Straight Answers

“It's pretty safe, right? You don't, you don't have this startup, you know, you're not sure if it's going to work or not.”

answered: “Everyone's focused on the AI wars, not enough attention going to the Sana wars.”

“Yeah. Um, I guess the question is, do you believe that you were in violation of your own employment contracts, or do you believe that there was some sort of legal loophole that allowed you to do this without committing any sort of legal violation?”

answered: “I think going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were”

“What are, what's your read on the Meta Ray-Band or the Meta Glasses rollout? They just had an announcement this today.”

answered: “My read is that there is way more money in an all-in desktop assistant”

“Are you paying me? How does this all work?”

answered: “obviously traditional academia is basically over as we know it.”

“There's this, you know, general lens from some, some, some of the tech community that says it's, you know, it's open source, you know, it's not sort of the, the same type of risk as TikTok. Uh, what's your read on it?”

answered: “a major frustration that I have is that we get a bunch of these cutting edge companies”

“Do you have any comments on, on your, your intern allegedly, you know, contributing funds to overthrow a government? Switch your business.”

answered: “Shell comes into the talks, uh, from operating from a position of strength”

“Exactly. The entire point is to let you kind of figure out what's important.”

answered: “So Karpathy goes on. He says, as far as a quick vibe check”

“What does it look like when somebody sells someone?”

answered: “Well, I mean, there's a technical reason. These are LMs are probabilistic.”

“Should we ban it? Is there an answer?”

answered: “So two awesome, like quick and funny stories.”

“Yeah. Do you think there's going to be that same path of like Uber for a while had a bunch of negative gross margin people going into it?”

answered: “I guess the question is like, are we in some sort of different regime”

“if we don't make this investment, is the, is the world gonna be, you know, worse off? Like, does this company, you know, I think it's not the quite the same test, but I think it's important for investors to run that, that process and understand, are we really funding the future that we want, or is this kind of a rounding error and the dollars would be better elsewhere?”

answered: “Can you give us a white pill? Like, are there any other organizations”

“Um, but I, I think, like, you know, meme coins have been a thing since the dawn of crypto. You could argue Every single asset is a is a meme coin in a way.”

answered: “What do you think about meme coins tied to individuals? Is that a growing trend?”

“Uh, and, uh, yeah. So how, how good does it feel at this moment?”

answered: “I think someone really has to do just like a deep in-depth piece”

“Is that, is that roughly correct? How would you, how would you, uh, how would you fight back against that?”

answered: “one of, you know, sort of major investments in the last year is this company called Captions”

“I, I, I, I was more, um, how was, has there ever, you know, it feels like over the last two years, call it, there's been more of these sort of roll-ups than ever before. Was there, was there another, did, was there another kind of like general, like market-wide crack, or was it just sort of like individual areas, um, and opportunities versus broader trends?”

answered: “unpacking the nuance In these words is more important than assuming a general”

“That doesn't make any sense. Uh, yeah, how are we solving this?”

answered: “I don't want to over-rotate on it. I think the last part of what”

“Yeah. Wasn't, wasn't there news out of California this week or, or last week around some of this stuff?”

answered: “you asked a question about California, and I dovetailed it back to the federal level”

“They should get 90% of the value and 10% should go to the repurposed rage bait version as opposed to the economic model now, which is maybe you get 90% more clicks on the, on the viral, you know, repurposed content and the scooper actually gets 10%. Do you think that's possible or how do you think that investigative journalism will evolve?”

answered: “I don't know if this is an answer to your question”

“what you're seeing on the LP side, but we've heard that there might be some fatigue from LPs on what's going on in venture, but at the same time, it feels like that David Goggins meme where, you know, venture just keeps on chugging no matter what, uh, you're going to the AGM. Uh, what, what are you seeing broadly in terms of LP appetite for ever bigger venture funds?”

answered: “We're a small, adorable seed fund... we are not responsible to answer that question.”

“Has any, has anyone at Anthropic, has anyone at Anthropic commented on this at all?”

answered: “I haven't seen anything. There is news out of, uh, out of Google.”

“Uh, I wonder if he, I would like to see the cold email that he sent to get that job. Share it, Jack.”

answered: “everybody listening has positive stories around cold emails, but you always remember the negatives.”

“Yeah. Um, I guess the question is, do you believe that you were in violation of your own employment contracts, or do you believe that there was some sort of legal loophole that allowed you to do this without committing any sort of legal violation?”

answered: “going back to like how it even like started to happen and what the motivations were”

“There was some controversy, uh, when the, you know, Cheeky Pint, Elon interview came out and John Colson, how many Guinnesses were they drinking?”

answered: “That was a bit of palace intrigue... So, so years ago I was talking”

“Um, is it, is it a producer and this like the supplier producer?”

answered: “Anyway, let's move on to some reactions on the timeline”

“Also like this is kind of a nitpick, but isn't that a V six, right?”

answered: “Is it? I don't know. Is this good for video explainer channels”

“The artists and the labels think it's not fair use. And somebody is making a lot of money on a new company thinks it is fair use.”

answered: “I'm actually not taking aside one way or another, but they're making an art”

