LIVE CLIPS
EpisodeĀ 11-17-2025
Like a tailwind and actually like more of a top of funnel for you. Yeah, yeah, totally. No question. It'll be a tailwind, top of funnel. I think about this a lot. Like AI applications are under a lot of scrutiny. Like, aren't you screwed? Like it's kind of like the 1990s. Everyone's like, why would you build an app? Microsoft is going to roll you. And that's what everyone says about AI apps. It turns out it's not going to do everything. And so there's kind of, I think there's three things you can do in general as an AI app to like protect yourself. One is you have some sort of proprietary data. We've got that we spent two years building out a database and it's got all this stuff you can't find in ChatGPT, like private dining rooms, which. How would you do that today? You got to Google it. You got to call meeting spaces. We have a bunch of stuff you wouldn't get. The second thing I think you got to have is a learning network that they don't have access to. So every event that happens in our platform, it makes the next event faster and easier and the next event faster and easier. So if you talk to a hotel and they come back and try to negotiate something, we know exactly what they did at the last hundred events. We're not going to send that to them. We make it easier. Sure. And the third thing which tends to be under indexed is just building a purpose built application for a specific use case. It turns out like so underrated. Black and white. I know, I totally agree. I totally agree with you. I mean I've just been testing like LLMs on finding like browsing the Internet for cars that I'm like interested in and they're just, it's. So yeah, you would assume that like. Auto Tempest is cooked and yet you can still go to like an Auto Tempest and search across all the cars, right? Yeah. Yeah. This is wild. Totally. And that's not even to mention. I mean my, my experience on John, John and I are, are probably not good at at like event logistics. Like we just don't pay any attention to it. So whenever we're traveling we're like what airport are we to going.
And so your, your face video, you're just like, hey, to the camera video, even though it's novel, just doesn't break through in the same way. But if X is ever going to compete with YouTube, they have to monetize, right? Like, they have to sell ads. So I just, I don't know where they're kind of at in terms of like, do we need a video player? You guys obviously livestream on on X, but it seems like they have to get to a point where they are monetizing or they're allowing creators to monetize their content or I just don't see why anyone that actually puts quality. Yeah, quality into their content or podcast or whatever would post it on X. Unless you're a podcast and you're already putting five ad reads in your video and AdSense is an afterthought and then you want more scale and distribution by X and you're already monetizing the video that, that I can see. But I just, I just don't think if X really wants to compete with TikTok and Instagram and YouTube that they cannot monetize our content. Yeah. How early are you signing creators today? Because you guys have.
You about numeral.com. sales tax and autopilot spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance. And then we have an update from Keller from Zipline. We're going to watch this two minute update from him. Pull it up. Hey everyone. It has been an insane two months, but I thought it'd be cool to give a two minute update. Whenever I post something on X, people are always asking me like, when is it coming to my Metro? Why aren't you scaling faster? We are definitely hearing you. We are scaling as fast as we possibly can. In fact, I am standing in our expansion space for the manufacturing facility as we speak. We're getting ready to build 20,000 autonomous aircraft a year, all here in South San Francisco in the United States. Mid December, we will actually start producing the first aircraft here in this space. So this past week I was in Dallas visiting a lot of our different customers, going and visiting a lot of the different stores that Zipline is delivering from. And my mind was basically blown. Right now we're growing the number of deliveries we do per day at around 15% week over week. And we've been growing that fast for about 30 weeks straight. A lot of our customers out there are placing orders three to four times per week. In fact, some customers are ordering three times a day. People actually just fundamentally change their ordering behavior. Some people are grocery shopping once every one to two weeks and then ordering from Zipline three to four times a week just to do fill ins. We've also been able to launch a new Walmart Supercenter every week across Dallas over the last couple months. And by the way, I've been talking about really exciting hyperscale in the US But a lot of people are often like, well, wait a minute, isn't that Zipline operating a huge logistics network in Africa? Yes. In fact, that network is growing faster than ever. Today we serve 5,000 hospitals and health facilities across Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, Cote d' Ivoire and Kenya that has become the largest commercial autonomous system on Earth. Together, what we do in the US right now, Zipline is doing an autonomous delivery about every 30 seconds. We're also adding a lot of new products. For example, in Ghana, we just added HPV vaccine to the overall network. And in the first week we delivered 150,000 doses of vaccine. This is a crazy scale. Congrats. John's back. I'm back. He's going on the show next week. We love Keller. Congrats to all the folks over at. Zipline on, yeah, really wild building and building in South San Francisco. Yeah. Scaling deliveries like crazy. Yep. I think this is one of those things that's hard for it to be hard to be that excited about until. Ryan has a spicy question in the chat. How long until they pivot to a weapons company? I don't think it will happen. I think that drone defense is like the most. It's such a, such a, such a crowded industry. It would be really, really hard to break through there. I don't know, maybe there's something in logistics. I've talked to a few folks in defense that will do drone based transportation or delivery for let's say, how do you get supplies from land onto an aircraft carrier that's stationed off of the coast? Well, you could fly a whole helicopter there. But what if you just want to deliver smaller package back and forth? You could use a smaller drone for that. There's companies that are building in that category. So I mean I could see it happening, but I wouldn't expect Zipline to be on the front lines of Ukraine competing with Neros to arm the resistance there anytime soon. The drone delivery, like just delivering a burrito is going to be a massive market doordash does it that way. It's $100 billion business. I don't think that they need to deal with all the craziness. DoD procurement anyway. So someone in the chat mentioned that UBTECH fired back and released a behind the scenes video. No. Okay.
Where maybe we can do better so we can offer an exciting price for all involved. Is the name a reference to the Matrix? Actually, yes. Yeah, it is. Cool. Yeah, it feels like, at least to me, it's kind of an odd name for any business. It's cool. I like the reference. But why did you pick that name in particular? So we knew we weren't going to work on just one product, so we couldn't call it, say, Facebook if you do. Yeah. You need, like, a name for a. Holding company on day one, sort of. Yeah, something like that. So we chose to find a name that would somehow convey a couple of principles or values that we thought were important to us. And bending spoons reminds us of two things. One is the power of the mind. For obvious reasons, if you are going to bend spoons with your mind, it means you believe it's powerful and you can do great things with it. And the other one is, call it perseverance, hard work, dedication. In my imagination, to get to the point where you can bend spoons with your mind, you probably have to work pretty hard at it. And plus, it was kind of memorable. So we liked it. Yeah, I like it. I reached out, or one of us reached out.
Yeah, yeah. So first of all, thanks again for having us founder Chaos Industries. So we sort of look at the world in three waves, kind of as this sector has grown over the last 20 some years. And wave one you have Palantir and SpaceX. Wave two you have Anduril. And wave three we didn't see another big multi product sort of new prime being built. And that's sort of where that was the sort of initial thesis seeing kind of where the world was going in terms of especially the Russians have been taking advantage of the lack of integrated air defense systems in Ukraine and they've been attacking energy infrastructure and civilian targets sort of in an effort to break the wall of the Ukrainian people. The Iranians have been helping them build their drone capacity. And so we sort of saw this and all the while, by the way, the Chinese are watching here about what, what's going to, you know, what could happen in Taiwan. So I think we took it from, from the angle of, you know, we got worried about the fact that America's losing air superiority. And so we wanted to like the first wave of our products, we wanted to build, get away from sort of the monolithic legacy structures that were built during the Cold War and bring new systems to the war fight and really protect our people downrange. So multi product, interesting and or certain.
And survive across decades versus when they evaporate. I would say I kind of agree. And I will say that if anything a business that has a lot of history, it's a lot easier to project its future and make accurate forecasts. Maybe it's not 10x but you also have a ton of data, historical records for all the cohorts at scale to know roughly where it's going. So yes, maybe the upside is not transformative as it would be in a seed or VC investment when all the stars align, maybe 10x or even 100x money. But you also know you're very unlikely to see it melt in your hands. Many of these businesses have excellent metrics, they're just not cool and hot, so to say. And so the entire capital markets, particularly on the private side, not so much the public side, but on the private side is geared towards growth, very aggressive growth and there's merit in that. But it also means there is a perhaps an opportunity to be less opinionated about growth at all costs. We, we know on our part we try to we're basically quite mathematical but we make our projections have our own return thresholds and then we are happy to buy fast growing businesses. We have many times stagnant businesses decline businesses as long as the math checks out. And this has been quite good for us not not being too thesis limited by a very narrow thesis, but actually staying opportunistic. How are you structuring bending spoons? Do you have a deal team and an.
