Okay, we are gathered here today

[laughter]

in holy [snorts] unity, brothers and

sisters, to convene and discuss on this

most holy day, the day the All-In

podcast drops

many topics. AI data centers, China,

justice, human dignity,

Daario unwinding these SPVS hasn't been

good for the Vatican. We got in at 20

billion. That was a 50 bagger for us.

So, let's get started.

>> Jason, I'm pretty sure you believed you

were the vicer of God before the

encyclical. So, this is nothing new for

you.

[music]

>> Let your winners ride.

[music]

>> We open sourced it to the fans and

they've just gone crazy with it.

[music]

I'm going all in.

>> The smoke has risen from Tratad's pool

house [laughter]

and from the poker room.

>> He's staying in my pool house. He's been

there for the last 3 days.

>> It's been magnificent. He didn't know.

You know what? I understand where OJ was

coming from. You know, you put

[laughter] Ko Kalin in your house for

long enough, you just lose your [ __ ] At

some at some point, somebody's getting

whacked. All right, enough with the

shenanigans. Uh, but it's been great

staying at the house because there's

actually Chimant is not aware of this.

There's an iPad in the kitchen and

that's logged in to Uber Eats, Door

Dash, Instacart, Amazon, Laura Piana.

Come on, stop.

>> No, there [laughter] is. It's literally

every single service. And I told the

house manager like, listen, any packages

that come in the next 72 hours, right to

the pool house, if it says JCAL, right

to the pool house. So, all these

packages have been coming. Then I

relabeled them, gave them back, sent

them to the ranch, and now the house

manager is sending that stuff to the

ranch.

>> Laura Piana wants to know why my inseam

went from 36 to 12. [laughter]

>> Your waist size went from 32 to 36.

[laughter]

All right, welcome to the program,

everybody. David Saxs is here. How you

doing, David?

>> I'm good.

>> Chimoth Poly Hopetia is back at the 8090

office. I was at the 8090 office the

last couple days and it's a vibe. It's a

vibe. There's like a great culture going

on.

>> If you're a bestie and you show up at

that office though, everybody there is a

huge fan of the pod. So I was like it

was like being royalty. It's stopped by

everybody. Hey, I'm a developer here.

I'm a big fan of the show. Thank you for

giving it to Chimath. We can't give it

to him because he pays our mortgage and

everything, but every time you stick it

to Chimath, we love it. We're cheering

for you in the secret slack room. Um,

and

>> there's a secret slack room.

>> There is. There is definitely a secret

slack room going on.

>> No, but it was great. The vibes were

awesome. You're building a lot of

software. A lot of young talent. I don't

want to say that where your secret

source is, but there's a secret source

of talent you have. And uh, man, those

are some smart kids.

>> I'm happy to say it. Look, when I was at

Facebook, we became the most aggressive

recruiter of Waterlue co-ops. And so, I

went back to the well. Yeah. We recruit

more interns every quarter than we have

full-time engineers, which we do on

purpose because it puts a ton of

pressure on the product actually being

good.

>> We had 400 people apply this quarter for

internships.

>> Wow. It's very interesting. Uh with us

sitting in for Freedberg, who's busy

with some potatoes seed this week doing

great stuff at Ohio, the one, the only

Bill Gurley is here. He's been running

down a dream. If you haven't bought the

book, get the book. It's incredible. And

you're off book tour, so now you have

time for us. Yeah.

>> Yes. And I, you know, I had told you if

you ever talk about the Pope, I'd love

to hop on. And so

>> yes, you were like, [laughter]

>> well, you know, he Bill's an

evangelical. I'm a Catholic. So, we do

have some common ground here. Do you you

when's the last time you were at church,

Bill? Have you have you thought now that

you're, you know,

>> when Jal gets sacriiggious? [laughter]

I got to come on there and make sure JCL

doesn't get out of line with the Pope.

>> Listen, the [laughter] Pope is God's

messenger on earth. We should give him a

base level of respect. [laughter]

By the way, that's us imitating Bill

Gurley. This not actually Bill Gurley.

Just for those of you listening, you

think they were confused. [laughter]

>> They were literally they were confused.

We don't want to put words in your

mouth, but just point of clarification.

But hey, everybody knows you were uh you

know, you uh handed the baton over at uh

Benchmark after a very successful couple

of decades in venture capital. You wrote

the book. You've now got a nonprofit.

You're doing your own spin, I think, on

uh maybe what Peter Teal does with his

fellowship. You started your own running

down a dream fellowship, I understand.

>> Yeah, it's uh it's targeted at a

different demographic. It's called uh

rdad.org runningdownadream.org.

There's a website we can give a link to.

We're going to do $5,000 grants to

people who want to chase their dreams

but need some help. And so there is an

application process like Teal Fellows

and other programs and we've been out

talking to those people. Um but we're

we're we're actually live. We went live

last week for the application. So if you

know people who have read the book and

are inspired and need some help, have

them apply.

>> Yeah. All right, folks. And uh Good for

you, BG. Yeah, great two two other So, I

did a TED talk which will come out soon

that's related to the book. Um I I uh

there's a professor in Miami that's

built a course around the book which I'm

excited about and he's he's he's doing

it in a kind of an open source way so

that other people can borrow that as

well. And so if [snorts] there anyone

out there I'd love to uh help them do

that.

>> What's your take on all of this

dumerism? Like if you're a young person

and you're in college or you're in high

school, is this is this much to do about

nothing or how do you run down a dream

in the face of something like that?

>> Yeah. Well, I you know, I started the

book before this happened and I've been

asked the question a lot and it it came

up in the TED talk. I I fear that the a

lot of people are in jobs they actually

don't care about that much. And um

there's a Gallup poll that backs this

up. They came up put that word quiet

quitters. They're like 59% of the people

they surveyed are kind of ambivalent

about their job. And when you're

ambivalent about your job, you're not

high agency. And so you don't lean in.

You know, if you if you look at how

Jason talks about all how they

implemented AI and all of his his

different working groups, you hear that

enthusiasm and that high agency and then

you want to go try these things. And I

think the best way to protect yourself

from AI is to be the most AI enabled

version of yourself you can be. But if

you're ambivalent about your job, you're

probably not doing that and you could

be, you know, a sitting duck. So I think

it's the mindset that's the problem.

>> I created an associate in training

program for my firm cuz we want to like

help people get into venture capital and

we gave them a choice of assignments.

One of them was to write coverage of one

of our portfolio companies that's

breaking out. Micro one is the name of

it and just give us like hey here's a

competitive landscape basically write a

deal memo and coverage of that company

and then we gave them another option to

vibe code a very specific project I've

wanted to have for our venture firm for

a long time you know on competitive

intelligence and I would say I think

like maybe 80% of the students applying

and we had four or 500 people apply for

six positions 80% of them did the vibe

coding and I was shocked I thought it

would be the exact opposite Anybody can

write, anybody can throw in JBT and get

some output. But they they actually

built software and th that's the scary

thing. The students who graduated, at

least this is my perception, Chimoth,

the students who graduated like 5 10

years ago before AI, they're not AI

first. They feel lost in a drift. They

don't have agency. But the group coming

out of college right now that cheated

their way through school using Chad GBT,

doing their assignments, like using

those tools, I'm joking, cheating, but I

mean hacking. I I agree with that.

>> So they were totally

>> Yeah. And and they're just like, I know

how to use these tools to get through my

finals. Yeah.

