The Exchanges

Q use cases are and build an organization that deeply integrates into his customers and does it so well all the way up into his roadmap that he's much more deeply embedded Than anyone else is. I, when I, I heard that part, I, I kind of gave him a real tip of the hat on that one, but what did you, you know, Brad, what was your take on that?

A You and I had this conversation after we first listened to it, and you know, if you really telescope out, you know, he talks as a systems level engineer. Right? Even if you hear, like, people, you know, people went to Harvard Business School and say, ah, can this guy possibly have 60 direct reports? Right? But how many direct reports does Elon have? Right? These systems level, and he said, I have situational awareness. Right? I'm a prompt engineer to the best people in the world at these specific tasks. I think when I look at this, the thing that I deeply underappreciated a year and a half ago about this company was the systems level thinking. Right? That these are, that he spent years thinking about how to embed this competitive advantage, and how it really, it goes all the way from power, all the way through application, and every day they're launching these new things to further embed themselves in the ecosystem. But I did hear from somebody over the last two days who, you know, Renee Haas, the CEO of Arm, Right. Rene was also at our event and, and he's a huge Jensen fan. He, he worked eight years at NVIDIA before becoming the CEO of ARM in 2013. And he said, listen, nobody is going to assault the NVIDIA castle head on. Right. Like the mainframe of AI, right, is entrenched and it's going to become a lot bigger, at least as far as the eye can see. He said, however, if you thi…

AI assessment note: “the thing that I deeply underappreciated a year and a half ago about this company”

Q I can just get answers? So do you think, you know, first, Can Google and Bing continue to grow the legacy search businesses in the age of answers? And then what does, you know, what does Bing need to do or your consumer efforts under Mustafa need to do in order to, you know, compete with ChatGPT, which really looks like, you know, it's broken out from a consumer perspective.

A Yeah, I mean, I think the, the first thing is what you said last, which is chat meets answers, and that's ChatGPT, both the brand, the product, uh, and it's becoming stateful, right? I mean, like ChatGPT now is not just, you know, in fact, search was a stateless for, you know, there was search history, but I think more so, uh, these agents will be a lot more stateful. So, uh, in fact, so, That's why I was so thrilled. Like, I've been trying to get an Apple search deal for, like, 10 years. And so, when Tim finally did a deal with Sam, I was, like, the most thrilled person, which is better, it's better to have ChatGPT get that deal than anybody else, because we, you know, we have that commercial and investor relationship with OpenAI. So, to that point, the way I look at it and say is, at the same time, Distribution matters, right? I mean, this is where Google has an enormous advantage, right? They have the distribution on Apple. They're the default. Uh, they are obviously the default on Android. Uh, they touch, so therefore, I think, uh, uh, and the habits don't go away, right? I mean, the number of times you just go to the browser URL and just type in your query, right? I mean, even now, even though I want to go to copilot, I mean, my usage is mostly copilot. And like, if I have to think about Bing versus Copilot, it's kind of interesting, right? Some of the navigational stuff, …

AI assessment note: “Some of the navigational stuff, I go to Bing, pretty much everything else, I go to Copilot”

Q uh, you know, Microsoft started investing in. Is invested in the ballpark at 13, fourteen billion dollars into open AI. And for that you get 27% of the business Ownership in the business on a fully diluted basis. I think it was about a third, and you took some dilution over the course of last year with all the investment. So does that sound about right in terms of ownership?