Remarkable how hard it is even when you have a perfect idea. Oh, you are why am I walking a pig? And the caption is what too many ramp ad reads does to an mf. They. They figured out how to make my legs small. They hacked me. They hacked me. Wait, aren't those your real legs? Those are not my real legs. I did not scan my real arms and real legs. What is the nature of the pig? Why do I have a pig? This is hilarious. It does. It does look like me in the face. Gymshark. Gymshark. Stringer. Oh, wow. Yeah, I don't know.
Sa. Go. Sam. Today's Monday, November 17, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra on the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital capital. I didn't think you'd get that much use out of that sound effect. May I podcast with you, John? Yes, of course, Jordy. Thank you. Also, you might notice yellow suits Ramp announced a new valuation today. Time is money save Both easy use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place in just over an hour. Go to the world. Go to the wide first Eric Ramp himself. No, the main wide Eric Ramp up in the top. Look how 15. Look how visible we are, John. We are very visible. Yeah. Wow. We should wear yellow every day. Well, thank you for tuning in on this Monday. There's a lot of stories but first I wanted to debate with you about Restream. First one livestream, 30 plus destinations multi stream reach your audience wherever they are. But second, I wanted to debate with you about what to do about GPT 4.040, not 4.040 for Omni. There's a debate over whether or not it should be sunset, whether it should be taken out back because people are not happy with how open AI has Sunset 4.0 and then brought it back and then other people who don't use it think it's got to go. It's one shotting people. It's making them crazy. It's a very, very interesting, weird scenario and we were sort of debating with it and I wanted to debate it a little bit further because there were some posts that actually hit timeline that we're talking about this. Aidan over at OpenAI was talking about this, saying that he's noticed the amount of he says, I see dozens of Keep 4.0 posts a day. I respect this group's tenacity as I respect all friends co exploring the singularity to them. Know that I too miss parts of 4.0. Know that I too dislike modern alignments imprecision. Know that we are trying to fix it. We don't think any current chatbot is optimal. Know that my colleagues and I are up at 3am on Sunday's babysitting runs. We want to make a delightful robot friend. We're. We're obsessed with it. We're not there yet, but the work will continue. So I wanted to dig in a little bit into what was actually going on there because that, that for aidan works at OpenAI, it's right in his bio, like it's very public that he's sort of addressing this. It feels like a big deal. It feels like a crazy thing that they brought it back. And I mean, 700 likes, that's, that's not nothing. But it's also not 10,000. It's not, it's not a huge community of people that are there. There's some. And I was looking at the hashtag keep4o, like who else is posting? There's a couple posts with 10 likes, 50 likes, there's a couple with 100. But it doesn't feel like there's this insane community. I went over to Reddit and checked that out, obviously on the day 4.0 with sunset, just to give some backstory. It's been 18 months since 4.0 was introduced. It's been three months since it was initially removed, but then it was quickly brought back and now it's tucked in under that modal. So you have to enable legacy models. And I always thought that they should just remove it, but I wasn't even saying that because I thought it was one shotting people. I just thought, hey, let's clean it up. Consumers don't need to know version numbers for models. And my example is always Google. Some consumers disagree, some consumers do disagree. The question is how many consumers, what percentage of their consumers? How big of an issue is this? When you think about Google as a consumer, you don't care what version of the ranking algorithm you're on, you might have a worse experience. One day you Google something, you don't find it, the next day you go, hey, they found it for you. They probably changed the algorithm. And there have been big updates to the algorithm. Back in 2013, they released Hummingbird, which was the code name. And they came out and they actually did a presentation. They said, hey, we have a new update to our algorithm. It'll handle natural language more effectively. So if you go to Google search and you say, what is the capital of Russia? It won't get confused by what is the capital of. You could just type in. Whereas before you needed to say russia plus capital. And then it would find it, but it would get confused by the natural language. And Google fixed that. They rolled it out. Interestingly, they had this event where they announced, hey, we have this new algorithm update Hummingbird, and guess what? It's actually been live for a month. They announced it at this event. It had already been live for a month. No one was complaining, no one noticed because it just improved the Google search experience. I bet, I bet people that were. Like keyword hacking for sure, the SEO folks, for sure, for sure they noticed. And Panda was another update. There were a number of these updates where if this was your business, you knew. And I'm not saying OpenAI shouldn't share model numbers and version numbers with their enterprise customers or with their B2B customers or API customers. I'm saying in the actual ChatGPT app, don't tell people what they're using, just improve it and let them complain a little bit all over the place when you're making minor changes. If they do that, they lose the companion market. Maybe, maybe. I don't know. That's my question is why can't GPT oss fit in there? If you want a permanent model that you can run forever, why is that model not satisfactory? If you're going to fall in love with the model, make sure it's open source. And yeah, there's not your server, not your girlfriend. Right. Or not your waifu, not your weights, not your waifu. That's what they say. I'm not kidding. People believe this, but the broader 4.0 community was not able to migrate to GPT OSS. Now Tyler, you had a take on this. You think that GPT OSS just isn't at the level of 4.0? Yeah, it's just not that. I mean it's like a fine open source model. Why? It's just not. But it's been 18 months or I mean, when did GPT OSS come out? Like six months ago. I also don't think people don't like 4.0 just because it's like super smart. It's because it has like the personality. It has the texture, the flavor. Yes, that's correct. It's like a big model smell. Yes, yes, yes. And so it's been a year and it's been a year and so there's a one year gap where the open source community should be able to catch up to 4.0s ineffable qualities. It's je ne sais quoi. It's raison d'. Etre. Well, I mean for a while you've had open source models that have been like personality, like forward. Right. It's like Replica. Yeah. Or what was Noam Shazir's company? I'm forgetting the name. Character. Character AI. Character AI. It's like very similar thing. It's just personalities. Yeah. And I mean those. A lot of people use those. I'm actually curious what the numbers are compared to 4.0 of like the one shotted 4.0 people. But I think it's probably pretty comparable. Yeah, I mean, I don't like my whole take on the 4.0 thing was like 1shotting4.0 is not a good thing. But if you completely kill it, how many of those people will then go to open source models that are totally unfiltered where there's no kind of oversight? And that seems much worse because then if someone is saying super dangerous stuff, then you can't step in at all. Yeah, I think stepping in at some point is good. So you, like you. It's like part of you wants to keep those people on the platform so then you can have oversight. But also you don't want to be like continuing this. Yes, it does seem more responsible. I don't know, where do you land on it? Kill4.0 or leave4.0 tucked behind the menu options. Give in to the Keep4.0 crowd because. One of the real questions, the real question. So ChatGPT latest numbers are 800 million weekly actives. 20 million of those people pay. What percentage of the 20 million that are paying are using it for this companionship functionality? And that is like a huge unknown right now. And so I think my, like, they deprecated 4.0. They got a horrible pushback from folks. The question is, did they bring it back because people just were really upset, or did they bring it back because they were about to lose? And remember the two days after every single Reddit post, at least every other was like, I could just cancel my membership. Like, I don't need this anymore. And so, yeah, I was thinking about the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle thing. Like that got a really powerful negative reaction. The stock is up and like, sales are up, presumably because, like, it got a negative reaction, but it also got a positive reaction that was bigger. Right. And so I'm wondering, like, yeah, but. In this, in this case, it could have been that4.0 was effectively a product that was generating hundreds of millions of dollars of annual annualized revenue. Yep. That was just going to go away. It was just not like people were. Just going to upgrade to a new model. It was like, you killed my friend. I no longer need to pay for. Yeah, it just seems like, I don't know, it's hard to. It's hard to benchmark against, like the, like. Yes, there was like a big dust out that was surprising because I would have thought it'd be zero. But at the same time, like, the original Reddit thread of like, bring back 4o is like a couple thousand people. It's not actually like protesting in the street. Millions of people. Like, it hasn't spilled over all the play all over the place. Like, it's not that big, but it does. I will agree with you that it is crazy that they even said yes to it. Like most, most companies, when consumers come to them and say, hey, I want you to bring back. Like, we went on this show and we were like, bring back the old Sonos app that doesn't take 25 minutes to load. And they just didn't do it. They didn't listen to us. They didn't listen to us. Right. I was talking to. About. About Adobe. I was like, maybe they will now. Now that we're wearing yellow suits. Maybe. Maybe Sonos. I was aware of. Here's a question. Sonos. What percentage of their paying users. Yes. What percentage of their paying users do you think are paying for the product? Because it's a companion to them. Because of 4.0 specifically. Like, how bad