>> Girly, I think you're saying something

super important. I said this last week,

which is

>> nobody asks the warehouse worker at

Amazon whether they actually want that

job. And so to your point, job

satisfaction isn't some external person

judging your job to be valid and saying

you must be able to have it. I think it

should be asking the person that does

the job, do you like it and do you want

to keep it? Those are two very different

questions. And

>> yeah,

>> I think that the all of this AI doom and

gloom was a lot and too much frankly of

the former and not enough of the latter.

And now this whole lie is kind of

getting undone. I think Saxs posted

about it this week as well. The Goldman

Sachs CEO said it. And now in this crazy

twist of fate now that we need to have

trillion dollar IPOs, the entire

Frontier Labs are all like, "Wow, it's

going to be a bonanza of jobs." And

>> Mark Cuban had had a great quote. He

said there are two types of people in

the world. Those that use AI to learn

faster than they ever could before and

those that use AI to avoid learning

altogether.

>> And I I think it's this notion of high

agency or not. That's pretty good.

>> Are you leaning in and using this stuff

to be ever more powerful in what you try

and accomplish or are you using it, you

know, as a cheat code? And if you're in

the latter, yeah, you're probably at

risk. You get asked a lot about how to

educate yourself if you're a parent of

kids

so that you can put them on a path to

launch and do well and chase their

dreams.

>> You have a good answer for that

question.

>> I I mean the the second chapter of the

book's all about lifetime learning and

it's kind of a requirement that you're

following your fascination because the

lifetime learning comes for free if

you're fascinated with something like

you just constantly soak up and devour

new information. And I I do think that a

lot of kids get exhausted because we've

made high school and college such a

grind that they think the learning ends

the day they they walk out with their

diploma. And as we all know, the best

and brightest in all of our fields are

on a constant learning journey. And when

something new comes out, they dive in

and try and figure it out, right? And so

and every every single uh person in the

book that we profiled has that kind of

attitude about their craft, you know, in

every day. And so I I think the real

test is if you're not proactively

self-learning, then you're probably not

tilting against something that you

really adore and are fascinated by.

>> Sax, you wanted to jump in there. With

respect to new college grads, I was

going to say that I think the single

most marketable skill in the economy

right now has got to be proficiency in

Claude. If you're going into a firm

right now and you're the only one who

knows Claude, it would be like you're

the only one who knows how to work a

spreadsheet, you know, or word

processor, the advantage would be

enormous. Now, I think that that's

probably a short-term arbitrage because

eventually everyone's going to have to

figure out how to use these tools. But

as a young college graduate right now,

you have such an advantage if you're an

AI native uh just knowing how to use

these tools. And this thought uh

partially occurred to me when I saw what

our producer Nick has been doing with

using Claude for you know he's been

creating this daily briefing document.

>> We've been doing it we've been doing it

for three months actually.

>> I just ran it for the first time

apparently. I didn't you've been busy.

>> Yeah. Well, I just, you know, I thought

it would just be AI slop and it would

just kind of give me a roundup of news

that I was getting in my X feed anyway.

But actually the thing that was really

impressive about it was that it

predicted topics that I would

specifically be interested in based on

my previous comments on the pod and also

it went back and looked at previous

transcripts and what I had said and then

had updates to those topics based on

specific things I had said. So again it

was highly highly contextual. But then I

asked Nick, how did you generate that?

and he showed me the the custom prompt

that he designed for Claude and then the

skills document and they were very long

and detailed documents. They weren't

written in code but they were very

technical and I just realized looking at

that that the average person is not

going to be able to generate this. I

mean this is why this idea that you're

just going to be able to like throw AI

into an organization and it's just

magically going to generate value is not

true. You have to know how to

>> get value out of it. I mean maybe we

could just show these documents on the

screen.

>> Yeah. I mean the the the interesting

thing uh Sachs is you can you just have

to ask your AI you ask claude or chatgpt

or whatever you're using hey I want you

to make me a mega prompt and you like a

mega pint like give me a mega prompt of

you're an producer of a podcast these

are the four characters on the podcast

what would be a great prompt for me and

it will actually suggest a prompt

>> and then you can refine the prompt so

you actually have a dialogue about a

prompt as opposed writing the prompt

yourself

like

>> well Nick can you show on the screen to

scroll through the training rules and

then also there's the skills document

that was written on how to be a producer

>> for this podcast which I thought was

really impressive

>> by the way David what you said I think

is true of almost every single job type

like it's not just tech or programming

if you're in marketing if you're in

legal if you're in accounting

Like any role you might have at a firm

sales, if you're the most AI savvy

person of all your peers,

>> you are golden. Like you are golden like

in your

>> 10x more valuable than the next person

who's not basically.

>> Yes. Yes. And and and I think that I

don't think it goes away because I think

you learn how to get better at it over

time. So having an early advantage I

think will extend for a while.

because you can learn more more and more

things you can accomplish.

>> Should we let producer Nick describe

what we were just looking at there?

>> Yeah, go ahead, produce. What? Producer

Nick, explain the process.

>> Yeah, once we got access to Claude

Co-work and it had that like further

expanded memory access. I thought it

would be interesting to just start

feeding every transcript into it and

seeing if it could actually

contextualize new stories that were

coming out based on past things that you

guys have said. And I gave it like a

general prompt of what I wanted and I

said, "How would you write a skills file

or some training rules for this?" And it

wrote all of it for me.

>> Yeah.

>> Oh, so you were less good than I

thought. [laughter]

>> I thought you were

>> It's a hack. It's a [clears throat]

hack. You use AI to make the skills.

Yeah. And

>> but you've been updating that over time,

right? As you've been iterating and

learning

>> every single day and every single day

gets smarter and better.

>> The recursiveness of this is incredible.

>> So you need someone to manage that

process, right? because the four besties

are not going to do that. So you need a

producer of the show to do that. This is

why people think, oh, it's just going to

wipe out all the jobs. No, someone still

has to supervise, iterate, validate, you

know, all those kinds of things.

>> Yeah. And it's

it's really interesting that the the

people who are coming into the workforce

right now are super aware of this and

they're putting the tools to work and

it's much easier for them to get a job.

I mean, I I literally looked at the top

nine candidates for this associate and

training program I have, and we're going

to do it every year. Every summer, we

start it. We do it for a year. We pay

you to learn. And um it it it was just

extraordinary how you could tell

immediately if the person had systems

thinking Sachs like they understood the

the process of venture capital that

there was a structure to it. You had to

source deals. You had to make decisions

on which ones to invest in. You had to

do diligence. you, you know, you had to

double down on investments, they they

just understood the process and then

when if you just talk to one of these

LLMs, it will tell you what to do. So,

you can say, I don't know what I'm

doing. What should I do next? And then

it actually tells you what to do next.

So, for people who are intimidated about

this and uh maybe think like, I it I'm

I'm already too far behind, I encourage

you to pop up Claude, go into co-work,

and say, "What can I do to be better at

my job?" and just start talking and

literally if the more you talk and you

can use voice uh you know text to voice

I use whisperflow is a really cool

program for this and I have a foot pedal

to do it you just ramble and ramble and

ramble and keep adding stuff you don't

have to be structured it will build the

structure around the two or three

paragraphs that you give it as

instructions that's the thing people are

getting caught up on now is Bill they

they think they have to type when in

fact if you just blather on and on a

scale I have a unique uh ability to do.

You just blather on. It's a superpower.