A Yeah, it does. But I would say before even our stake in it, Brad, I think what's pretty unique about OpenAI is the fact that as part of OpenAI's process of restructuring, one of the largest nonprofit gets created. I mean, let's not forget that You know, in some sense, I say at Microsoft, like I, you know, we are very proud of the fact that we were, we are associated with the two of the largest nonprofits, the Gates Foundation and now the OpenAI Foundation. So that's, I think, the big news. We obviously were, you know, are thrilled. It's not what we thought, and as I said to somebody, it's not like when we first invested our billion dollars that, oh, this is going to be the hundred bagger that I'm going to be talking about to VCs about, but here we are. But we are very thrilled to be an investor and an early backer. And, and it's a great, and it's really a testament to what Sam and team have done, quite frankly. I mean, they obviously had the vision early about what this technology could do, and, uh, they ran with it and just executed, you know, in a masterful way.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it does. But I would say before even our stake in it”

Q Yeah, and like Bill said, turn that into a premium offering, right? Say that's the, you know, the gold. And, you know, the silver and the bronze are built off, you know, something that's, like I said, one-tenth the price.

A That seems to me, Bill, you know, if, if I had to forecast You know, if I'm open AI, I'm running a consumer business with really high gross margins, right? Because consumers are, uh, uh, less sensitive to what they're paying. Their, their, their, their intensity of use is lower. Whereas when, if, if somebody's writing code, you know, there's, the variable intensity is high. And so, you know, for them, it would make sense to launch an open source model back to where we started the pod. And price it really low to, you know, drive share knowing, you know, reminds me a little bit of Amazon back in the day. Amazon had this monopoly retail business they could use to subsidize AWS, gain share for a decade, and then begin to take price. That would be a rational strategy for OpenAI to follow. So you take the profitable consumer business, you use it to subsidize, you know, the, the, the market sharing other applications that you hope to build.

AI assessment note: “That would be a rational strategy for OpenAI to follow.”

Q everybody really holding their breath and hoping that we see something really capable and powerful, uh, is this open source model that's been promised out of OpenAI. Now, of course, Elon says he's committed to open source as well. Grok four is a great model, is impressive what they, uh, what they put out there. Any idea, uh, Sonny, about the open source plans out of, out of, uh, X?

A Yeah, so I think, like, Elon's been, you know, pretty, said it on Twitter that they'll always open source one generation back, and so while they were on three, you know, they should have gotten to two, and now they're on four, so I think the, the thinking is that they will get there. You know, my, my only guess would be is that, um, you know, right now, if they were to open source two or even three, it's so far behind that, um, you know, what's, what's the purpose in doing it? It may not even be utilized, and you'll maybe end up Having to deal with just, you know, a bunch of internet or Twitter FUD. Just coming back to OpenAI, I, I will tell you, it's like one of those things that really you rarely see in the enterprise. It's almost like the demand for like a, you know, like a Tesla Roadster or something, or a Model Y before it came out. Everybody asks for it. It's like, that's the model that everybody wants to use right now. And so, you know, we can't wait till it comes live and, And it, you know, when it's on Grok, when it's all over the world, I think it's going to be a real big one for everyone.

AI assessment note: “Elon's been, you know, pretty, said it on Twitter that they'll always open source”

Q everybody really holding their breath and hoping that we see something really capable and powerful, uh, is this open source model that's been promised out of OpenAI. Now, of course, Elon says he's committed to open source as well. Grok four is a great model, is impressive what they, uh, what they put out there. Any idea, uh, Sonny, about the open source plans out of, out of, uh, X?

A Yeah, so I think, like, Elon's been, you know, pretty, said it on Twitter that they'll always open source one generation back, and so while they were on three, you know, they should have gotten to two, and now they're on four, so I think the, the thinking is that they will get there. You know, my, my only guess would be is that, um, you know, right now, if they were to open source two or even three, it's so far behind that, um, you know, what's, what's the purpose in doing it? It may not even be utilized, and you'll maybe end up Having to deal with just, you know, a bunch of internet or Twitter FUD. Just coming back to OpenAI, I, I will tell you, it's like one of those things that really you rarely see in the enterprise. It's almost like the demand for like a, you know, like a Tesla Roadster or something, or a Model Y before it came out. Everybody asks for it. It's like, that's the model that everybody wants to use right now. And so, you know, we can't wait till it comes live and, And it, you know, when it's on Grok, when it's all over the world, I think it's going to be a real big one for everyone.