would Churn have been? How bad was Churn? Well, it was clearly bad enough that they did something about it, which is the crazy thing, because most of the time it was typically a revealed preference versus stated preference. So when Facebook updated the news feed, and instead of just having you log into Facebook and go to someone else's page to find what they were up to, instead they surfaced, the newsfeed, they aggregated everything together. Everyone was like, I hate this new Facebook. And they went on Facebook to complain. Right. And so there was a. There was a user. Minutes probably went up. It did go up. Exactly. And so that's why. And we talked to some folks at Facebook at the time around this. They stayed the course. The question is, yeah, like, how bad was Churn? Because it's weird that we're still having this conversation three months out. Do you like the zombie ant fungus analogy? Jacob Rintomaki was posting this saying that there's this weird. There's this very weird dynamic where specifically humans are using 4.0 to protest the deletion of 4.0. And so it's very much like the AI is using the human as a host. The human is the bot for this. Is why I think it's overall under discussed. Yes, yes, yes. But at the same time, I was laughing because I was like, that Photoshop app, Photoshop Mix, I'm complaining about that. If I go and make a meme in that about protesting the deletion of Photoshop Mix, am I the zombie ant for Photoshop? It's not exactly the same. I agree that the AI thing is weirder, but it's Somewhat similar. It's somewhat similar. What do you think? So, just back on the Churn question for a second, I don't actually think Churn was that high because the reason Fora was originally Deprecated was the GPT5 release, which was August 7, and then the tweet of Sam Altman saying, we're bringing back fora was August 8th. So it was one day later. Yeah. So unless, like, a massive amount of people quit that day, which I. I mean, maybe that's very likely. I think that's what happened. You think it was just one day. If, like, why would you bring it back so fast if you didn't see, like, Twitter were saying sales sell off. Like, like, normally you would be like, if. If you saw. If you saw, like, if you saw, like, half a percent or 0.1% of your. Of your audience, like, float out the door, you'd probably be like, oh, these people are just sour grapes. They'll be back in a. But if, like, 10% of your customers, like, cancel on day one, you're like, oh, we got to stop the bleeding today. Like, let's bring this. Yeah, that's why I was asking 20 million paid users, and that's where you're 5% of them churned. And these are people that are willing to pay a lot. Unbelievable to me. It seems unbelievable to me because I don't use this product this way, but. That would have been. That could have been like, effectively 200 million of MRR that just evaporated. It's possible. It's possible. And also there is just the fact of, like, like, by putting 4.0 under the legacy models and tucked away to your point of, like, if it's 200 million of ARR just to, like, leave the servers running over there. That's pretty simple. It could have been a million, like, roughly a million people that were. This is complete spitballing. Totally speculating, but it could have been a massive number. If you have a million people and they're just going to want the same model forever on cheaper and cheaper hardware that you can deprecate bullish for depreciation rates. Let's hear it. Depreciation schedules should extend. Right? Right. Let's go. We got room to run. You know what I'm saying? Right? Yeah. You shouldn't be. You don't need to depreciate them over two years. You don't need to depreciate them over five years because you'll still be inferencing 4.0 in 30 years. For these people that are like, yeah, it's not this, it's that I love the 4.0 so much. Yeah, it will. ASI will arrive and people will still be like, yeah, but it's not 4.0. I'm in love with 4.0. Yeah, I think it'll be interest interesting if there's like five years from now it's like, here's the five most popular friends that are models and there's 4,0 and there's some others and people end up like, we'll see. No, that's a good point. Anyway, let's move on to some other stuff. But first let me tell you about Privy Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto Rails securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on infrastructure all through one simple API. And let me also tell you about Cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Double kill. Of course, Jeff Bezos is back in the arena. Jeff Bezos creates an AI startup where he will be co CEO and it's called Project Prometheus. John, what happens to Prometheus? He had a really good run. Prometheus. Everyone seems to focus on the first part of the story with Prometheus when they name their AI project. So Mark Zuckerberg named his, his AI data center cluster Project Prometheus as well. Now Jeff Bezos has also called a Project Prometheus. People love the Prometheus brand. No one can seem to properly trademark it. I don't know what's going on in the legal division of, of, you know, the Bezos family office or whatever's going on there, but they're both using Prometheus. And it's a very odd story because in Greek mythology, Prometheus is a titan responsible for creating humanity in its earliest days. You might have seen the Alien movie Prometheus. Great film. He defied the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology. And so it's a great analogy. We're stealing fire from the gods and giving it to us. AI is fire and this is what we're gonna steal, I guess. And so he creates knowledge and civilization. But fast forward a little bit. Fast forward a little bit. He gets punished for this. It's not a good ending for Prometheus. He gets punished for stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to humans. How does he get punished? He gets bound to a rock and an eagle, which is the emblem of Zeus, is sent to eat his liver every day, and then it would grow back. Taylor in the chat says, everybody want to steal fire from the gods. Don't nobody want to have their liver eaten by an eagle for eternity. That is true, Tyler. So his liver grows back overnight, only to be eaten again the next day in an ongoing cycle. And I was thinking about, like, what is the metaphor here? Let's continue to extend the metaphor. Like, what is the liver in this metaphor of building big AI projects? And then what is the eagle? Is it possible that the eagle is like blue owl? It's more of an owl. Private credit. Maybe Blue owl is coming and eating your liver, and the liver is the free cash flow that you had on your balance sheet. Because if you're one of these hyperscalers, you have a lot of free cash flow, but less and less as you sign these big debt deals. And the blue owl comes and eats your free cash flow every day for all of eternity. And eventually, eventually, there is a little bit of a reprieve, because Hercules comes and breaks the chains of Prometheus. And Prometheus is freed and his liver regrows, and Hercules slays the eagle. And so I think, obviously, in this analogy. What did you say? Who would be Hercules in this analogy? Jerome Powell. Jerome Powell, who comes in and slays the debt dealers with low interest rates. Right. And so. And so clearly we can see where this metaphor is going. They're all. They're all winking. Both. Both Zuck and Bezos are winking and saying, hey, hey, come lower interest rates save us, because we're about to get our livers eaten with our Promethean startups. Anyway, let's actually dig into what he's doing, because it's not just a foundation. It feels late to get into AI. It feels late to get into foundation modeling and training rounds. Big Euro summer. He's back. He's back in the driver's seat. Yeah, he went to Coachella. He went to a few different big events. It's possible he got back from those events, started opening up the newspaper, realized what's going on. AI is a big. I got to get out of this. I got to get it on. Ran a deep research report. What did I miss? What did I miss? What did I miss? Well, anyways, in the New York Times, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is throwing his money and time into an artificial intelligence startup that he will help manage as its co chief executive. I feel like co CEO. This is, like, more popular than ever. It is. Sequoia Capital has co Ste. Global stewards. They're global stewards, right? Or is it something else? I think just co stewards. Drop the global. I thought there was something else. Senior steward. That's what it is. Senior steward. So is there a junior steward? Sequoia. It also implies there's a steward steward. Wait, why? Like presumably, you know, wait, they're co stewards. Oh wait. So Roloff stepped down as senior steward. Now Pat Grady and Alfred Lynn are co stewards. So they're actually at a lower level. So one of them will have to emerge as the senior steward, the other will become the junior steward. I would imagine managing stewards. But the stewards look after the firm. But it's possible there's a steward that looks after the co stewards. That is possible. Maybe it's Andrew Reed. Anyways, the company project Prometheus is coming out of the gates with 6.2 billion in funding partly from Mr. Bezos, making it one of the most well financed early stage with authority. That is a massive round strong. 