You blather on and the thing makes sense

of it. It is unbelievable what the

blatheron prompt can get in terms of

output. Thanks for coming uh to uh my

TED talk. All right, let's get started.

There's a lot to talk about and uh we

got a big docket today. We're going to

start with the Pope. The Pope is dope.

And uh the Pope Leo, he's the 14th,

released his first encyclical encyclical

on AI. And it was long. 235 pages over

42,000 words. Just to give you an idea,

Bill Gar,

>> when did he write it, do you think? When

did he put that together?

>> Well, no, no, I think he used chat GBT.

That's what it says here um in the

notes. No, I mean I I'm guessing

>> how long did it take for him to write

this in between all of his other tasks?

I think it's a six-month process to do

this, but I'm sure he had collaborators.

>> Bill, your book, I'm assuming, was

>> write it.

>> I'm sure there was a team that wrote it.

But Bill, your book's 60 70,000 words,

I'm guessing. So, this is almost a

literal book, right?

>> In terms of how long it is, and it's

called Magnifica Humanitas or

Magnificent Humanity. In it, he warns

business leaders to safeguard humanity

from AI. His core argument is AI is not

inherently evil, but technology is never

neutral and that technology takes on the

characteristics, wait for it, of those

who build, finance, and control it. And

I don't think he thinks super highly of

that group of people. The Pope called

for regulation of AI companies.

Obviously, we're going to have that

debate here. Some of the things he uh

called for I think are not very

debatable and there's a lot of consensus

around worker retrainment, safety uh for

children and guard rails, a ban on

autonomous weapons. That's the uh Skynet

rule. Don't build terminators with your

AI. But he was joined by anthropic

co-founder Chris Ola. I don't know how

many co-founders there are of this

company, uh but apparently there's

dozens. And Ola is not Catholic.

According to a Vanity Fair profile, he

was raised evangelical and now he's an

atheist. The folks at Amazon, Google,

and Meta lobbyed the Vatican on April

29th to soften the language in his

missive and uh he was not swayed.

His central question, Saxs, is will AI

be used to concentrate power in the

hands of a few or will it serve

everyone? Something you brought up when

you mentioned monopolies, duopolies,

etc. two weeks ago on this very podcast.

What's your take on the Pope and his

interest and his missives on AI and

promoting a bit of AI regulation?

>> Well, I very much agree with the Pope

that the biggest risk of AI is a

centralization of power and then its

misuse against us um in some Orwellian

way. I think it's government that's

going to do that. Um, not necessarily an

individual actor because it's

governments that ultimately have the

power. So, I do worry about the

potential for AI to be used to surveil

us, censor us, control us as Orwell

described in 1984. So, if that's where

the Pope is going with this, I very much

agree with him.

The maybe where we end up in different

places is he thinks that government

regulation is the way to prevent this.

And I would just say that we have to be

careful not to empower government too

much because if you give government the

power to regulate or approve AI

development,

if you create say an FDA for AI as many

people are calling on, that will give

government the power to approve models

and and therefore give notes to model

developers. And very soon this

definition of safety will expand because

the government always takes an expansive

view of its powers. And we saw this

during the social media wars where the

definition of trust and safety expanded

to issues like psychological safety,

microaggressions,

disinformation,

transphobia, and so on. That, you know,

again, these social media companies were

told that they had to stamp out all of

those threats to safety. And it ended up

becoming a censorship agenda. So I get

very worried about you know what if some

government agency can give notes to the

model developers and they start telling

the model developers that your

definition of safety is not expansive

enough. You have to again protect the

public from disinformation or you know

psychological harms. So again, I think

we just have to be careful not to

arandise government because that's going

to be the most likely culprit in terms

of the centralization of of power. And

um I know the um the Vatican likes

Latin. This is a problem of political

philosophy that goes all the way back to

Socrates. It's called quis custodos

custodes which is who will guard the

guardians. In other words, if we entrust

a set of guardians to protect us from a

bunch of threats, what's to stop them

from becoming tyrannical and from

becoming the new threat against us? And

I mean, this is a the central dilemma of

political power.

>> Who watches?

>> Yeah. Who watches the watchers? Who

guards the guardians? Meaning, who's

going to protect us against our

guardians if they turn against us? The

genius of the American founding by the

way is that it was a second order

solution to this question. The founders

of America very much understood this and

what they came up with is we have to

have the guardians guard against each

other. And so they came up with the idea

of separation of powers. We'd have

separation of federal and state. We'd

have um the three branches of of the

government. Even within the legislative

branch, it was a biccameal legislature.

So they divided up the powers in a way

that hopefully the guardians would check

against each other as opposed to

becoming tyrannical against us. And that

that is kind of my view on AI is that

ultimately we have to have a solution of

checks and balances. If the AI market

becomes monopolized and falls into the

hands of one or two companies, I would

use antitrust law very aggressively to

as a check and balance against their

power. Right now we have a very

competitive market. You know, we have

five frontier labs competing very

aggressively. As long as the market is

competitive, I would use that because I

think competition generates the best

outcomes. It helps us win against China.

But it also protects the population

because these companies, you know, if

they get out of line, there's some

competitor that can offer something

better.

>> Consumers can opt out of it. If they

don't trust GPT, they can use Anthropic

or if they don't trust Anthropic, they

can go to Grock. Bill, you had the

number one rated talk at the All-In

Summit in history, 2,851

miles. You have been famously against

regulatory capture. In light of the

Pope's comments of, hey, regulating,

what do you think is common sense?

Because AI is everything. AI can help

people make boweapons. It can also help

people get their term paper in or do you

know uh be a better salesperson at you

know Oracle like we're talking about

paper like we're talking about oxygen

here this is like a fundamental

horizontal technology so where do you

think there is a case to regulating AI

if at all and where do you think yeah

free market will figure it out

>> well I have I have two takes one on the

pope and one on anthropic so your

questions your question powerful let's

with the more let's go with the more

powerful entity. We go you want to go in

reverse the least powerful of the two

go.

>> So so this pope said that and I have to

learn how to pronounce all these Latin

words like you that this encyclical was

u was mirrored after one done by Leo I

13th in 1891 and he invoked that he even

said he chose the name because he's so

enamored with Leo I 13th. Leo the 13th

encyclical warned that the industrial

revolution was going to be bad for

people. So let me tell you what happened

from 1891 till today. The work week went

from over 60 hours to 34 hours globally.

Real wages went up 8 to 10x adjusted for

inflation. The medium worker now earns

more than a doctor did in 19 in 1891.

Global GDP per capita went from 1500 to

20K. Child labor in the US went from 18%

to zero. Workplace deaths fell by 40x.

Life expectancy went up 60%. And global

poverty went from 75% of humanity to

under 10%. All those things happened

because of technology, innovation, and

capitalism, which is exactly what Leo

the 13th was warning against. So he got

it dead wrong. He got the whole thing

precisely wrong. So it's an interesting

thing to say you're borrowing from.

>> Yeah. Uh so now on to

>> Yeah. Anthropic and just common sense

around do you think there how would you

regulate and or protect against maybe

we'll broaden the term here protect

against nefarious uses of the

technology. Obviously we all want

children to be protected. We want to

have truth uh and honesty in terms of

facts and and all of us sharing some

some basic truths and we obviously don't

want people using this technology for

boweapons and the Terminator scenario.

>> I have to tell you that that Anthropic

is a mystery to me. I've never ever seen

a company that is both leading their

field and the most negatively outspoken

commenter on what they do. I I've just

never seen it. And my initial theory was

the regulatory capture theory that they

just want to ensure there's regulation.