AI assessment note: “said it on Twitter that they'll always open source one generation back”

Q slide, which I thought was incredible slide six, which is when will AI reach 75% of total US market cap, which I think is incredibly provocative how you compare that to industrials and transport, because everybody's saying it's so big already, it can't get any bigger. So just kick us off You know, contextualizing your level of optimism and this slide, like, can it really be 75% of total cap?

A Yeah. Uh, so listen, um, every time I'm optimistic, I'm worried this is it, you know, this is the peak. Uh, and now that Thomas and I are doing this podcast together, we're guaranteed to be doomed. But I think that at the end of the day, That's how everybody thinks, first of all. So it's never priced in. Everybody's worried that it's all the time, the peak, and yet despite that, uh, things tend to work out. I think today we've learned from these founders and stuff like that, that AI is probably the defining and biggest tech trend that we're going to see. And I showed you the different waves. There's only been a few waves over the last 70 years or so, going back to mainframes. And one person made the point that the networking, we needed the PCs. The internet, we needed networked PCs. Sass, we needed what happened before, and AI is also built. So one of the reasons these trends get bigger, they're built on top of each other.

AI assessment note: “one of the reasons these trends get bigger, they're built on top of each other”

Q have to kick off with software, right? Um, you're, you're one of the thought leaders in the space, and certainly we know you well, and most people in Silicon Valley know you well. But maybe just, uh, level set, you know, quick reminder for everybody. What does Box do? What inspired you to get it started? And then, and then how it's evolving, you know, as you guys exit Zerp.

A Um, actually the Zerp thing, um, uh, I, I mean, I, you know, I know there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot of Zerp stuff going on, but we actually never really even had that much of a Zerp benefit. Um, I can certainly get into the different eras. There was, there was about a three-year period where we raised a ton of capital and we burned it. Um, and we did have a little bit of absurd benefit, but it was actually like on paper, exactly the right thing to do at that point. I got diluted a ton in the process as a result, but it was actually like strategically the most important thing to be doing, but, uh, history of the company super quickly, um, and kind of what we do. So we built a platform that helps companies manage their most important data, their financial documents, their marketing materials, their contracts, uh, their strategy, you know, content, anything that can turn into a piece of content we manage and store and secure. Uh, we have about a 115,000 customers, uh, 70% of the fortune, 500. And we started the company with a really simple premise. This was in 2004, 2005. When we got the idea, it was like right at the start where like you could put data in the cloud. It wasn't called the cloud then. And we did like crazy bridge rounds and all this stuff. I think we pitched bill like four times at that point, um, handily got rejected, you know, probably appropriate, probably ap…

AI assessment note: “we built a platform that helps companies manage their most important data”

Q 10 blue links that is just at its core seems somewhat at odds, um, with what perplexity is doing, with what ChatGPT is doing, the age of answers. Um, and so I, I would just love to, you know, kick it around for a second. How, if you're running Google today, right? And you're faced with this innovators dilemma around this, like, like what, what should they be doing here?

A Uh, well above my pay grade. Fortunately, I am just a lowly enterprise software. But, um, but you know, I, so, so as a reminder, obviously for everybody, um, like innovators dilemma is about business model, you know, difficulties. And we always, we always think it's a technology problem. It's always about your business model, um, doesn't make The, the new thing attractive to you. Um, and so you avoid doing it until you get disrupted. You know, I, I, I might take, uh, after, you know, uh, thinking about this a little bit, not, maybe not enough, is I don't think there's a totally, 100% classic innovator dilemma issue with, with, um, the move to AI with Google. Um, I think on the other end of this, uh, the business model could be as good, if not better. And Brad, you think about this a lot of like, Of like, if you, if you actually had Google literally tell you the thing to buy, um, and, and they got a transaction on that, it would actually be a similar business model. Um, they would just get you to that answer even faster and you'd still transact and you'd still do commerce and, and they are still the distribution engine.