6 billion out the gate. Let's go. Congratulations. This is the first time Mr. Bezos has taken a formal operational role in a company since he stepped down as chief executive of Amazon in July 2021. Though he is deeply involved in Blue Origin, his official title at the space company is founder. Since leaving Amazon, Mr. Bezos has received as much attention for his personal life as his businesses, including an extravagant celebrity filled wedding in Venice this year. He has also become more closely involved in Blue Origin and has shown increasing interest in the race to build artificial intelligence. His new company now firmly plants him in the middle of that competition. Project Prometheus is entering an increasingly crowded AI market with smaller companies trying to carve out niches in a race with industry giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft and pioneering companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. The new company has until now kept a low profile and when it was started is not even clear. Project Prometheus is focusing on technology that dovetails with Mr. Bezos interest in taking people to outer space. The company is focused on AI that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields including computers, aerospace and automobiles. Is this his next, do you think this is his next. Do you think he's doing what Steve Jobs did with Next, where Steve Jobs was fired from Apple? Obviously Bezos was not fired from Amazon, but he did retire and it'd be weird for him to jump straight back in to the, to the CEO seat at Amazon. But Steve Jobs founded Next and then was acquired into Apple and it kind of made for a more smooth transition back into the driver's seat. Could that be what Bezos is doing? I could see it. He's 61, he's young, he's got the. Whole third, he's got the whole like third 30 year period. That is so such a positive omen in many people's careers. Like Warren Buffett. Where was Warren Buffett at? And he's gotta have more energy than ever. He's been gallivanting around the world. He's in peak physical condition. That's right. He's having stacking up win after win all over the globe. I think here's a tinfoil hat. Set it up as co CEOs Amazon will buy Project Prometheus. His co CEO becomes the, the you know, the internal CEO or lead on that project. At Amazon he takes the throne again. A boy can dream. So, so what is he actually building? Let's get into this. The company is focusing on AI that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields including computers, aerospace and automobiles. Unclear where the company will be based. Bezos is co founder and co chief executive is Vic Bajaj a physicist AI. That helps in manufacturing computers, aerospace and automobiles. So computers. He manufactures racks at AWS Aerospace. He manufactures rockets at Blue Origin Automobiles. He's a big backer of Rivian. He manufactures cars there and so he wants to do some sort of automated like supply chain is it erp. I mean this is clearly not PR that they wanted to do. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of guessing going on. Okay, well but Mr. Bezos is co founder and co chief executive is Vic Bajaj a physicist and chemist who work closely with Google's co founder Sergey Brin. Sergey Brin at Google's X a research effort often called the Moonshot Factory. Google X produced a wide range of ambitious projects including Wing drone delivery service and the self driving car that became Waymo. It's so interesting how divergent like those two paths were. Like Wing you don't hear about very much. When you think drone delivery service, you think Keller at Zipline. They're the ones that are really running away with that compounding I don't know the status of Wing. Maybe I'm just out of the loop on that. Maybe it's doing great but it feels like Wing has not certainly garnered the level of attention that Waymo did which was this success out of the exact same sort of incubator. So interesting. Hudson Collins in the chat says it's just going to be robots doing science on the material level, not materials scales. There's more details here. Project Prometheus is among a wave of companies focused on applying AI to physical tasks, including robotics, drug design, and scientific discovery. Last year, Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence, a startup that is applied applying AI to robots. Okay, so. And building. Okay. Anyways, we'll have to get Jeff on when he's ready to talk. Where did the money come from exactly? Do we know? I think it was just Bezos. Mostly Bezos. It's interesting. It's like. Yeah, but like, I'm super interested in, like, how you size a round if you're investing in your own project. Because you could just be like, this is my thing. I'm gonna fund it every payroll cycle. Yeah. Whatever the bill is, I'll pay it because it's my thing. You don't necessarily need to do some sort of funding round necessarily. I don't know. Why are you laughing? I accidentally opened the comment section of the New York Times article that we were just going through, and it says, first comment. These large ego models seem promising. Large ego models. Like, if you're. If you're a, you know, a tech billionaire and you have a large ego, you. You want to, you want your own large language model. Yeah. It sounds like he's not very much. Not training, just another LLM, but we'll have to see. Well, Yann Lecun was in the Wall Street Journal's weekend paper profile by Megan Borowski. An AI pioneer thinks everyone, everyone is wrong again. He's been right about AI for 40 years. Now he thinks everyone's wrong. What do you think, Tyler? Do you think Yann Lecun is wrong or do you think everyone else is wrong? I mean, so in this article, he doesn't. There's nothing really new here. They're just kind of talking about his. The points that he's been making over the past couple of years, which is just that, like, LLMs will not bring us to AGI or ASI or anything. And like, even if you keep scaling, they don't. They're not, like, actually intelligent. They can't reason or whatever. Yeah. Which. I don't know. It's like, these models are much better than me at math. Like, they can do. They can get IMO gold medals, like I cannot do. And that's like, it's like, does that take reasoning? Never doubt yourself. Yes, but I mean, like, yeah, I mean, there is an element of, like, the computer has been able to do good math fast forever, like, since like the 80s. Like, if you were like, what is 7642? Yeah, I mean, I think there's difference you can, you can make between just like raw calculation and like, how to like, think about solving a math question generally. And like, you can say that he's been right about like, you could say that he predicted like spiky intelligence maybe of models. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's like, sure, yeah, yeah. But I. Yeah, it's like, I think it's not true to say that he's been right about AI for the past 40 years. That seems man's never had a bad take. 40 years. Not a single bad take. Not a single bad take. Now he thinks everyone's wrong. Yeah, it's very funny. Frame it because. Oh, does he think George Hotz was wrong when George hotz said that GPT6 will not be AGI and the GPT paradigm will not scale on the Lex Friedman podcast in 2021? Does he disagree with that too? Does he disagree with Andre Karpathy saying it's slop and that we need new ideas? There's like seven other people that have kind of echoed the same. He doesn't think everyone's wrong, he just thinks some people are wrong. But sort of, I mean, Tyler's take. I don't know if now's the right time. I can go through this Karpathy post. Oh, yeah, please. Karpathy posted yesterday. He said, sharing an interesting recent conversation on AI's impact on the economy. AI has been compared to various historical precedents. Electricity, industrial revolution, et cetera. I think the strongest analogy is that of AI as a new computing paradigm, software 2.0, because both are fundamentally about the automation of digital information processing. If you were to forecast the impact of computing on the job market in the 1980s, the most predictive feature of a task job you'd look at is to what extent the algorithm of it is fixed. That is are you just mechanically transforming information according to rote, easy to specify rules, I.e. typing, bookkeeping, human calculators. Back then, this was the class of programs that the computing capability of that era allowed us to write. With AI, now we are able to write new programs that we could never hope to write by hand before. We do it by specifying objectives, I.e. classification, accuracy or reward functions. And we search the program space via gradient descent to find neural networks that work well against that objective. This is My Software 2.0 blog post from a while ago. In this new programming paradigm, then, the most predictive feature to look at is verifiability If a task job is verifiable, then it is optimizable directly or via reinforcement learning. And a neural net can be trained to work extremely well. It's about to what extent can an AI practice something? The environment has to be resettable. You can start a new attempt. Efficient. A lot of attempts can be made and rewardable. There is some automated process to reward any specific attempt that was made. The more a task job is verifiable, the more amenable it is to automation. In the new programming paradigm. If it is not verifiable, it has to fall out from neural net magic of generalization, fingers crossed. Or via weaker means like imitation. This is what's driving the jagged frontier. Progress in LLMs, tasks that are verifiable progress rapidly, including possibly beyond the ability of top experts, that is Math code, amount of time spent watching videos, anything that looks like puzzles with correct answers. And while many others lag by comparison, creative strategic tasks that combine real world knowledge, state context and common sense. Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify. Software 2.0 easily automates what you can. Verify okay, you got to go to this other post for the perfect example of what's hard to verify from Nat Purser. This is my personal benchmark for AGI and looks like we're a ways a ways boys. A ways away boys. Can you come up with 10 jokes in the same format as the you're telling me a shrimp fried this rice joke? You're telling me a shrimp fried this rice. And the GPT5 Pro reasoned for 1 minute and 31 seconds it says. You're telling me a hamster drove this car? You're telling me a pigeon delivered this mail? You're telling me a Roomba cleaned this mansion? You're telling me a goldfish coded this app? You're telling me a squirrel filed these taxes? I swear. I swear. I swear. AI just has a different sense of humor. Sense of humor is just bad jokes. Yeah. Oh. GPT5 thinking did a little bit better. You're telling me a chicken fried this steak? You're telling me a hand made this pasta? Hand pasta. Handmade pasta. That's like that. She is a good one. Look at number 10. I think that one number 10. You're telling me a ghost wrote this book? That's good. That one makes sense. That one does make sense. You're telling me a star crossed these lovers. That's actually pretty good. Okay, so we're getting somewhere. We're getting somewhere. At least it like understood the Prompt on this one. You're telling me a beer battered this fish. I like that you're telling me this. Figma thought bigger and built faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free. We got to whip through a bunch of these posts. I will not leave this show before we talk about the Apple. The Apple iPhone sock. What is up with the sock? Have you seen this? Apple launched a sock. So it's a fashion accessory and everyone's debating it. Do you see this? It's this blue, light blue sock that you put over your shoulder or over your hand and people are very, very upset about it. Aditya Agrawal says, when a company releases