And quite frankly, I think they're, you

know, very close to achieving that. Like

they have stirred up, you know, a

frantic position, especially in America.

American consumers are definitely afraid

of AI. Um, I think I've talked to you

guys in the past about, you know, the

book that Jonathan Heights written about

social media and there's a whole bunch

of state legislators that think we

should have regulated social media and

so now they're destined to want to get

in front of it. And we know that

Anthropics, one of the most aggressive

lobbying company startups of all time.

You know, the the the amount of effort

that they're putting in, the amount of

money at a statebystate basis. So that

was always my first theory, but then

they just they got so loud that I I've

literally in the past 30 days read

everything I can about anthropic and

I've come up with a new theory. This

this

>> okay new breaking theory.

>> This I call it the Dr. Frankenstein

theory. Um you remember when Elon had

that conversation with Larry Paige where

Larry called literally sitting next to

him when he called?

>> Explain the story real quick. while we

were at uh a birthday party and and you

know Elon was like listen humanity needs

to be protected from the stuff at

DeepMind because at DeepMind they had an

example of the AI having tried to break

out to jailbreak out of its computer and

not be turned off and you know had some

sentience or some you know inkling of

sentience and he said you know we have

to protect the human species and he said

well Larry said well what do you think

that's species because you care about

the human species over AI. This is at

least 15 years ago.

>> No, this is right before Elon co-founded

uh Open AI, right? Back in 2015 or

something.

>> The actual story here is Elon Hon and

Google had backed Deis and the team at

DeepMind when they were an independent

company. Then Elon was like, "Oh my god,

Google's going to buy this." And I

remember having the conversation with

Elon about this. We have to figure out a

way for DeepMind not to go to Google. We

have to block this somehow. But he

begged those folks to not sell to Google

because Google was running the table on

everything and he wanted this technology

to be independent and he was on the

board of the company

>> and he also said this was his motivation

to launch open AAI as a nonprofit.

>> Google got it. He just said we we this

is this technology is too powerful for

any one person. So like once again you

got to give Elon a lot of credit. He saw

the writing on the wall if one person

can and he saw it 15 20 years ago and

him and Sam Harris used to debate this

over dinner. You know what happens if

somebody controls this and they run away

with it. It would be extremely

dangerous. It has to be available to all

the people. Essentially the pope's

position. It has to be in the service of

humanity, not ruled by one person. It's

far too powerful.

>> So the reason I call this the Dr.

Frankenstein theory is the more I dig,

I've met people who I who I dare say

think it's their responsibility and

they're excited about building a species

that's that's superior to humans. And I

would just encourage people to read, you

know, as much as they can about

anthropic. Chris Ola worked on this

thing called the Constitution. It's

about 80 pages. It's hard to get

through, but I would encourage you to

read it. Amanda Ascll who is the chief

philosopher has started doing podcasts.

I would encourage you to listen to them

and listen to her language. And then

Daario wrote this blog post called

Machines of Loving Grace.

>> Loving grace. I read it

>> and it it was based on a poem and the

poem is kind of weird. I we should put a

link to the poem. It's quite short. But

the last the last stanza of the poem

says, "I like to think of a cybernetic

ecology where we are free of our labors

and join back to nature. Return to our

mammal brothers and sisters." I don't

know what that means. Like we're going

to go live in the fields where the

mammals live. I I And then the kicker

and all watched over by machines of

loving grace. Sounds like overlord to

me. And then in Daario's post he says he

near the end and it's very long. You

read it Jamal. I mean machines of love

and grace is very long but he's he's

talking about in the future what are

humans going to do because he believes

in the massive abundance and UBI and

that we won't have to work. I don't

believe in any of those things but he

does. And then he says it could be a

capitalist economy of AI systems which

then give out resources to humans based

on some secondary economy of what the AI

systems think makes sense to reward in

humans. So So that's envisioning a a

deity of sorts that's going to break

ties and discern decide what humans

>> it's a it's a computational reward

function for humans. It decides how much

you're worth.

>> Yeah. So, I don't think they think

they're writing software. I think

they're midwifing a deity here. And and

I don't know which one I'm more afraid

of, the regulatory capture or or or or

this second theory I call the Dr.

Frankenstein theory. It it's more it's

more scary to me. I think the second

thing

>> these are delusions of grandeur. Let's

call it what it is. They believe that

they are so intelligent. I know some of

these folks, the Burning Man sort of

offshoot of it, transhumanism. They

believe that they're so powerful, these

individuals, that they can create God

and that by creating God, they are like

this Prometheus kind of species. It

literally is the ultimate level of

narcissism and delusion of grandeur to

think you can create God and that then

the god you create like you're saying

Bill is going to be so benevolent and

perfect that you create constructed the

perfect God that will give you your

pellet will give you your little

scenarian you know

>> I just would correct you I didn't say it

Daario said it

>> right but no to [laughter] but to your

point of like just taking them at their

word they actually believe that they can

create God and that they'll create a god

so good that it's better than humanity.

Saxs, your thoughts.

>> Well, I guess the question then is why

are they pushing for the let's call it

red capture agenda where

>> I know why.

>> Go ahead, Jamal. Go ahead.

>> That is very reductive game theory. So,

if you want to be unexploitable, I think

the best thing that you could do if

you're trying to build a super god is

have three or four entities in a room,

close the door behind you, and then

dominate those other three or four

entities, and then you set the rules.

And because your counterparty is unable

to track at the level of technical

capability that you would have, you

create this massive asymmetry that

allows you to exploit them. That's just

simple game theory optimization. And you

know what Bill said is so powerful. I've

read these things and it's laborious and

it takes time, but every time they put

these things out, just take the time to

read it. And what I have said before,

Bill, I don't know your point of view on

this, but I initially thought that this

was mostly game theory, that a lot of

their reactions I thought were less

rooted in their dogmatic beliefs and

more rooted in a GTO approach to either

raising capital or putting pressure on

competitors. Either way, both could be

true. What your framing is and my

framing, although mine's more tactical

than yours to be fair, because I've

always thought that these moves make

sense through that lens. How do you

absorb most of the capital? How then do

you make sure that you are in a position

to disproportionately affect the rules?

And how do you create an oversight body

that is less capable and intellectually

aware as you are about the actual

details because

>> the referees don't understand the game.

Right?

>> If the refs don't understand the game,

you'll run over the game. Yeah.

>> By the way, by the way, one thing they

have achieved by doing this is I think

that if you pulled the, let's just call

it the intellectual elites, so everyone

in the media and whatnot and the

professors and all those, and they were

to rank the different AI players by who

they think is most caring, I think

they'd probably put Anthropic first

because they've been out with the

doomerism talk. And so it's given them a

halo with the people that may matter to

what they want to accomplish. It it's

simultaneous

creating a lot of trouble like with the

data centers and whatnot. Like there's

there's negative ramifications.

>> What you're saying is so important

because on the one hand they create

empathy

and then they write these documents that

expose what they think and nobody

actually connects the dots.

>> Yeah. To steelman their position for a

second. I mean, I think probably the way

they think about it is that they are

creating something very powerful,

something godlike, and therefore it

needs to be safe

and that they care the most about that

out of everybody. Nobody else takes this

seriously. Remember that Enthropic was

basically a spin out of open AI and they

felt that Sam and the company leadership

weren't taking their point of view

seriously enough.

