to six after studying and I made it more action oriented. So we put sprints behind them like you would an engineering team.”

“The number one is applied AI. Because we're not building a foundation model at the DOW because there's being hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by the private sector on this. So how do I adapt or use what's being developed in the private sector and ap…”

“So, you know, in 10 years, it wouldn't surprise me if 20, 30% of the budget is, is, is spent on those kinds of systems.”

“I had some like Databricks engineers, former Databricks engineers, former Meta engineers, former AWS people, Tiger team, 60 days good, great collaboration from Gemini from Google's Gemini, who already works at Department of Warsets, some familiarity with our a…”

“And we've had over a million people Unix use it in the last 30 days, which is kind of awesome. We've got one third of the enterprise on one model.”

“The talent they brought into every department could then be deployed on other projects like the AI action plan that we did with Gen AI. So, because they were already, like, Elon chose technically sophisticated people. There weren't all engineers, some were law…”

“The buildup, the military buildup in China is the biggest military buildup in world history.”

“In the eighties, there were 50 defense contractors, and they were, got merged, so there were only about five. Now.”

“I think there's going to be, when you think about drones, not just the small drones, they just get the bigger and bigger drones that really look like long range missiles, if you will, to be innovation there.”

“For Golden Dome, which you've heard about, we're looking at how to take things out from space, which is a compelling, really complex, but interesting proposition.”

“And then from an AI standpoint, you know, I feel like we're generally okay with the investment. I mean, there's so much money going in there that that's like a well-funded area, both the foundation models and the derivatives that are trying to do specific apps…”

“Which is why in two months of owning, being the chief AI, having the chief AI office run in my world, which was a new move, we were able to launch gen AI, which is Google's Gemini for four million, every, every employee, military and civilian in the department…”

“They were the first of the big frontier AI companies to say, we want to work at Department of Defense. They were easy to work with on the contract. We're paying 47 cents For the whole year for all of this. So they're like taking, taking a loss to make sure tha…”

“We just did an RFI for space-based interceptors, which is how do you put something in space that could take something down in space.”

“Pete Hegsus, I think, is going to be, and is already, probably the greatest Secretary of War in our lifetimes.”

“I was like, we should buy Lyft. He's like, we should crush Lyft.”

“And my job is to create five more companies that, you know, work in the department and bring new capabilities.”

“BD and product partnerships should be the VC arm of a company. And this is what I tell my team is like, look, we need to look for pole vault opportunities, but we're going to fail sometimes like, yeah, Navon zip are going great, but there's a bunch of other pa…”

“Andreessen, having lost the Uber deal, ended up doing the Lyft deal, and we had, you know, Travis and Emil, you know, they were close to acquiring it acquiring Lyft which, you know but they wanted too much ownership so that luckily didn't work out”

“He architected the fifteen billion dollar raise he had a massive impact on the trajectory of Uber, and he became really Travis's right hand and sparring partner in building, building Uber.”

“So that Series D, like a year after the Series C, which Google and TPG did, that was at three billion. This was at seventeen billion, and we started off at 10. So, Emil was able to negotiate from, like, 10, eleven billion valuation to 17, because there was so …”

“So the SoftBank conversations, ironically, Travis and Emil started those conversations, the ultimate twelve billion dollar investment from SoftBank Vision Fund.”

“And so they got two, two of the greatest minds in Silicon Valley were taken out of the company. This is the greatest value destruction that's happened since firing Steve Jobs at Apple. And it was a massive mistake.”

“A country is not a country without a border, right? And not being able to control comes in means, means you can't serve those who come in very well. And if the idea is we have a melting pot so that everyone who comes in here, we take care of, they're entitled …”

“What you know it is now is a place where people are walking around with fear to not say what they think. They're not challenging their ideas. That means they're not coming out as fully formed adults with the ability to critically think through problems and sol…”

“University of Florida where Ben Sasse He's done a really good job sort of taking the politics out of school and letting people speak and debate and come out critical thinkers.”

“So so we then did a mobile payment system so that we could pay them, they got to keep it and we would prevent the warlords from taking it, and then we sort of were able to consistently get them on their side, so they wouldn't be doing IEDs against us.”