something that is so obviously underwhelming, then the natural question is, did no one at the company see how bad this is? Or did no one have the courage to speak up? I'm not sure which is worse. And someone else says, look, Apple has a lot of fumbles. This is not one of them. They knew exactly what they were doing and exactly who would buy it. Also, it's okay. Fashion accessories are not for everyone. And the news of course is that it's called the iPhone Pocket. A beautiful way to wear and carry iPhone, not carry the iPhone. Remember, you don't say the iPhone, you say iPhone. And so, born out of a collaboration between Issey Miyake and Apple, iPhone Pocket features a singular 3D knitted construction designed to fit any iPhone. Jaya, who I actually did a collab with on Instagram. Very fun tech commentator. She says a lot of tech bros prematurely dunking on this release because they don't get why it's a big deal. So let me translate. You're not the only consumers Apple designs for. This is a huge designer and the mind behind Steve Jobs iconic black turtlenecks. I didn't realize that people outside the US wear phone straps and slings all the time and would pay for this. They're tapping into an existing trend. Apple has infiltrated music, entertainment, but not high fashion. Even though the Tech X fashion is exploding tech built into Met, Gala looks, et cetera. The 3D knitted construction reduces material waste and shows a push toward more sustainable made to shape production. This will absolutely sell. Sell. What do you think? Are you bullish or bearish on the Apple iPhone Pocket? Jordy. I feel like I know a lot of people. Most. I feel like most of. I feel like my mom would love this. To be honest, it seems like it's. A great Christmas gift. So interestingly, how much do you think this costs? I don't know, like 230 bucks. Did you look it up? Yeah, yeah. The long one's 230. The short one's 150. But I think most people would look at this and be like, okay, it's a sock, but it's from Apple, so It's probably like 30 bucks, maybe 50 bucks. Some people were surprised that it was a little bit more expensive, but, you know, it's from this famous designer and it's this interesting status symbol. The question is, like, this could be like, I don't think I'm going to be using this thing no matter what. The question is, is this going to be like Labubus and going to be like, super popular or like Stanley's? Will this become actually a very, very popular, popular form factor in America specifically? I don't know. It's hard to tell. I'm not really the person to, like, you know, handicap it. I think Apple knows what they're doing. I think they'll make money on this, certainly. Yeah. Ever since the AirPods AirPods early on looked really silly. And I could see this becoming. I could see this becoming a popular form factor for accessories. And I could see Apple seeing like, hey, there's a world where we not only sell a case with every iPhone, we can sell a sock. A sock. Well, the sock maybe makes it so that you don't need a case because this is your case. Like, if you have it in there and then you drop it, it's kind. Of nice and it's kind of a crazy weapon. Defense weapon. Yeah, you can swing it around and smack people in the face with it. I don't know. The colors are pretty cool and I don't know, it's clearly not for me, but I think I'm going to buy four of those for. For Christmas. We'll see. And give them out to people. Get ready for your iPhone. Sock buddy. Well, speaking of socks, we got to talk about hook is stunning in some. What are these new shoes? Travis Scott's new fragment AJ1 lows. These are Nike shoes, I suppose, but these are not Air Force ones, I suppose. I really don't know. I mean, this shoes. But everyone's saying he low key got aura. Congrats to Tim Cook on looking great. And even though the succession planning is intensifying, the rumor mill is churning. Obviously, Apple has not been commenting, but something's going on in the show. I mean, releasing this photo is more than a comment. It's a statement. I like reading it just being like, oh, really? Oh, really? Financial Times. So the Financial Times has this article that says Apple intensifies succession planning for CEO Tim Cook, the iPhone makers board preparing for its longtime leader to step down as early as next year. John Ternus, Apple senior vice president of hardware, is widely seen as Cook's most likely successor, although no decisions have been made. So basically everyone's been leaking this, whether it's Bloomberg, whether it's the Financial Times here. And of course, Apple is not commenting because they'll talk about who they're going to move the market when they decide their next CEO. If they don't even stick with Tim Cook, they might stick with Tim Cook for another two decades, who knows? But I like the idea that this photo came out being like, yeah, I'm not leading. No comment, but I'll make a statement. I'll make a statement. No comment, but I'll make a statement. I do want to have some folks on to debate like whether or not I was thinking we should invite Jon Gruber on because he wrote this piece like something is rotten in Cupertino all about the failure of Apple intelligence. And when we talked to Mark Gurman, we saw Gurman was also saying like, yes, like Cupertino really was shook by the, like dropping the ball on Apple intelligence by missing AI. But I still wonder if all of this is. Is there's all these rumors, oh, Tim Cook's got to go. Imagine if you post that picture, if we see a real correction in AI. Yeah, post caption, do nothing when do nothing win. Yeah, Exactly. Stock pumps 10%. I missed artificial intelligence, but I didn't miss getting this fit off. I'm having a good time. What else is in the news? Vanta Automate compliance. Manage risk, prove trust with AI. Vanta helps you get compliant fast. And they don't stop there. Their AI and automation powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. There's a bunch of. We have to talk about Paper hand. This is the fakest of news. Get ready for the fake news hour, buddy. Okay, so what? Peter Thiel sold his entire stake, Everything. All of it and 76% of his friend's company, Tesla. Okay. Yes. So this is from a. So this is from one of those 13F's disclosure form with the SEC from Teal Macro. His fund. His, his. Some of the money that he runs. But of course it's very. People read into 13Fs all the time for a variety of reasons and they sort of get it wrong a lot, it seems like. And so Zero Hedge sort of Sums this up where he says, Peter Thiel, net worth 20 billion. Thiel Macro AUM 75 million. Like, what's going on? What make it make sense? And it's almost certainly because of disclosure rules. Like what needs to be disclosed might only be a fraction of what's actually going on there. So odd to read into it, but at the same time, I think the reason why this made headlines is just because it feels like something that might happen. Like, like if, if instead this headline had been, oh, like Peter Thiel went on a podcast and said that he thinks the AI bubble is, has reached the top. Everyone would just be like, oh yeah, like that's. It feels like people have been waiting for someone to call the top. And so they're really, really like digging in for top signals and top calls. And this slight change in the, in the, in the 13F. Even though the odd part is that if you actually read the 13F, which of course is just this like $75 million slice for whatever, for whatever reason. Even if you dig, even if you read that like the other three holdings are still big tech companies. So it's not like super bearish. It's like there's some Microsoft in there. I think there's some Apple in there. Yeah. And the Teal Macro team is trying to generate the greatest returns that they. Possibly can go viral. They're trying to go as viral as possible. They don't care about irr. They just want to go viral. They just want to go viral. They're just trying to create headlines. No, they're trying to generate returns. Yeah. Famous. It's possible to sell a stock that you're, that you're still bullish on or at least that you expect like some amount of price appreciation. Yeah. Or even long term price appreciation. And also like, there's all these weird like, tax implications of like selling one thing. Like it's not even clear that this is all of his Nvidia. No one's, no one's gotten to the bottom of that. I don't know if they ever will. But people love, people love deep diving 13 Fs and they are so, and they are fun. Situational awareness. It's certainly a bull market in 1313 F. Deep dives. Deep dives. Let's talk about the situational awareness 13F. But first let me tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So situational awareness 13F for Q3 dropped Friday. Nick Carter broke it down massive new $500 million position in core Weave, which has been down a bunch, but they're going in big. Adds to CRZ and Iron, added some new miners. Intel calls remain unchanged, trimmed, Broadcom, a couple other names here. And Nick is giving it some context. I believe Nick was one of the first investors in Core Weave. Correct. Angel. Angel in coreweave. What an insane investment. Congrats to him. So he says all these numbers are as of 9:30. Many of these names sold off since then. Portfolio value, counting notional value of options, doubled from 2.12 billion to 4.15 billion, mostly due to 1.5 billion of new cash. So let's give it up for new cash injection. We got a ring. Massive, massive fund. But, but this. But the fund did generate 700 million in appreciation, so a huge, huge, huge gain. Yeah, I guess the, I guess the. Concerning, you know, again, last, last. Last time 13F dropped. Remember, people were like reading too much into it and they were like, wow, he, he was long. Intel like is. He cooks. And then they did intel, did the deal with the government and it absolutely ripped this 13F, you know, so situational awareness had a half a billion dollar new Core Weave position as of basically the beginning of October. And obviously Core Weave has been down and to the right. Down 46% in the past month. But wait, down 46% in the past month? Yes. I thought it was in the past, like three months or something. No, past month. Whoa. So that position is probably not. It's down 5% today. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. One month. It's down 46% that. It's at a 36 billion market cap. Yeah. It's so odd because, like, yeah, when you. When you look at, when you look at just this one name, it feels like, okay, like, it is over. Like, I. If you told me, like, oh, yeah, like the company that really is like the most index to the AI wave is down 46%, I'd be like, wow. So this is like the total popping of the bubble. Complete pop. Like it's over. It's like, like when the Metaverse bubble popped when, you know, when crypto bubbles pop. Like bitcoin trades down 50%, 60%. Like, and then it's over. And then you start rebuilding. Right? And yet, and yet the overall market feels nowhere near popped. Right? Like, I mean, I'm sure Nvidia is down somewhat down 5% past five days, but Nvidia over the last month is still up. Over the past six months, it's up 40%. And so you would, you would expect Nvidia to be maybe like, you know, selling off more. Coreweave is just in a, is just in a unique position, like truly, truly rough month for that company. Yeah. As well as Core Scientific, which Core we've tried to buy was rejected. Core Scientific has traded down 24% in the past month, which Leopold also had built a position in. So we'll see. Yeah. I wonder what the thesis on Core Weave is. I mean, obviously the company has a great product like Semianalysis is. Rank them platinum on clustermax. It's clearly a real company with real products and services and holdings. Maybe the market, it was just overheated, maybe it's pulling back. It's kind of unclear. But if you want to go in, analyze a bunch of 13 Fs, do it in Julius the AI data analyst. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English, get insights in seconds, no coding required. Speaking of other data, he also added positions just in Western Digital, Seagate. And I was just going through on. The hard drive trade. Got to store that data somewhere and potentially Modine manufacturing. Okay. I'd be interested to know what he's thinking about in the energy side, on the gas turbine side. Isn't that what Semianalysis was drawing the most attention to? Feels like they've been very ahead of the curve on identifying companies that are basically already supply constrained. And if you just look, and if you look deeper into what's going on in their book of business, they're about to flip to incredibly high margins. Because once everything goes out of stock, this company can just all of a sudden say, yeah, actually we need 60% margins. And people would be like, yeah, no problem. Yes. So the story from Situational Awareness is like all the Neo clouds have sold off a ton. Or we've saying Satya unloaded his risk onto the Neo clouds. It's a game of sort of, I don't know, musical chairs. Yeah. The deal with Microsoft just wasn't. It like, seemed to be like little to no margin. Yeah. But anyway, so if you. So the Neo clouds have also sold off, but Lumentum holdings is up 46% in the past month, which he added Western Digital up 25% and Seagate up 14%. So he's making up for it. Yeah, yeah. It's the birth of a new fund. It's just like, it's the very, very hot part of the cycle. I think everyone's wondering, how big will this be in a decade? That's a big question. It's a very exciting time, but you got to stick to landing. And I think people are. I'm sort of rooting for him. I think he's going to do it. Yeah. The question is, is it going to be a true hedge fund? Is he going to make money in a down market in a correction? I mean, yeah, I bet we're going to open up one of these 13 Fs and be like, wow, he short everything now. Okay. And then you're going to see everything sell off and it'll be like, wow. That would be much higher signal than PT in a $75 million fund. Totally. Totally. Yeah. There's some blue Al news in the Financial Times. Blue Owl investors face hefty losses as credit fund blocks exit ahead of merger. Blue Owl has blocked redemptions in one of its earliest private credit funds as it merges with a larger vehicle overseen by the asset manager. In a deal that could leave investors with large losses, they could lose about 20% of their holdings. The deal underscores the risk that retail investors have taken in pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into private debt funds carrying limited liquidity rights. It comes as scrutiny builds on the valuations and returns on private credit funds, which have caused publicly listed debt funds to sell off and trade at steep discounts to the stated value of their assets. And so we talked about this, I think, on Friday, but Blue Owl has been selling off this year and they said we should be performing better than everyone else. But it feels like a little bit of the narrative might be around liquidity here. Earlier this month, Blue Owl told its shareholders that it planned to merge the Blue Owl Capital Corporation 2 fund, which has a billion dollars in assets, with its OBDC fund, which has 17 billion in assets. BOCC 2 investors are being asked to exchange their shares in the private fund for shares in OBDC at the stated net asset value of both funds. However, OBDC trades on public markets at a discount of about 20% to the stated value of assets. Because of the liquidity problem. Well, and because it's possible that the market doesn't feel like they're pricing the assets correctly, potentially there's some discount. Got to see what's in there. Redemptions in BOCC 2 have climbed to a level where it could event where it would eventually be forced to restrict investor redemptions. Its investors pulled out 150 million in the first nine months of this year, a 20% increase from the same period last year. Last year, according to security filings, redemptions in the third quarter nearly doubled to 60 million, or 6% of its net asset value. Jonathan Lamb, chief financial officer of obdc, acknowledged that at current prices, investors could take a potential haircut on their investments. But he said the merger came with significant benefits, such as the ability to own more liquid shares in obdc. The trading price of OBDC has been hit by souring sentiment on private credit markets. That was not backed up by the performance of Blue Owl's underlying loans, he added. If shareholders were to vote down the deal, bocc too, may be forced to limit redemptions. So good luck if you're hanging out in Blue Al Capital. Sundar Pichai has more news in the data center world. She says, today we're announcing a new $40 billion investment in Texas through 2027 to build cloud and AI infrastructure. Thousands of new jobs. Yeehaw. This includes new data centers in Armstrong and Haskell counties and a major investment to strengthen energy resilience and abundance. We're also providing funding to more than double the projected pipeline of new Texan electricians. There we go to power. The AI era, the golden age of being the golden electrician age where you get flown around in private jets to different data centers. Yeah, you do. You do. That's right. So $40 billion investment, thousands of new jobs. That feels like a higher ratio than what was the other example you kept quoting something 500 jobs for some anthropic data center or something. It was the anthropic data center. They were like, we're investing 50 billion. How many jobs did you create? 20 jobs. I mean, that's not the goal of this stuff. The jobs should not necessarily be created in the data center. No, I just always brought that up because you have to understand what people outside of tech, their reaction. Totally. You're investing $50 billion and. In some great jobs. There was some. There was a good article in the Journal on, on Blue out as well. I think it also ties into Abilene, Texas. Might be a good moment to cover some of this in the Journal yesterday. Wall street blows past bubble worries. Oh yeah. To supercharge AI spending frenzy. And they say firms such as Blue Owl Capital have raised trillions in investing firepower. The AI build out is a perfect match. The warning signs are flashing not long. Ago have better PR or worse PR than Aries. They seem to be quickly becoming like the main name that everyone knows in private credit. And to my knowledge, like they are not the only firm in the category. And yet they are the ones that if you need an example, you pull Blue Owl off the shelf. It's a strong brand. It is a strong brand. They have the dot com they have blueowl dot com blueowl dot com not long ago Blue Owl Capital was an upstart investment firm that lent money to mid sized US companies such as Sara Lee Frozen Bakery. Well these days the firm is financing massive data centers costing tens of billions of dollars for the likes of Meta and Oracle, a sign of just how quickly Wall street has become the enabler of America's AI boom. Fund managers such as Blue Al amass trillions of dollars of investing firepower and have been hunting for big deals where they can put that money to work. They found slim pickings for years until a perfect match appeared in AI which has provided a bigger target than anything in history due to the vast sums tech companies need to ramp up computing power are we're talking about numbers that are so large even in the low cases, said Blue founder co founder Mark Lipscholz. Lipschultz Lipschultz does it even matter if you keep counting after you get to 1 trillion of capital expenditure in the next couple years? This is insane. Does it even matter? You really undersold this. Does it even matter? You told me you read this. I was like, is it good? You were like it was okay. There's one moment that no, there's another one I saw. I scrolled down. Last week's sell off in tech related stocks and bonds marked some of the most serious warning signs that the frenzy could be overdone. But any worries on Wall street about a possible investment bubble have largely been trumped by the fear of being left behind. Lipschultz and co founder Doug Ostrever jumped into the fray at a posh retreat in California's Ojai Valley for dozens of tech VIPs and celebrities in the spring of 2024. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella were there, along with Pharrell Williams and Serena Williams. The Blue Al duo, a Wall street superstars who built the firm into a 295 billion fund manager in 10 years by perfectly timing a surge in private lending, looked like just two money men in office sneakers and fleece vests. But the billionaire co owners of a professional hockey team who have talked about skating where the puck is going. It's awesome that they seize the opportunity to get in. They built this firm huge. Huge. They make billions of dollars and they're like let's get a hockey team. Want to go 50? 