>> It was the most woke portion of Open AI.

>> We're steel Manning. So the most for so

they they see the power of it. They're

the ones who are concerned about safety

>> and they care the most and therefore

they're in the best position to do that.

>> Now I think the issue is just you can

see how this can lead to red capture,

right? Which is if you brand yourself as

the safe AI company and then try to

characterize everybody else as a

reckless player and reckless AI needs to

be stopped. you can see how this would

basically further your monopolistic

control over this industry. And if you

see AI through the lens that you know

that really frankly the pope and I see

it which is centralization versus

decentralization I do think that is you

know one of the key lenses we should

have on the technology is whether you

want this to be a centralized or

decentralized technology. This way of

viewing the world leads to more

centralization and I think that's

dangerous. I mean, if AI is this very

powerful technology, I think it needs to

be decentralized so that all of us can

protect ourselves to some degree, right?

We need to be able to run we need to be

able to run the AI ourselves on our own

hardware if we so choose, so we're not

beholden to a single company that might

be in bed with a deep state.

>> Let's say it very pointedly. If benefits

and compensation and economic support

were all of a sudden tied to some

algorithmic decision, this is a

dystopian episode of Black Mirror that

we're dealing with. And to your point,

Saxs, you want 100 or 1,000 or 100,000

versions of what that answer is so that

there's actually a way to refute

a singular answer. A singular answer to

these kinds of questions, which is

effectively what some folks would want,

is incredibly dangerous.

>> And this is something that is in

control, I think, of humanity. I've been

talking about AI sovereignty here for a

bit just in terms of how much more cost

effective it is and how you're not

training other people's AIs with your

knowledge and your insights. This is why

it's super important that open- source,

open- source agents and local hardware

be able to run these models and that

consumers and companies learn how to

roll their own language models, how to

make a small language model, an SML, a

VSSML, a verticalized one and run it on

your Apple hardware because Apple

actually has taken a principled approach

historically to your sovereignty for

your data. Data sovereignty now is

privacy.

>> Yes. And now it's intelligence

sovereignty. the the intelligent

sovereignty is different than privacy.

Privacy is, oh, you can't see my photos.

You can't, you know, peek into my notes

app and what I wrote there in my

journal. Now, intelligent sovereignty is

you can't tell me what to think. You

can't use your AI to analyze my photos,

to analyze my emails, to analyze my

messages, and tell me how to interpret

the world. That's actually going to be

the next key piece here. This is why I

think Apple is just the dark horse in

this entire race. there is an

open-source product that can run on this

hardware, the M5s, the, you know, 48

gigs, 128 gigs, the stu new Mac Studio

coming out with supposedly a terabyte.

That changes the whole game. And this is

so paradoxical, Bill, that our

adversary, the Chinese of all people,

the Communist Party is leading the

open-source movement and the United

States is centralizing.

>> They're leading the openweight movement.

It's not open source. Just the

distinction is important.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> Look, I Jacob, I agree with you about

the importance of open source because

open source means software freedom. You

can run the program yourself on your own

hardware. You don't have to share. You

don't have to give up your data

sovereignty. You don't have to give up

your privacy to again to some monopolist

who's going to be, you know, in bed with

the government or the deep state, right?

So that's the thing we're all afraid of.

And if that's the only AI that's

available is from the, you know,

monopoly or duopoly,

then your choices are to live off the

grid and not participate in the modern

economy or give up control, right, to

some social credit system. So I think

the open source is really important. And

by the way, that was Elon's instinct in

creating open AI. He was afraid that

Google was going to monopolize AI. So

he's like, let's create open AI so that

it's not dominated by a single company.

But that that is I think the right

answer here is I know people want to I

think their instinct to the idea of

powerful AI is to clamp down and just

control it. But actually you have to

have multiple players. That's the only

way you're going to be protected is is

to have multiple players.

>> This next wave of the market evolution I

think is going to be extremely high

stakes and messy. Nick, just throw this

up because I just want these guys to

react to it. So this is a company that I

just ran into on X called Rogo. And what

they did was they created a test bench

and a set of evals to be a financial

analyst essentially and tested all of

the frontier models. And it was so

interesting because they summarized I

read their paper that they published and

I quoted the most interesting part

because I see it everywhere now across

all EVALs which is this one phrase there

is no single best model anymore. at the

top of the leaderboard. Opus 47, GPT55,

Sonnet 46 appear almost

indistinguishable,

separated by less than, in this case,

you know, 3/10en of a percentage point

overall. Read superficially, the results

suggest convergence. Three frontier

systems reaching roughly the same level

of capability. Okay, why is that

interesting? Well, you got trillions of

dollars going into each of these guys to

trying to create these next superb

brain,

but increasingly our existing set of

evals and our existing capabilities

when applied on these models roughly

produce the same thing which

theoretically says that these things are

getting commoditized way too quickly.

And then you'd say, well, what's the ROI

on all this incremental spend, which is

a very interesting economic and

investment question. So I don't know

like gurley what do you think happens if

these evals continue to asmtote and we

need more and more and more money for

training

>> some of the smarter people in the open

source community have suggested to me

that we need more open-source connectors

of types so MCP uh is actually run by

the Linux Foundation and if you think

about any surface area where a model

might interact with other software the

more of those connectors that can be

open sourced and commoditized, it would

lower. This is what Google did with

Kubernetes uh to to try and commoditize

where workflows live off of AWS and to

make it easy to migrate. And so the more

you can create systems that make that

type of exchange you just described

super easy so that you can plug and play

the model and you have to worry about

things like context and how does context

come in and and data and you know stuff

that like glean and and data bricks do

but how anyway if you can do that if you

can create more of those connectors like

that then the models become swappable

and certainly with the both the model

companies trying to move up the stack

you have massive

desire from the app layer players to try

and figure this out and we already you

know watched what cursor is doing and

playing with their own model and being

forced to kind of reckon with the fact

that they're coming up the stack fast.

So I think that's a really good insight

that this gentleman shared with me and I

think we the founders and developers

that are out there should work on more

of these interfaces and throw them into

the open source world just to make it

more exchangeable, swappable. Is there

an issue right now with we don't have a

good harness for open source? I mean the

way that like claude is a harness for

>> Yeah. There's people making open-source

versions of this or building companies

around harnessing and building the

integrations into it. But open source is

always like the last to build the fit

and finish around the product. They

focus on the core of the product, right?

So like Linux for your desktop never

really took off because the interface

was never polished. The UI was never

like perfect, but there are companies

building that and I'll just I'll show

you one company that we invested in.

This is a company called Abacus and they

had a very simple idea. They came up

with their own hardware stack. They came

up with their own uh platform and now

they are sold out of these boxes that

they're building for insurance,

healthcare and everybody wants to run AI

inside their organization and then start

building their own models. We actually

incubated this in our incubator and you

can check it out goabacus.co.

They're just basically saying and

organizations cannot get enough of this

product. It is crazy how

savvy these organizations are getting

and Chamat you're doing it with 8090 as

well I think where they're just like we

have to build headless products so that

we don't get locked into

any one provider. Whenever we go into

the Fortune 1000, we never compete with

OpenAI or Anthropic, they'll have a

preference sometimes of what they want

to see under the hood. So, our control

plane can basically hot swap, as Bill

said, between one or the other. We've

also started to lay the seeds for open

source and open weights.