AI assessment note: “I don't think there's a totally, 100% classic innovator dilemma issue”

Q somebody who participates in the ecosystem, kudos to you both. It's incredible, this contribution to the future of AI. But Sam, talk to us a bit about the importance of the, the choice around health and, and resilience, and then help us understand how do we make sure that you get maximal benefit without it getting weighted down, as we've seen with so many nonprofits with its own political biases?

A Yeah, first of all, The best way to create a bunch of value for the world is hopefully what we're, we've already been doing, which is to make these amazing tools and just let people use them. And I think capitalism is great. I think companies are great. I think people are doing amazing work, getting advanced AI into the hands of a lot of people and companies that are doing incredible things. There are some areas where the, I think, market forces don't quite work for what's in the best interest of people, and you do need to do things in a different way. There are also some new things with this technology that just haven't existed before, like the potential to use AI to do science at a rapid clip, like really truly automated discovery. And when we thought about the areas we wanted to first focus on, clearly, if we can cure a lot of disease and make the data and information for that broadly available, That would, that'd be a wonderful thing to do for the world. And then on this point of AI resilience, I do think some things may get a little strange and they won't all be addressed by companies doing their thing. So as the world has to navigate through this transition, if we can fund some work to help with that, And that could be, you know, cyber defense, that could be AI safety research, that could be economic studies, all of these things, helping society get through this transitio…

AI assessment note: “And then on this point of AI resilience, I do think some things may get”

Q Is that what I'm hearing you say? Yeah, on a place like OpenRouter, you know, where you can see where this is happening, I see we would see it rise to the top in a few days.

A Um, that's music to David Sachs's ears because, you know, clearly in the strategic plan, they're worried about Chinese open source models dominating, uh, globally. And we're, we're, if you just watch the pace of releases, the quality of the releases out of China, the cycle time on the innovation and the open source community out of China, it's faster and better at the moment. So, and the only real big development, you know, we may see some of these new startups, Bill, we may see a reboot out of Meta, but the, the one that has, I think everybody really holding their breath and hoping that we see something really capable and powerful, uh, is this open source model that's been promised out of OpenAI. Now, of course, Elon says he's committed to open source as well. Grok four is a great model, is impressive what they, uh, what they put out there. Any idea, uh, Sonny, about the open source plans out of, out of, uh, X?

AI assessment note: “that's music to David Sachs's ears because, you know, clearly in the strategic plan”

Q combination of equity and, you know, and debt. You know, nobody has to show up with five hundred billion dollars on day one, you know, and, and I'm, I'm forecasting maybe 250,000 GPUs this year, maybe a million or two million, you know, next year, but what's the, what, what, what's your role in this, and how are you thinking about how this scales up over the next few years?

A Yeah, sure. So, um, I have a few roles that, you know, on this, and, and I know you guys know, Mossel reasonably well, I know you do, uh, definitely Bill, um, Yeah, I spend a lot of time with him. Part of it is they, you know, he owns 90% of arms, so, uh, I have a lot of investor meetings, uh, with him, with my, as my chief investor, and talking about strategy. He, he has been, himself personally, pretty large on this idea of singularity for, for quite some time, and it's something that I think he's just had a vision on in the long, long game. With Chet, the Chet GPT moment, I think for him, was a bit of an accelerant relative to, uh, there's a, There's a game to be played here relative to capital, relative to compute, relative to power, and he wants to play a big part in it. And I think there was just a lot of discussions, whether it was Sam Alton wanting to buy fabs or, uh, different assets that were trying to look at power in different areas of the planet. I think something had an opportunity to come together to solve this giant problem of how do you Get access to so much energy that's needed, we think, to drive AGI and ASI at numbers that are even well beyond the balance sheets of the giant Companies like a Microsoft, a Google, a Meta, an AWS, et cetera, an Amazon. So I think this all kind of came together at, at right time, right place, but like everything in life with the…

AI assessment note: “I have a few roles that, you know, on this... spend a lot of time with him”

Q ignored Zerp a bit, didn't get caught up in this, but when you looked around, right, Frank Slootman said to me, probably in 20, 21, most software companies in Silicon Valley are walking dead and they don't even know it. Right. When you looked around in 20 and 21 and look around today, How do you think, um, your fellow CEOs and founders are balancing that profitability versus growth tradeoff?