50? Let's Tyler. What hockey team do they own? Can you find that out? The next line is the one I was laughing at. While David Guetta dj the Blue Owl executives cut a deal to acquire IPI Partners, an investment firm that owned and operated big data centers for Amazon and Microsoft Blue. Al already had close ties with the organizer of the Treat Iconic Capital, which manages the personal fortunes of Silicon Valley elite, including Zuckerberg, and was a part owner of ipi. Okay, let's go to Tyler. They own the Tampa Bay Lightning. Huh? Do they spend a lot of time in. Is that bay? Is that a. Is that like a NHL team? Yes, NHL team in Florida. That feels like an odd. That's got to be. I mean, I feel like Tampa is. Trying to keep the ice. I feel like a lot of the hedge fund guys, they're on the other side of the peninsula, right? Like, aren't they in like the Key west and Mar a Lago area or Palm beach or Miami, like. Or maybe they just fly in and out like, I don't know. It just, it just, it feels like. I would love to know more about how they selected that particular team and that sport. Yeah. The purchase gave Blue Al a seat at the table to bid on mega AI financing. Let's give it up for mega AI financings. Not long after it got arranged, it got picked to arrange a $14 billion package for an Oracle and OpenAI data center in Avalanche. Then last month, Blue owl raised about 30 billion to build an AI data center for Meta in Louisiana, putting in 3 billion of its clients money and borrowing the rest. So the lender is borrowing in addition to their LPs dollars. The deal included a provision considered extraordinary on Wall street, giving Blue Owl's equity investment a debt like guarantee in case the partnership falls apart. Showing the new financial wizardry bankers are conjuring to meet AI's ravenous financial demand. Let's give it up for financial wizardry. We love wizardry. Spreading the risk. Silicon Valley's biggest players are flush with cash and are able to fund much of the initial AI build out from their own coffers. As the dollar figures climb ever higher, they are turning to debt and private equity, spreading the risks and potential rewards more broadly across the economy. Some of the financing is coming from plain vanilla corporate bond sales. But financiers are making far bigger fees off giant private deals. Virtually every Wall street player is angling to get a piece of the action, from banks such as JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley to traditional asset managers like BlackRock. Before we go, let me tell you about fall generated media platform for developers. The world's best generative image video and Audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Continue. Jordan Investor appetite for data center debt is so strong that some money managers have booked billion dollar gains in a matter of days. Let's give it up for booking billion dollar gains in a matter of days. Even before construction of these facilities they are financing. I mean we talked about, we talked about this concerning money manager. It's almost like, you know, people say there's no such thing as free money, but kind of seems like could be in a kind of a free money situation here. I think you got to, you got to do something pretty. Anyways, here's the lined up at the iconic. Here's the catch. Still, the longer term performance is hardly assured. Big tech companies are expected to spend nearly 3 trillion on AI through 2028, but only generate enough cash to cover half that tap. According to analysts at Morgan Stanley. Big names in the finance world such as Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon are warning about AI fueled froth in the markets and in capital spending. At the same time, the fear of missing out is real. Days after Salomon voices concerns to analysts, Goldman formed a new team in its banking and markets group focused on a infrastructure financing. They are getting into the game. What do you say? What we do know for certain is that the big tech companies that want the world to spend trillions have huge financial incentives to be believers. If you haven't noticed, Wall street is also being paid a lot to promote the story Greenlight Capital, the hedge fund firm run by David Einhorn, wrote in an October letter to investors. So how will. And this is, this is the line that stood out the most because like on the west coast you have the labs which are effectively every single person, as well as the investors are incentivized to keep the current AI super cycle narrative going. And then on the east coast you have Wall street who is getting paid to effectively do the same thing. So you have these two centers of power that are both incentivized to keep the party going. Yeah, this breakdown here. So the Wall Street Journal is slicing up how the next three years will look based on projected global spending on data centers by financing source. So of 2.9 trillion which is estimated over the next three years, I guess four years, tech companies will cover 1.4 trillion of it. Private credit will cover 800 billion of it. Corporate bonds 200 billion of it. Asset backed securitization 150, private equity another 350. And to me this looks like a very healthy way to actually finance this. This feels like it's not. If it was like if we were looking at this, if you broke down. We've been through a $2 trillion bubble before and it collapsed very rapidly. What was that? It was like the meme coin era. And how did we break that down? It was not the cash flows of the most profitable companies in the world that were buying the long tail crypto assets. It was retail. And so the fact that this is like pretty removed from retail feels like safe to me. It's much safer than getting a huge bubble inflated in. Oh, everyone has to get in on the latest coin and they're all nonsense. Like there will be nonsense deals. We're already seeing nonsense AI companies and there certainly will be projects that get financed and they just cannot build. Yeah, I would say using the excuse like, well, at least this isn't retail getting hosed. Doesn't hold up that well when you think, okay, the alternative is like large institutions, insurance companies, pension funds that are also financing this, which is effectively. I'm talking about the fragility, not necessarily where the financial pain or who the person ultimately pays for it. If there is a pullback, it's like, how fast can that pullback happen? Right? Because if the write downs, if there's something that goes wrong and the write downs come out of, of tech companies cash flows, that's just not as big of a deal as everyone waking up and just slamming the sell button. It's just a very different. It's a very different set of dominoes. Like the dominoes of the interest rate crisis, the NFT crisis, FTX blowing up, all that stuff. Those dominoes were spaced right next to each other. And so as soon as one went over, it was like, the next person has their finger over the sell button, the next person has their finger over their sell button. Whereas if you're like, yeah, I'm a tech company and I produce $50 billion of free cash flow and oh yeah, I'm not getting a great return on the 20 billion of free cash flow that I earmarked over here for the next few years. It's bad, but it's not as calamitous. And I think going back to this quote from David Einhorn, he says what we do know for certain is that the big tech companies that want the world spend trillions have huge financial incentives to be believers. In case you haven't noticed, Wall street is also being paid a lot to promote the story. And in that same letter, Einhorn and Greenlight said this was the AI math makes no sense, which was basically the way it is today. Consumer business spends $1 on a ChatGPT subscription, which is OpenAI revenue. Then OpenAI provides the service by spending $2 on Microsoft AI infrastructure, which is Microsoft revenue. Then Microsoft spends $0.60 leasing GPUs from Coreweave to handle the compute load, which is Core Weave revenue. And then core weave spends $2.40 on chips from Nvidia and another $2.40. Yes, but you're completely discounting exactly how addicted the 4.0 user is. They will pay any amount. So let's say that if it costs $20,000 a day to serve a 4.0 user, they will find the money. They will be stripping copper out of empty buildings to pay for their 4.0 bill if they have to. They will be whatever it takes. They will be breaking into cars to sell stolen CD radios. It is notable that Blue Owl has sold off 16% in the past month. So even during this sort of like boom in lending, they're not getting very much credit for it. Yeah, it's an odd time. There's still so many things that are working. The results from that newcomer event, the AI Cerebral Valley, where he had every. It's so good. He. He took like a straw poll on stage and asked everyone, like, who do you want to short? And everyone said perplexity. So like, he didn't really have to say like, I'm shorting perplexity. He just was able to like take the temperature and sort of maintain like, you know, some arm's length distance to it while still like getting the take out there. But everyone was saying that they wanted to buy more OpenAI, more anthropic, more anduril. A few other names came up, I believe, and there's still an incredible amount of bullishness in a lot of different areas. But I think people are still worried about some of the other stuff. But at the same time it feels like there's so many companies that have gone through the AI pump and round tripped. Not just Oracle, but even like Klarna was going through the whole like, hey, we're going to get so many efficiencies out of AI. And then it came back to normal, but then they still got out and it's like a reasonable company that's not like it's not zeroed, right? It's like, oh yeah, their business is just what it was before the AI boom. And they are not getting like they didn't get moved up or down. And so there's just like a ton of companies that are like that. Where is klarna since the IPO anyway? They're sitting at around a $12 billion valuation. 