But the reason is because they don't

want to be tied into one of these

critical frontier labs. They want to be

able to ride the wave of innovation, but

they're afraid of two things. They're

afraid that one technology leaprogs the

other too quickly for them to

participate and they pick the wrong one.

And the second thing that they're

increasingly afraid of is terms of

service and being at the sake of a

frontier lab in a political philosophy

that they may be in the crosshairs of

accidentally. Right? So you're a

hospital system in Canada. You support

the euthanasia laws in Canada, but this

frontier model in America says, "No,

can't do it. So now we shut you off."

Right? That's an an example. I'm not

saying one is right or wrong. It's just

to illustrate the case. So a lot of the

folks that we see now in the fortune

1000 and increasingly the global 1000.

They want as Gurley said abstraction

above it. They want to sit as Sach said

in a control plane. They want to see be

at this level and they want to have the

flexibility because they don't know how

it's going to shake out. They see all

the money being invested at the model

layers but they see the model quality

asmtote. So they're like, "Wait a

minute, what are we supposed to do just

from a risk perspective?"

>> And and regula regulated industries are

particularly sensitive to these kind of

issues you're bringing up.

>> Hugely hugely sensitive and regul.

>> So if you just follow what finance,

healthcare, you know, and and those kind

of folks are doing, they're just like

this has to be onrem and they're very

concerned about a data leak and they're

very concerned about HIPPA compliance.

They're very concerned about training a

model. Like what if you know all of a

sudden somebody does you know a query or

or writes a prompt and it pulls some

information from that Canadian

healthcare system and all of a sudden

somebody gets a result and that sounds

farical. Remember stable diffusion

built themselves on Getty on Getty

images

>> and they all of a sudden the Getty image

watermark was in the output like system

you see anthropic and open AI in all of

these Fortune 1000s at the developer

layer cuz most of the developers have

their own credit cards they're allowed

to sign up for them you eventually wrap

them in an enterprise license so it's a

typical PLG-led market motion like we

saw in Slack we've seen it everywhere

the interesting thing is not that but

it's the unwind that happens then when

you have these huge licenses you have

these huge buckets of spend you can't

really tick and tie it together the CEOs

then wake up and are told by the CFO hey

FYI here's where we are Uber was one

example a second I don't know Nick if

you have this tweet but from Vivecarpali

the founder of Clover yeah this was just

yesterday overheard from a fortune 20

company CEO asked for a billion in AI

generated OPEX savings at the beginning

of the year so we're 6 months in the

team has spent $200 million on tokens

and with minimal results.

And so now they're in this weird motion

now where the CEO is pulling the budget

back and now you're having to cut the

licenses. You just saw Microsoft

announce that they're killing the claude

licenses.

It's a super dynamic market right now

and I don't think we know what the

terminal solution looks like. And by the

way, I would I would add Claude is

really good at product. Like Claude for

Excel is better than Copilot by not by a

little, by a lot.

>> And so, you know, anyone that's going to

run against them, they're they are a a

worthy foe, I should say.

>> Yeah. I think I think Claude is

exceptional, by the way. I mean, I use

it every day. Yesterday, I hit my token

limit on my pro plan. I had to put on my

credit card, spent [laughter] another

couple thousand bucks, and I'm like, I

was so angry, but I did it because it's

so good.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah. Go ahead, Sax. Wrap us up here.

Yeah.

>> Yeah. So, well, just to wrap up, let me

just connect a couple ideas. So, one is

that in terms of the the red capture

agenda that you're seeing in Washington,

I think where it's all leading to is an

effort to ban open source models or open

weight models.

>> There's a lot of breadcrumbs leading

here. I think people who want this are

being a little bit circumspect. They

don't feel like they're quite there in

terms of being able to justify it yet.

>> Can you explain it?

>> Sure. You look at you look at a lot of

the rhetoric around how models need to

have guard rails and that with open

source models, the guardrails can be

removed and therefore they're dangerous.

You see this rhetoric already in

anthropics blog posts. So, you know, any

threat that they describe, they kind of

go out of their way to take that shot at

open source models. you saw it with

respect to cyber for example or with

respect to bio threats things like that

I mean I've seen that type of language

repeatedly that open models lack guard

rails or the guardrails can be taken off

and therefore it's a problem and I think

again they're trying to create ideas or

put predicate facts in the public record

to justify an action later on and I

think it's just a matter of time before

they feel like they're at a position

where maybe they can push for that type

of ban [snorts]

directly. They're not quite there yet.

>> But what does that do then to the rest

of the market? Like let's just say

America bans open source and open

weight. Okay. Well, what about the rest

of the world? I mean,

>> it sure it'll put

>> they're going to leap frog us.

>> Sure. You'll put the US on an island.

Well, first of all, as we all know, what

does it mean to ban a openweight model?

It's a file. It's a bunch of numbers,

you know, that you can run on your your

laptop.

>> Yeah. But what it will do is you think

about like all the cloud service

providers who run open models like they

will stop doing that because they got to

comply with the law and so all this

infrastructure that's been built up it

will get much harder to use open models

in the United States now the rest of the

world will continue to benefit from them

because there's a tremendous benefit in

terms of cost and customization and

control that you get with an open model

>> and we're on a completely different

price curve. And we haven't talked about

this yet. There was an economic and

capital mode to training that is going

away. It's going away in two ways. One

is because we're getting these domain

specific architectures at the silicon

layer. And then second, we're rebuilding

all of the core components. I don't know

if you guys saw yesterday, but Elon was

like, we've rewritten the entire

training complex in C and it's an order

of magnitude increase and we can run it

on 220,000 GPUs. at the scale of what

they're trying to do. Those kinds of

innovations are going to make the cost

of model training so much cheaper that

it's like, why would we stick to the $10

billion training runs when we can have

the $10 million training runs?

>> Well, if it got 1% better, just as a

thought experiment, Nick, could you find

Elon?

If okay, if it got 1% better, that's the

equivalent of 2,000 GPUs, which is the

equivalent of hundreds of millions of

dollars in compute. So every 1% equals

hundreds of millions in compute. If he

gets 10% 20% more efficient every

quarter, every

>> look at this speed improvement, the

speed improvement versus jacks for for

training runs is now an order of

magnitude. When you think about then the

capex buildout, the opex, the power,

the cabling, the copper, all of it.

And now this is a closed source model,

but I'm pretty sure that just that tweet

is going to get read by enough people

where there's going to be five or six

open- source stacks for training that

are rebuilt closest to the bare metal as

possible.

>> Yeah.

>> Why wouldn't you do that now? And so to

your point, Sax, cutting that off so

that we lose that kind of innovation

makes no sense to me.

>> I agree. And and like I said, I don't

know that the forces who want to ban

open source are strong enough or have

made the case or created the predicate

facts necessary yet to ban open source,

but I do think it is on the agenda and

it's where all the breadcrumb trails are

leading. So just watch out for that. I I

agree totally with with what David just

said and I wrote a blog post recently on

open source and and made the exact same

point.

>> I read that too. That was a good one too

on above the crowd.

>> No, it's not.

It was on the Santa Fe Institute.

[laughter]

>> Oh, no, it's it's the P3 Institute which

is my new my new institute. Anyway, um I

same same exact conclusion which is rest

of the world ends up running on Chinese

models if if if they're able to succeed

at what you just said.

>> And if you want to know the canary in

the coal mine sacks obviously the place

they love regulation most is the EU. So

EU has already done volley after volley

of proposed regulation for AI and open

uh and open source is particularly in

the crosshairs there because nobody's in

charge of it. So are you going to get a

bunch of open source contributors having

to vet their model with the EU

regulators like that's obviously not

going to happen. Nobody's in charge of

it. There just a bunch of contributors.