A A lot to unpack here. Um, so, so first of all, I mean, empirically the data is showing that, that most public company CEOs have dealt with this relatively well. Um, they have sort of responded to the crisis. Um, and you know, Brad, especially, obviously you've put out great, great, you know, content that I think has, has catalyzed that across, um, a number of CEOs as well. And I think there, there's been a clear wake up call to, you know, let's just say, you know, My contemporary group of, of, you know, 2010 onward SaaS companies where, you know, we, we benefited from relatively cheap capital, you know, relatively high valuations. We could use that capital to, to again, grow at all costs. Uh, I would, you know, if I, if I represent, you know, probably many of the names on this group, I think that was the exactly right economic decision at the time. There was sort of a market share war. Um, you were, you were acquiring customers that maybe had a, a sort of a five or 10 year You know, kind of lifetime value curve, uh, associated with them, maybe even more. Um, and so of course you want to gobble up as much market share as humanly possible. There's a lot of stickiness to the platform. There's, there's some kind of network effects in some of these enterprise software.

AI assessment note: “empirically the data is showing that, that most public company CEOs have dealt with this relatively well”

Q lose by not increasing that is this future founder thing that you're talking about. And on one hand, it's kind of impossible to numerate, like why that could be so huge. But when you look at the legacy of immigrant founded companies in the Bay area and the headcount that's now under those companies, it's almost impossible not to believe. And, and you, why wouldn't you want that aperture bigger?

A Well, the only thing like, like there, you know, there's also, you know, the argument of, okay, well, this is just a Silicon Valley thing. And I mean, clearly it's not like, so we all know it's not, but like, even if you wanted to prove that it's not Silicon Valley, well, we're going to literally run out of real estate. Okay. So like, and room, um, we know that. So guess what, if I'm a freaking town in anywhere in the country and I could just be like, well, I can create like, 10,000 tech jobs. If I just become, if I, if I'm able to get this amazing talent and they're all going to move here, like, This is totally a countrywide opportunity for us, and we are just, we're just sitting on this and not doing anything about it, and I think it's insane. So, yeah.

AI assessment note: “This is totally a countrywide opportunity for us, and we are just sitting on this”

Q And so is Microsoft benefiting from that? You know, so let's, let's think about a couple of years from now, five years from now at the current growth rate will be sooner, but let's call it five years from now, your top line is twice as big as what it is today, Satya. How many more employees will you have? If you're, if you're, if you grow revenue by,

A Like one of the best things right now is these examples that I'm hit with every day from the employees of Microsoft. There was this person who leads our network operations, right? I mean, if you think about the amount of, uh, fiber we have had to put, uh, for like this, you know, this two gigawatt data center we just built out, uh, in Fairwater, right? And the amount of fiber there, the AI-WAN and what have you, it's just crazy, right? So, and it turns out this is a real world asset. There are, I think, 400 different fiber operators we are dealing with worldwide. Every time something happens, we are literally going and dealing with all these DevOps pipelines. The person who leads it, she basically said to me, you know what, there's no way I'll ever get the headcount to go do all this. Not forget, even if I even approve the budget, I can't hire all these folks. So she, she did the next best thing. She just built herself a whole bunch of agents to automate the DevOps pipeline of how to deal with the maintenance. That is an example of, to your point, a team with AI tools being able to get more productivity. So if you have a question, I will say we will grow a headcount. But the way I look at it is that headcount we grow will grow with a lot more leverage than the headcount we had pre-AI. And that's the adjustment I think structurally you're seeing first, right? Which is one, you c…

AI assessment note: “we will grow a headcount. But the way I look at it is that headcount”

Q And by the way, he's locked up for 365 days. Yes, exactly. So we know he's not selling, right?

