Feb 28, 2025 · 1h 0m · more-or-less
#88: Meta’s $200B AI Bet, Instagram Reels & The Future of Content · More or Less Podcast
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In this episode of the More or Less podcast, hosts Jessica Lessin, Dave Morin, Sam Lessin, and Britt Morin analyze Meta's prospective standalone Reels app, scrutinize the ballooning capital expenditures and valuation multiples of frontier AI labs, and examine shifting dynamics in modern media and venture capital.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 85.1% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.2 Guest teaching 2.1 Guest disagreement 2.1 The hosts pushing back 3.1
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 33:47 Britt dismisses tech antitrust pressure under Trump
Britt firmly pushes back against Jessica's premise that DOJ and FTC antitrust breakups remain a looming threat, arguing tech leaders are openly bending the knee to Trump.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 14:48 Sam rejects Dave's centrist media thesisSam flatly refutes Dave's claim that a massive business opportunity exists in the political middle, countering that media markets naturally tend toward disequilibrium and partisan polarization.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 43:20 Britt shares capital cost comparison for frontier modelsBritt educates the hosts on comparative model training budgets, contrasting Grok's $12B spend directly against OpenAI's estimated $20B to show Grok's superior capital efficiency.
The host holds their own ▶ 52:44 Jessica cites specific valuation multiplesJessica demonstrates journalistic command of the data by rattling off exact private AI revenue multiples (40x to 150x+) compared to the public SaaS benchmark of 8x.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| More or Less Podcast Opening Title Sequence | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | Introductory banter and logistics as the hosts and Britt Morin discuss recording in hotel rooms near the Intuit Dome for the Upfront Summit. | |
| Intuit Dome, Tax Complexities, and DOGE Efficiency | 5 | 2 | 2 | 4 | Dave defends Intuit against Sam's mockery, citing Scott Cook, while Jessica breaks down the actual bureaucratic mechanism of DOGE's Treasury department intervention. | |
| Jeff Bezos Reshaping Washington Post Editorial Pages | 7 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Jessica provides journalistic context on Jeff Bezos changing the Washington Post opinion page to focus on personal liberties and free markets, while Dave questions the masthead slogan. | |
| Media Trust, Polarization, and the Missing Middle | 6 | 2 | 3 | 5 | Dave and Sam spar over the viability of a middle-ground, objective news publication, with Jessica detailing the cost economics of original reporting. | |
| Prediction Markets and Hayek's Information Machine | 6 | 1 | 2 | 3 | Sam leads a long monologue explaining Hayekian pricing and his practical experiments with meme coins and curation mechanisms like Jelly Jelly. | |
| Meta's Standalone Reels App and Social Media Detox | 5 | 3 | 3 | 4 | The group analyzes Meta's proposed standalone Reels app, with Britt arguing it will trap users in an addictive feed and Sam suggesting it lets Meta restore original Instagram. | |
| Emerging Social Contenders and Big Tech Antitrust | 5 | 4 | 4 | 4 | Britt informs the group about Yope raising $5M at a $50M cap, while Dave dismisses it as a feature rather than an app and Jessica highlights pending FTC antitrust trials. | |
| Google's Search Erosion and Multi-Model LLM Fatigue | 5 | 3 | 3 | 3 | Britt notes that surveys indicate 40% of people expect to abandon Google search, prompting a peer exchange on how LLMs handle low-intent versus product search queries. | |
| Grok 3 Breakthrough, Compute Scaling, and AI Avatars | 8 | 1 | 1 | 3 | Dave provides a detailed technical breakdown of Grok 3's speed and 100,000-GPU cluster buildout, explaining why compute scaling remains alive despite DeepSeek. | |
| Grok, OpenAI, and the Escalating AI CapEx Race | 6 | 4 | 3 | 4 | Britt shares lunch cost analysis data comparing Grok's $12B spend to OpenAI's $20B, prompting Sam to challenge whether cost matters if infinite capital can be raised. | |
| OpenAI's Financing Dilemma and Astronomical Private AI Multiples | 8 | 2 | 2 | 4 | Jessica cites reporting on SoftBank contributing one-third of OpenAI's projected growth and details the 40-50x private AI revenue multiples versus 8x public SaaS. | |
| Promoting The Information's Upcoming AI Summits and Banter | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Housekeeping and event promotions for The Information's upcoming AI summits, followed by Sam departing early and Britt sharing reflections on the Time Women of the Year gala. | |
| Hallway Networking at the Upfront Summit in LA | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Britt and Dave provide on-the-ground color on Upfront Summit hallway networking tips and conclude the recording. |
Statements from this episode (28)
Sam Lessin: Complex US tax filing is a scam benefiting software firms
“Yeah, but, like, this whole thing is just a scam by the accounting department, the accountants of America, right? Like, to make taxes complicated, so you have to, like, use their software or pay for their services.”
Sam Lessin: Intuit's stock shows investors doubt DOGE will reform taxes
“It's a good point that Intuit clearly the investors into it are not pricing in any doge efficiencies because the stock looks fine. So if you were to look at the Intuit stock price, You would say that Elon will do nothing to reform the tax strategy of America.”