But open source is the solution I think

to

>> Yes, I agree.

>> It is the back stop. It is the backs

stop. I mean, unless you want to live

off the grid. I mean, if you want to

participate in the modern economy, it is

the backs stop. And let me just make one

other final point. It kind of maybe

leads into our next topic is I do think

that there is the potential for the

monopolization of this market to a

greater degree than people may be

pricing in right now. First of all,

we've seen that every other major tech

category has led to a monopoly or

duopoly situation. Seems to be the the

way that these things work out. But also

if you look at the growth rates right

now, Enthropic does seem to be pulling

away. There's a article in the

information showing the latest numbers

where I think Anthropic's now at they

seem to have pulled away from open AI,

which is not surprising and something I

I predicted. Look, if you have one

company that's growing at 10x

year-over-year and another company

that's growing at 3x year-over-year,

within 2 years, the first company will

have 90% market share. This is the power

of compounding, right? is just do the

math on it. 10 * 10 is 100. 3 * 3 is 9.

So again, if you just are able to

outgrow your competitor at that rate for

2 years, you will achieve monopoly

market share. Now there are reasons to

believe that anthropic cannot continue

that growth rate for 2 years. There's

going to be a competitive response. It's

already happened. Also, there may not be

enough compute to support that kind of

growth. There may be physical

constraints, but you'd always rather be

the company that has that inertia that's

on that totally trajectory than the one

that has to do something different to

then knock that leader off its current

trajectory.

>> Did you guys see what just hit the wire?

Nick, can you throw it up from Poly

Market? This is insanity. Poly Market

puts out there that an AI consultant

revealed that one of their clients

accidentally spent half a billion

dollars in [laughter] a single month

after failing to set employee limits on

clock usage. [laughter]

>> What?

>> Oh my god, look at this. Look, the 16.6

million per day, almost 700,000 per

hour. Oh my god. Well, there seems to be

there seems to be a new like meme taking

shape that somehow like all this token

spend is is wasteful and basically

useless. And you know, we're constantly

oscillating between narratives like AI

is going to put everyone out of work to

like AI is useless and it's a bubble.

The doomers can't seem to make up their

minds whether AI is going to be our new

god or whether it's basically a total

waste of money and it's going to lead to

a bust. But in any event, yeah, I think

you know the there there's no question

that token efficiency is going to be a

big theme over the next year because the

spend has been ramping up way faster

than enterprise customers thought and

there's going to be a drive for

efficiency. Does that fundamentally

change the dynamics? I don't think so.

But it it might, you know, it might

temper the growth to some degree. Well,

and they've done a tremendous job making

people believe that tokens are free by

giving them these crazy deals like $20 a

month, you can do whatever you want.

$200 a month, you can do whatever you

want. And it's like everybody's leaving

the hose on, everybody's watering, and

then

>> you get a photo that says you've hit

your usage and it's like, "Come back at

230." I'm like, "230? It's 10:30. I

can't do anything between 10:30 and

2:30." And then it says, "Well, you can

put in your credit card." And so I did.

>> Yeah. But I mean it's it's literally

like the first the first 10,000 gallons

of water are free basically and then all

of a sudden it's like okay it's a penny

a gallon and then everybody in the

organization and this has literally

happened in our organization. One person

built like an interface for the founder

university program. Another person built

one. Then another person was like,

"Well, those two people got credit at

the management team meeting, so I'm

going to build an interface." And the

next person builds an interface. And

then everybody shipping like interfaces

and I literally had three different

people on the team make three different

versions of like a founder university

portal and I'm like, "We don't need

three. Can we get coordinated here?" And

it didn't get to the point of like

spending thousands of dollars, but it

certainly got to the point of spending

hundreds of dollars and it would have

gotten to tens of thousands.

>> Are we still on the first topic? What

are we doing? Well, no, we kind of

merged like two or three of them

together.

>> Oh, we did? Okay.

>> And it's super interesting. Trust me,

>> it's super interesting. I think what

Gurley said is one of the most

interesting things I have heard

>> in a long time.

>> Take people by their word. And if you

read their words,

>> if you just read their words and you can

understand what they're saying, you

don't have to guess about why they want

to have a digital guide. Well, now I'm

not the sharpest I'm not the sharpest

arrow in the quiver, but I can take down

a buck. And I can [laughter] tell you

that this don't make a lot of sense to

me. Even the dullest arrow can take a

buck down.

>> All right, let's get back to

It's so great having you here, Bill. We

missed you.

>> I [laughter] got you. I got you.

>> We missed you, brother.

>> We're going to transition to the next

topic. There is some evidence that

Daario is mitigating his dumer rhetoric.

Did you see this?

>> Let me get to it. Yeah. Yeah, I got to

it here. All right, we we're going to

have to talk for the 16th time in the

last 18 months about AI's impact on

labor because again this chaotic

schizophrenic

interpretation of the data continues.

Cloudfare as we talked about last week,

shout out Matt Prince

Shimath's favorite CEO of the year.

Letter of the year

>> letter of the year. He cut 20%

>> award for the letter of the year

>> making friends every week.

here on the program. So they both blamed

AI spec explicitly and specifically and

Zuck then paired his 8,000

cuts at meta with the fact that he has

put uh spyw wear on everybody's laptop

to study every employee to make their

training data better. That got leaked

and people thought, hey, that's a Black

Mirror episode. We're we're working at

Meta in order to, you know, get our

two-year severance package. But on the

other side of the table, Goldman Sachs's

uh CEO, David Solomon, wrote an op-ed in

the New York Times. I'm the CEO of

Goldman Sachs. Period. The AI job

apocalypse is overblown. Period.

Obviously, he might be fighting for that

anthropic or open AI IPO in the coming

months, or maybe is doing it right now.

He made three points. AI won't eliminate

25% of jobs. It's going to automate 25%

of work hours and workers will fill that

time with higher level tasks. Obviously,

that didn't happen in the case of

Zuckerberg's layoffs. Just because a job

can be replaced doesn't mean it will be.

Bank tellers increased after ATMs. Live

entertainment became more popular after

TV. And the US labor market creates and

destroys 25 to 35 million jobs annually.

And the gross churn dwarfs net losses.

New categories like agentic AI

management are already hiring yada yada

yada. Uh a publication called Fortune is

apparently still publishing AI slop and

they say both Sam Wman and Daario have

walked back their AI job apocalypse

predictions as they gear up for an IPO

sax have at it. You know you've been

saying uh and your prediction was you

took the other side hey we're going to

create more jobs. There was a a recent

one of the job boards put out some stats

that the number of software jobs is

going up, the number of listings of

other jobs going down. So, I guess

you're probably in the camp of creative

destruction and churn at this point,

Sax.

>> Well, I mean, I think you should be

giving me more credit than that cuz my

most contrarian take back in January on

our prediction show is that AI would

lead to job gains, not job loss. And

over the past week, you've now seen the

narrative shift, I would say, almost

completely towards that position. So,

you have the CEO of Goldman Sachs right

in this in the New York Times. You know,

I don't think he'd be doing that if he

felt like he was completely stepping out

on a limb. Maybe even more importantly,

you had Sam and even Daario now walking

back their claims of massive job loss.