“and according to Emil, Dario was in a meeting and, and was busy, and wasn't really respecting the deadline, which maybe he felt was kind of artificial, but in hindsight now looks like it was a significant, because the Department of War was, you know, taking the, the, Uh, country into a conflict and wanted to know, hey, can we lean on one of our, one of our AI partners?”

answered: “I'm hesitant to speculate. I don't know what was going on... That's not the point”

“I've always, I've generally, the meme has been like, stay private as long as possible, but you know, there's a reason companies go public. There are obviously tons of benefits, but, uh, what, what, what are the, what is the M and a dynamic in public and private markets right now?”

answered: “you can use a public currency for M and a, you know, blah, blah”

“Is there, is there some weird world where there's like a capital war and I'm paying for a more powerful ad blocker?”

answered: “Yeah. I mean, that sounds good. Like another question is kind of to say”

“Uh, you, you mentioned diffusion, uh, is there a distinction between weather forecasting using diffusion models versus transformer based models or token prediction models? Like, is, is that a meaningful distinction or are you kind of using the term broadly?”

answered: “both of them Are good at, you know, kind of milking”

“Do you, you don't trust Doug on this? Doug really doesn't want, Doug from Semi-Analysis really doesn't, does not want Intel to fail.”

answered: “I'm still like on the fence about it. Um, but, uh, so the debate”

“Like you already own like the, you already have the Disneyland of skiing. And 40 other resorts, how are you not a real business?”

answered: “I do wonder if there's other things they could do to lower the cost”

“You know, pushing this, like, unethical conduct angle. People at OpenAI have, obviously, their bias, but they've denied it.”

answered: “Some quick thoughts on Barrett Zoff and Madsen Schoenholz.”

“You guys certainly believe, uh, that, that it could be, uh, important, so. How quickly do you think?”

answered: “We're actually totally okay with a world where we do the product innovation and everybody else copies”

“Yeah. How would you, how would you grade your predictions?”

answered: “Well, I obviously grade myself excellently on all of them. The, um, no”

“How, how do you think about the salt and sea opportunity? And then just like, you know, if we're even capable of doing projects at that scale anymore.”

answered: “So, um, a related thing, um, Interestingly enough is like, I think that”

“Can you talk about how you would walk someone, uh, away from the cliff that is, uh, utilitarianism?”

answered: “That's, that's probably not the frame that I would take.”

“How would you describe your corporate environment? Thrilling and unnerving.”

answered: “Better than just unnerving. I'd rather have some thrill in there.”

“Uh, and so I think they all kind of get it. And so it's just a question of like, how do we as a society start moving in that direction?”

answered: “what's really underrated is just, like, how useful this process of writing an article”

“You think that, you think the U.S. government at the federal level would say, let's fast track GLP-I's being covered by Medicare because it's gonna save us so much money in all these other ways, even though it is this sort of incremental cost.”

answered: “just to kind of steel man how we got here with the current healthcare structure”

“So what does Brian think about, uh, what should churn look? I bet if you ask the Delphi app, uh, is, is what, what kind of churn is, is respectable for a sub ten million MRR.”

answered: “all of that just gets compressed down... So, let's go to Lulu.”

“It's not about making the models like, Way smarter at whatever. It's like, how do you have the model be useful or fun, engaging?”

answered: “I'm curious, uh, any, um, is all the stuff around every B to B SaaS”

“That's kind of what I was getting at. I'm one of my, Very first questions around the, the, the new terminal would just be ingesting and classifying all this data and then just immediately taking action on it without necessarily having a human in the loop, right?”

answered: “one of the fantasies of AGI is that, well, if you do have”

“Uh, how, how optimistic are you that our sort of legal system in the U.S. can get some of these issues right where maybe it can't just be, you know, total free markets, kind of lawless, whatever goes?”

answered: “You know, so in the case of training data, I think that there”

“Can you break down doing, how did he manage, I haven't, I've been so, uh, focused on TBPN this week, I haven't been able to listen to the episode yet, I'm gonna get to it this weekend, but how do you go from zero to netting six million Uh, or, or grossing six million in the first year. Like, what does that even look like?”

answered: “It's even crazier than that, where like, he started the company with a thousand dollars”

“love that. Uh, is, is that actually a bull case for the regulatory regime in America working as intended, and we should have companies that can go test things elsewhere and then bring it back when it's mature and the technology is ready, or Are there specific regulatory changes that you'd like to see over the next decade to either spur more innovation or just make what you do easier?”

answered: “finding a government that behaves more like a startup, a small, agile government”

“Can you steel man any of the pushback? Is it bad to cheat?”

answered: “what Cluey or what AI allows is sort of like an unfair advantage.”

“What was the number he threw out at the dinner last week? Wasn't it?”

answered: “I don't know if he had a number because... Zuck had a number”

“Why say many word when a few word do trick?”

answered: “it's the, ah, neural ease, I guess is the correct phrase.”

“Do they have a comically large baton? Like, like we have our scoop?”

answered: “Yeah. Oh, Mark Gurman, the scoopinator, he's a scoop doggy dog”