A So, I just think it's an unprecedented situation, and the right answer is, I don't know what's gonna happen in the short term, and the right answer that I would just, you know, encourage every investor making their own decision is to just think exactly the way you articulated it. We have these different levers, we have these different variables. Think about each one of them from first principles. Make your own decision. Do your own due diligence. Be thoughtful. But there are a lot of variables here, and then it is a little funny to me that, ah, you know, it was a hundred times trailing TTM revenue. Well, after the deals they signed, I think it's at 39 times.

AI assessment note: “the right answer is, I don't know what's gonna happen in the short term”

Q Brad, Brad, Brad, you're the expert on this. Why can't Google get 40 dollars for that flight or 30 dollars for that flight instead of the two dollars, uh, for clicking through to Expedia?

A Well, I, I think to, I think to Bill's point, if you look at the traditional commission models, and I think the iconic example is in travel, the traditional commission model, for example, in hotels is 10%. And let's just say the average daily rate is a hundred bucks. So they're willing to spend on a commission model, 10 bucks, but in a marginal advertising model where they're, where they're bidding up all the way to, you know, their gross profit on, uh, you know, in order to get that next And if you're a startup, you certainly go above it. You may spend two or three X right on that individual purchase. It certainly has extracted more rents, but I think the other piece here is that if we really just telescope way out here, like we are heading to answers and actions, right? And even the people who invented the damn blue link model don't believe that that is where this thing ends. And all I'm saying is the idea that Google can replicate a 99% monopoly and take all of that pool of profits with it into this new world after letting ChatGPT become the verb, at least at the start, for what this new world is. It just, you know, that to me is almost impossible to believe, but the consensus view has continued to be that, you know, they're going to dominate this new thing the way they dominated the world of search. And I just think if they pull that off, I hope I'm a shareholder along the …

AI assessment note: “if we really just telescope way out here, like we are heading to answers”

Q uses the tool and it searches the internet. Um, so if you don't have to compress all this Wikipedia information, I don't know, take it, take a subject like World War II, you just need to know how to go out and use the internet to find the information, to summarize it in real time. How has that changed the pace of progress and the balance between open and closed?

A Yeah, and so it's spot on, right? Brad, what we see now, and you see it when you use these reasoning models, and what I suggest everyone do is when you're using a reasoning model, you can usually expand out its thought process. So when you ask a question, it'll say, oh, the person is asking a question about this. What should I do? Let me go and maybe search the internet. Let me go do a few different things that can have a lot of different tools. And so the push has been towards, you know, really, really strong reasoning models. And, you know, we have to give credit there. OpenAI really started that. With oh, one, that was really the first reasoning model that was put out there. But I think on the back of the research and the back of it, you know, everyone talked about and, you know, the pod's good friend, Noam Brown was the leader on that program. Everyone's been able to look at that and say, let's reframe the problem. And this allows us to build stronger reasoning models that don't have to compress, like you said, all the internet's information. And once they're coupled with strong tools, you start getting these really, really incredible results that don't even just show up in benchmarks because none of the benchmarks Really allow you to use a tool to answer the results. And if they did, we're going to see a whole bunch of new set of results that happen there.

AI assessment note: “allows us to build stronger reasoning models that don't have to compress”

Q Yep. But that's probably where most of their tokens are being processed anyways at this point, Bill, right? Like transcribing YouTube videos and, you know, all you can Google meet, you can turn it on and all those searches.