DOGE Didn't Overhaul Treasury, Just Filled Existing Tags, Says Lessin
“What they had done is they hadn't overhauled the treasury system for payments. They had convinced the treasury to actually fill in the tags for the payments it was already making. There were already forms in the fields that they were not filling out. So basica…”
Lessin: Bezos directs Washington Post opinion to focus on free markets
“Bezos announced today that the Washington Post opinion section is going to wholly, wholly focus on topics that support personal liberties and free markets. So as a result of this, the opinion editor who is award winning, probably Pulitzer Prize winning, but I …”
Morin: The New York Times is blatantly biased and untrustworthy
“I find myself reading the New York Times now, and it's so clearly blatantly bias anymore that I don't trust what I'm reading.”
Lessin: Media has no opportunity in the middle
“There's never an opportunity in the middle. The world tends towards disequilibrium.”
Lessin: Big newsrooms adopt ideological journalism to pay bills
“A lot of them, the larger news organizations That we're doing it leans towards agenda driven journalism and ideology to kind of pay their bills during this wave of digital destruction.”
Lessin: Most news exists as social media talking points
“If that's actually the purpose that most news serves for people is conversation set pieces to yell, then like it's actually fulfilling its purpose very beautifully. It's just unfortunately very not aligned with truth.”
Sam Lessin: A Polymarket-Run News Outlet Would "Crush"
“I actually think the best, maybe, you know who should start a newspaper is Polymarket. Polymarket news would crush.”
Lessin: Meme coin infrastructure is dramatically better than early NFTs
“The 20, 25 version of the tools and the infrastructure around this stuff is so dramatically better than like the early NFT, which was also an attempt at doing narrative investing, but it was a pretty bad attempt at narrative investing. This is like a much more…”
Jelly Jelly Token Hit $200M Market Cap in Six Hours, Says Lessin
“We launched Jelly Jelly, right? Which as pod listeners remember, went in six hours from zero to like over a two hundred million dollar market cap on half a billion in volume, which was all these crazy people playing this game.”
Meta Is Considering Launching a Standalone Reels App to Fight TikTok
“Meta is considering launching a standalone reels app, so that would be taking video only out of Instagram to go a little more head to head with TikTok.”
Morin: Social app Yope raised $5M at a $50M valuation
“There's an app called Yope that got five million dollars in funding at a fifty million dollar evaluation this week.”
Dave Morin: Short-form video feeds have become net negative for health
“Look, my opinion is, I think I've said it on the pod already, which is that the, what we are actually talking about topically right now, the reels, the TikTok, the video feed, I believe crossed over in the last three months to being net health negative.”
Britt Morin: Trump unlikely to pursue big tech breakups in near term
“I mean, did you look at the inauguration? These guys are now bending the knee to Trump, right? So, I don't see him playing hardball in the near term.”
Britt Morin: Roughly 40% of people expect to stop using Google
“It's something like 40% of people think they're going to stop using Google the next two years.”
Sam Lessin sees no pull-away differentiation among leading LLMs
“It's just like, eh, and like, I just don't see any pull-away differentiation.”
Dave Morin: 100k GPU Clusters Have Not Hit a Scaling Ceiling
“At a 100,000, we haven't hit that ceiling. And in fact, the user experience that they're delivering is on par, if not exceeding open AI.”
Sam Lessin: AI Applications Will Primarily Be Scaled Persona Characters
“You're going to end up with like, you got to just think about like the base model and then what's being done on top of them is like, they're all just characters. Different people at different wealth levels and power levels are going to, like, invent those char…”
Grok Built a Competitive Model for Barely Half of OpenAI's $20B Spend
“Twelve billion has gone into Grok, and OpenAI, you have to sort of discount the Microsoft dollars, because a lot of it's for compute, but an estimated twenty billion. Into open AI. So, you know, almost double what Grok has used to build a very similar, if not …”
Sam Lessin: AI and AGI Are Essentially Meme Coins for Rich People
“Cause I'd argue that in a lot of ways, AI and AGI is next to GameStop, the ultimate, it's a meme coin. It's a meme narrative for very rich people. It's like Silicon Valley, very rich people, venture capitalists, et cetera, needed a meme to pile a bunch of capi…”
Sam Lessin: Big Tech Wins AI if Scaling Simply Requires Infinite Spend
“If you believe that it's just a matter of dollars in to get it, then I'd actually be very bullish on like the metas and the biggest companies in the world because they're the ones who can spend infinitely.”
OpenAI Investors Can Demand Refunds if For-Profit Conversion Fails
“Their conversion is still in jeopardy, although to a for-profit, and I believe if it doesn't happen, the existing investors can ask for their money back. Not saying that they would, but I think they have the right to if it doesn't happen in two or so years.”
SoftBank Will Drive One-Third of OpenAI's Revenue Growth This Year
“The information had an important story last week, which was inside OpenAI's revenue forecasts, and the biggest revelation is that SoftBank is expected to contribute a third of their revenue growth this year by paying them for their product.”
Sam Lessin: Private investors cannot compete with trillion-dollar tech giants in AI
“I just don't see a world in which any of these private investors can compete with trillion dollar companies for this nut. They just can't afford it, especially when it's free to a trillion dollar company.”