And they explained why Daario said, it's

kind of like the 25% of work hours

thing. He said that AI might automate

away 90% of someone's task, but the

other 10% will expand to do a whole

bunch of new new tasks and new things,

which is very similar to the the types

of of arguments that people like me have

been saying and actually that Jensen's

been saying that just because you

automate away some task doesn't mean

that you automate away the purpose of a

job. But now the worker is freed up to

do new things, to do the higher

complexity tasks that David Solomon, the

Goldman CEO, is talking about. So the

fact that Daario is now walking this

back and coming around to my position,

I think that that's kind of amazing. And

uh where do I go to get my apology? You

know,

>> well, we're going to have an ap

[laughter] we're going to have an

official apology form that you can fill

out. It's got check boxes. I was wrong.

I mean, some mornings I woke up

thinking, why am I going out defending

these guys? You know, these idiots. I

mean, they're scaring the public with

all these dire predictions about an

apocalyptic future. There was no data to

support that. I mean, we can all debate

what's going to happen in the future,

and we probably should be humble about

what is going to happen in the future

because we don't completely know, and

this industry is very dynamic. But you

have to look at what is the data that we

have so far in the current situation.

And we do not see data that supports

massive job loss. You can cite this

layoff or that layoff Jcal those are

anecdotes and the plural of anecdotes is

not data. If you look at the actual data

like Yale Budget Lab did they said no

discernable disruption in the labor

market in the last 3 years due to AI

they've done a comprehensive study. You

look at job postings for software

engineers. It's up 15% year-over-year.

Their job postings for software

developers have hit a new three-year

high despite the fact that coding is the

single breakout use case of AI this

year. So if AI has not caused job

elimination for software developers,

what category has it caused? I mean code

is now the number one use case I think

of AI in the enterprise.

>> Okay,

>> let's be honest. Over the last five or

10 years, a lot of companies overhired.

They mishhired. These CEOs did not have

a good handle on it. Their opex budgets

completely got bloated, inflated,

and they need to sort of get back to

where they were, get back to a fighting

weight. And it's this old adage of never

>> never waste a crisis.

>> Never let a good crisis go to waste.

Exactly. And so they point to this

thing. It's very simple to say. It's AI.

It's two letters. And say we're going to

fire people. But underneath that is not

AI because we know this. It hasn't done

anything measurable yet at the end

consumption of these tokens. Nobody is

standing there and saying look at my

filing

here is the lift that I have gotten.

Nobody has said that yet. That's very

important to observe. And so instead

what people are doing is realizing okay

I have this cover now to go and clean up

what was very poor management and

mismanagement over the last 5 and 10

years where I overhired and I mishhired.

That's what's happening today.

>> Okay, Bill Gurley, I'm going to let you

chime in here. You've got two besties

saying, "Hey, this is all hogwash. It's

AI washing. These jobs were just, you

know, the strategy obviously in Silicon

Valley was

>> they need a scapegoat. They need a

scapegoat.

>> They're hired two years ahead of time.

Build for the future and it was a vanity

metric and you were blocking talent from

working on other startups or

competitors. The Google strategy."

>> Hold on. Wait, wait, wait. You just said

the critical thing. That is exactly why

they did it.

>> Yes. That was the explicit strategy from

>> the actual strategy. These guys were a

wash in cash. And so part of it is you

were just hoarding talent or what you

thought was talent.

>> Yes. And just keeping them off the

market.

>> And now you're jettisoning it because

the reality is as companies get bigger,

their growth rates monotonically

decrease and you get to like a GDP plus

some number and your valuation

frameworks change and there's nothing

you can do to fight that law of gravity

in the public markets. And so as each of

these CEOs who at some point thought

they were different and the rules didn't

apply to them are now realizing you're

just like everybody else. Okay, we have

to stay humble as Sax said, but Bill

Gurley, would you like to apologize for

Sachs andor give him credit for his

incredible non-conensus?

>> He wasn't the Hold on. He wasn't the one

promoting the jobs apocalypse.

>> It was

you. [laughter] I will give my thoughts

in a moment.

You're the for the mainream media.

>> I'll give mine.

>> You always represent the legacy media on

our show. Jay Cal, you have been in the

fourth.

>> I represent the legacy media represent.

You're the New York bluehaired.

>> I'm just giving you the statistics,

guys. I'm just presenting the numbers.

Now, let's remember anecdotes.

>> Let's remember.

>> Actually, let me give you an important

statistic. Let me give you a very No,

no. This is really important.

>> We have to let Bill Girly comment. Then

you can really important. Do you use

ketamine? I don't use ketamine. That's

the terrible drug. Do not use ketamine,

folks.

>> Bill Gurley, you have the floor.

>> I would just touch on two things that I

already said earlier. One, you know,

historically innovation has led to more

prosperity for humans. And I gave those

numbers from 1891 to today. I see no

reason why that won't happen here. In

the short run, from a bottomup

perspective, every human that wants to

protect themselves needs to be the most

AI enabled version of themselves they

can be. And the people that might be a

threat of job loss are someone who like

stands hard, fast, and refuses to use

AI. And I would just say that's simply

like saying, "I'm not going to use

email. I'm not going to use a

spreadsheet. I'm not going to use a

computer." And and you know, you

probably are at risk.

>> Yeah. Yeah. The paradigm will shift to

give you actually my position which is

>> Would you like me to give my position or

just want to jump?

>> Yeah, I do but I I never got to finish

that point. So, but I can do it after

you.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So, I I will give my

position on this which is there and it's

always been the same which is there's

going to be a massive job displacement

that occurs and that massive job

displacement is going to come because

CEOs in many cases believe that this

technology is going to make people more

efficient. they can do more with less

and they will be rewarded by the public

market by just having higher earnings

and we see that for every single

company. Now I fully concur it was

because of bloating and I gave my

position there. I know specifically that

Sergey and Larry took that strategy of

taking talent off the market so there

wasn't a Google competitor that was

literally explained to me by those

individuals. We hire people and then we

figure out what to do with them later.

That strategy permit just became the

standard in Silicon Valley and now it's

being reversed.

Now there will be wholesale jobs that

will be retired. If you look at

self-driving that's obviously happening

with Whimo with 3,000 vehicles and and

there'll be many more on the roads. That

job will be eliminated. We will be

sitting here in but 5 10 years and the

idea of somebody driving a taxi is going

to seem silly and dangerous. We will see

the same exact thing happen with

Optimist. You may have seen the figure

robot sorting packages. All those

sorting jobs at Amazon factories are

going away. Amazon themselves, these are

the savviest people in the world said,

"We are going to eliminate 600,000

future positions and we are going to cut

positions." And Andy Jasse said, "This

is going to be a reoccurring theme. As

we deploy AI, we will do more with

less." You will see the headcount at all

these big companies dramatically

decrease or stay the same as earnings

massively increase. And you can take the

position, Saxs, that oh my god, the

numbers are in my favor. They're not.

The numbers are in my favor. The job

loss is tremendous. And there are

numbers associated with that. 8,000

people at Meta after 20,000 before that.

And if you look at the steady state of

these companies, they has nothing to do

with AI. Let me finish.

>> They overhired.

>> No, no, no. We are beyond that. We are

beyond that. They are now getting rid of

people. When they say they're getting

rid of measurers, you can take them at

their word. When they say they're

getting rid of middle managers, you can

take them on their way and

>> scapegoating. That is you've given your

position already. I'm giving mine. My

position is they are obsessed with this

technology, they're obsessed with

earnings and they will continue that.