A I was just inferring in your question, maybe I shouldn't have been that, that they'll have an advantage for Google cloud. And in, in order for that to be true, they need to, to have this crossover moment. One quick thing Brad on, on open AI, you know, I'm, I've, I've been writing a book which I've talked about frequently, and I've been quite, ah, although I guess there's some privacy things now you need to be worried about, but I've been quite open with OpenAI about the book and doing research, you know, along the way. It knows a tremendous amount about my book right now, and I can ask follow-up questions without having to put the whole book back in the prompt again. Um, because of that. And so, I can, I would, I would continue to believe that OpenAI's, um, most likely chance to long-term, um, success comes from switching cost and lock-in more than it will come from staying on the edge of the, of the model race. Because I think.

AI assessment note: “One quick thing Brad on, on open AI”

Q uses the tool and it searches the internet. Um, so if you don't have to compress all this Wikipedia information, I don't know, take it, take a subject like World War II, you just need to know how to go out and use the internet to find the information, to summarize it in real time. How has that changed the pace of progress and the balance between open and closed?

A Yeah, and so it's spot on, right? Brad, what we see now, and you see it when you use these reasoning models, and what I suggest everyone do is when you're using a reasoning model, you can usually expand out its thought process. So when you ask a question, it'll say, oh, the person is asking a question about this. What should I do? Let me go and maybe search the internet. Let me go do a few different things that can have a lot of different tools. And so the push has been towards, you know, really, really strong reasoning models. And, you know, we have to give credit there. OpenAI really started that. With oh, one, that was really the first reasoning model that was put out there. But I think on the back of the research and the back of it, you know, everyone talked about and, you know, the pod's good friend, Noam Brown was the leader on that program. Everyone's been able to look at that and say, let's reframe the problem. And this allows us to build stronger reasoning models that don't have to compress, like you said, all the internet's information. And once they're coupled with strong tools, you start getting these really, really incredible results that don't even just show up in benchmarks because none of the benchmarks Really allow you to use a tool to answer the results. And if they did, we're going to see a whole bunch of new set of results that happen there.

AI assessment note: “this allows us to build stronger reasoning models that don't have to compress”

Q about thinking that the next step for them, you know, it'd be great to have them as a public company. You know, it's such an iconic, uh, you know, business, uh, early leader in, in AI. Um, Is that the path that you see, you know, for these guys on the way forward? Um, or do you think that it stays kind of in the relationship that we are today?

A And that's the place where, Brad, I want to be careful not to overstep, right? Because in some sense, you know, I'm neither, we're not, we're not in the board, we're investors like you, uh, and, uh, at the end of the day, it's their board and their management decision. And so at some level, I'm going to take whatever their cues are. Like, in other words, I'm very clear that I want to support them with whatever decision they make. Um, and, and to me, Perhaps even as an investor, it's that commercial and IP partnership that matters the most. Uh, we want to make sure we protect our interests in all of this, uh, and if anything, bolster them going forward. Uh, but I think, you know, at this point, you know, people like Sarah and Brad and Sam are, you know, are very, very smart folks on this and what makes the most sense for them to achieve their Objectives on the mission is what we would be supportive.

AI assessment note: “I want to be careful not to overstep, right? Because in some sense, you know”

Q What does that part of the code do? This code defines encryption and decryption functions. It seems to use AESCBC encryption to encode and decode data based on a key and an initialization vector. Ivy.

A Happy birthday. So it only took us, you know, 11 years from her to have kind of our her moment, um, and I actually asked ChatGPT how long it usually takes from science fiction to it showing up kind of in its first iteration, and it turns out they, they estimate, you know, 15 to 40 years, so that seems pretty good, um, you know, in, in, in terms of the timeline there, but let's talk about what ChatGPT for Omni And Google Astra gave us this week. I mean, I think it's mostly these consumer facing small assistants. The models are smaller, faster, but most importantly, it's like this end to end audio model, right? It can listen, it can think, it can speak in one model. The voice seemed to have a lot more empathy. Uh, it could interrupt. It was much, it was reacting a lot faster, still didn't have memory, still didn't have actions. But the tone and the cadence of interruption, it all felt a lot more real.

AI assessment note: “let's talk about what ChatGPT for Omni And Google Astra gave us this week.”

Q Well, someone still has to take it and apply it to that business, right? And it may just be the one, you know, the one tech person in that business.

A It's a, I was on a walk last weekend, um, with a great economist over at Stanford, and we were talking about whether or not, about the amount of productivity improvement that would be unleashed into the economy because of AI. And what was interesting is You know, productivity's actually been under assault in this country because we've limited immigration, which was a huge source of productivity, um, because deglobalization is actually hurting productivity, um, because we're not moving the productions of goods and services to the lowest cost places, you know, anything that's causing friction. So he's like, all the goodness to come out of AI, we need it just to replace the headwinds that we have on productivity in other places. But I digress. Let's move on to the.

AI assessment note: “But I digress. Let's move on to the.”

Q in scaling like that because I've already got the compute. Um, you know, I can go from ten million to hundred million billion to ten billion dollars on reasoning in such a quick succession. And so this, this, the performance improvements we'll get out of these models is, is humongous, right? In, in the coming, you know, six months to a year in certain benchmarks where you have functional verifiers.

A Um, quick question, and we promised we'd go to these alternatives, so we'll have to get there eventually, but, um, if you go back, we've, we've used this internet wave comparison multiple times. When all of the venture-backed companies got started on the internet, they were all on Oracle and Sun. And five years later, they weren't on Oracle or Sun. And some have argued that went from a development sandbox world to a optimization world. Is that likely to happen? Is there an equivalency here or not? And if you could touch on why the, the, the back end is so steep and cheap, like, you know, just, you, you go a model, you know, behind, or you, you, like, the, the token, the price you can save by just backing up a little bit is nutty.

AI assessment note: “quick question, and we promised we'd go to these alternatives”

Q other side. So it actually leads to acceleration because people feel comfortable in doing that and you need to invest ahead of that, right? Um, and, and oftentimes to really get ahead of it, You have to be buying when there is, you know, the proverbial blood in the streets when there is that doom and gloom, and people say it can't ever, you know, it can't ever be different.

A Well, yeah, uh, yes. Uh, I mean, I can only imagine that there is some timing element to that because you have to know when you've reached the bottom of the doom and gloom, but that aside, which I don't, I don't, uh, I don't actually want to like veer this politically at all, but like, as just like a, a bookmark, this is, uh, I get very confused why we are so passionate about changing the government right now. Like they're like, they're nailing it. Like why, like, like, why, like why pull out a Jenga piece out of nowhere and then see what, what changes. Um, but again, you know, different, different podcasts, but, uh, Uh, like, like we, we are so lucky right now that we somehow landed this thing and ensure there's, you know, a bunch of, of incremental issues on the margin, uh, that we're dealing with, but like, wow, we should like be, you know, you know, not, uh, not taking this for granted, um, too much.

AI assessment note: “but that aside, which I don't... want to like veer this politically”

Q How does it, how does it eliminate illegal immigration?

A Well, it at least, it eliminates abuse of the H-I-B. Yeah, yeah, yeah, at least, and, and that's a good start, and at least we can have a conversation. So one of the things that we know about President Trump, he's, he, he's a good listener. He actually listens, I mean, he listens to you, he listens to me, and he doesn't have to, and he listens to a lot of people, and he's integrating a lot of information, and this is obviously a very complicated issue. And so, so I think that, that this is a fine start, it's a fine start, but I, I'm not confused that, that anyone in the administration, anyone in the White House is confused that Legal immigration. Immigration is the foundation of the American dream, and it's the ultimate brand that we want to protect, and that's the future we want to protect.

AI assessment note: “Well, it at least, it eliminates abuse of the H-I-B.”