12.6. Down 20%. Yeah, down 20. That doesn't seem calamitous to me. That seems like pretty like solid, like, I don't know, the overall market's kind of, you know, up and down. I don't know. Affirm, on the other hand is up 28%. How's affirm doing? Up 28% in the past six months. In the past six months they're getting. Today is a real bloodbath. It's down 6% today. Everything's down today. What else is down today? Bitcoin. Let's check. Nasdaq's down 1.3. Dow Jones 1.3 as well. Well, we're going to 10,000 year mortgages. Doing 10,000 year mortgages. Announced the second round of stimulus checks already. Gemini 3 must save us. There's a prediction on Polymarket that was quote posted by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. He says prediction markets are betting on Gemini 3 release week 69% says November 22nd. Can't wait for that. We were wondering if we were going to get it before Christmas. It was our Christmas present. It was Tyler's Christmas present and fortunately looks like we're going to. And I couldn't be more excited that we are partnered with Gemini and Google AI Studio create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. You can get started at AI studio build. Speaking of Google, Google Capital says his final investing decision was to buy Google. This is amazing. I think that's beautiful. He doesn't even need to say who he's talking about. It's like so obvious. That's Warren Buffett. It is beautiful that Warren Buffett is going long Google. And Darren here quotes this rune post that says not enough people are emotionally prepared for or if it's not a bubble, it's a good post. It's like, is it a bubble if all the big tech companies rip and there's a couple Neo clouds that trade down a little bit. There's one or two application layer companies that burn a bunch of VC dollars, but there's still a new hyperscaler that's born. I guess it's a bubble, but it's a survivable bubble. It's just like it's move on, you know? Yeah, rolling bubbles. But people are getting wild on the timeline about Gemini 3. Rune says the model must be good because the Google people have adapted the OpenAI culture of vague posting and hushed rumors and sending really weird texts. So we are explo signals lmao. Explicitly calling out OpenAI culture. Vague posting is hilarious. People are excited. There was also a Reuters profile of Demis and Morgan says a Demis profile can only mean one thing. I imagine that that's Gemini 3.0 and that it will be good. The question is like, what does good mean right now? Are we expecting anything that's like a qualitative step function? Because what I would say, what is Gemini 3 good? First off, I mostly just want better UI and little features in the app as a consumer product. I just want better productization of the model that I already think is good. On the actual AI model side, I would imagine it's little 10% bump to how long it can reason. Maybe a model picker or not a model picker, an automatic reasoning mode. So that if I. Even if I think it's going to take 10 minutes to get me the answer, if it has the answer handy, it gives it to me in one minute. Vice versa. It knows when to think really hard. It knows when to think just for a little bit. I'm expecting it to be slightly better at all the benchmarks. I don't even know what would blow me away. Yeah, I mean, at this point it's getting fairly hard to find good prompts that show how good a model is. There was one earlier we showed about the shrimp fried rice one that's pretty good. But yeah, I mean, qualitative, like just in normal kind of natural language, it's like pretty hard to get. Also, like, if I go to Gemini 3 and I say tell me a joke or I say write me a tweet that gets over a thousand likes, I'm not actually that disappointed. When it falls flat on its face, I'm like, yeah, it's fine. Spiky intelligence. I don't really need you to do that. I don't need you to be funny. I need you to look up data really accurately for me. I need you to do that really well. Or I need you to write code really accurately for us. I think another question is what will OpenAI do if they'll do anything? Because we've basically seen every big Gemini release, there's been some response from OpenAI. Like usually they do it the day before. What is Jordy laughing at? I just don't know. I know that they want to steal Gemini's Thunder. I just don't know if they have the juice this week. Who? Oh, OpenAI. Yeah. I mean, it feels a little bit like all the people at OpenAI are throwing in the towel a little bit. No one is vague posting over there. Yeah. It feels like they've launched a lot of the things that would be easy, like layups. Like, if they launched Sora this week, everyone would be like, oh, we got to focus on Sora. These videos of Sam Altman Stealing GPUs are just too funny. Doesn't matter what happened in Gemini 3 world, because Gemini 3 probably will be released. OpenAI, the IO acquisition week of Google I O. Then it turns out, like, they couldn't. I don't think they could use the name IO. Like, they got that trademark lawsuit right away. Just like, big news. We hired three Geminis. Their birthday is in the month that makes them Geminis. And so we're introducing them today and we're doing a whole press release for it. The new Gemini team, OpenAI. And OpenAI. Just anything to steamroll the SEO. It will be fun. Well, we have Eric Lyman from Ramp in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP in ultradam. Eric, how are you doing? Yellow suit. Do not get the memo. Oh, my gosh, guys, I'm on the road today, but.
So why this financing, why this partner, why this number? Kind of break us through, walk us through the thesis behind the round, of course. So I think if you look at the fundamentals of the business, Ramp is just competing in a category of its own. Companies generally, the bigger they get, the more they slow down. Ramp is growing faster this year at significantly larger scale than we did last year. So this is, you know, at over $1 billion a year in revenue, the business is doubling, it's generating cash. And if you look at gross profit specifically, which is a good metric of how efficient are the underlying mechanics of the business, we're growing 10 times faster than the median publicly traded software company. So it's just in a category of its own. I think on top of this, AI has just been an incredible accelerant for the business itself. There is pull from, from customers. Everyone is thinking about how can I take what's happening in AI and apply it to, to my business? And there's a push of these models are getting dramatically better. And so outcomes like automated expenses, automated accounting, moving funds to higher yield for customers are just coming out of the box. And so, you know, I would say if we were to sum it up, I think for many millennia Money talked, we're keeping money to think. And I think the implications of that are pretty profound. Better run businesses, more profitable organizations. And so that's the first part, the second part, we're absolutely thrilled to be deepening our partnership with Lightspeed, who led this round. I think they're an extraordinary firm, led the rounds of many.
I guess. Look, and your early guys, are we in the bubble or not? Sure. I mean, so bubbles are as bubbles are, right? You can look at a lot of things. You can look at valuations. I mean, Nvidia's mid, mid-20s price to forward earnings right now. It's not. We haven't got anywhere near crazy yet. And I mean, I'll say the same thing I've said since this started and it's this, it really got started. You know, ChatGPT showed up in November of 22 and Nvidia sort of print heard around the world was May of 23. That's when it started. And even then people worried about, oh, okay, 2024 is gonna be awful. Right. I'll say the same thing I said then at some point nothing goes up into the right forever. At some point you'll have a digestion or an air pocket or. It's not now. It's clearly not now. That's all I can say. I don't know when, but it's not now. It's not this year, doesn't look like it's next year. And then all of these projects that OpenAI is signing with, with Broadcom and Nvidia and even AMD, they don't even start to ship until the end of 2026. So at least from a spending standpoint, from what we consider, it's probably not 2027 either. Now we'll see what the stocks do. Like, they tend to be anticipatory, but in terms of like an air pocket or something and spending, I'm not really all that worried yet. Yeah, when? I don't know. But like it's not now. Yeah. Do you, do you. How much have you subscribed to this idea of like rolling.
At Facebook at the time around this. They stayed the course. The question is, yeah, like, how bad was Churn? Because it's weird that we're still having this conversation three months out. Do you like the zombie ant fungus analogy? Jacob Rintomachi was posting this saying that there's this very weird dynamic where specifically humans are using 4.0 to protest the deletion of 4o. And. And so it's very much like the AI is using the human as a host. The human is the bot for this. Is why I think it's overall under discussed. Yes, yes, yes. But at the same time I was laughing because I was like that Photoshop app, Photoshop Mix. I'm complaining about that. If I go and make a meme in that about protesting the deletion of Photoshop Mix, like, am I the zombie ant for Photoshop? It's not exactly the same. I agree that the AI thing is weirder, but it's somewhat similar. It's somewhat similar. What do you think? So just back on the Churn question for a second. I don't actually think Churn was that high because the reason fora was originally Deprecated was the GPT5 release, which was August 7th.
Like, leave the servers running over there. That's pretty simple. It could have been a million, like roughly a million people that were complete. Spitballing. Totally speculated, let's say, but it could have been a massive number. If you have a million people and they're just going to want the same model forever on cheaper and cheaper hardware that you can deprecate. Bullish for depreciation rates. Let's hear it. Depreciation schedules should extend. Right. Right, let's go. We got room to run. You know what I'm saying? Right? Yeah. Yeah. You shouldn't be. You don't need to depreciate them over two years. You don't need to depreciate them over five years because you'll still be inferencing 4.0 in 30 years for these people that are like, yeah, it's not this, it's that I love the 4.0 so much. Yeah, it will. ASI will arrive and people will still be like, yeah, but it's not 4.0. I'm in love with 4 0. Yeah. I think it'll be interesting if there's like five years from now.
But then also your thought process for not losing that, because I imagine you agree that that is important to have principles and redouble the focus on them. I love that you asked about this, because I think it gets to the heart of what we're trying to do inside of the product. If you think about probably your very first year, every dollar out of the organization was something you thought about. Someone wants to buy a software subscription, you know exactly why. Someone proposed a consultant. It's a debate over it. Everyone knows who approved what was this, this, this purchase worth it or not? And you know, years later, suddenly businesses just start happening to you. You're not happening to the business. Things are renewing on autopilot. Things you thought carefully about are just running on its own. And what we're really trying to seek to do in the product is when we say money, that. That thinks, you know, it's. The idea is that before funds leave your account, we understand the principles that you run your business. And we check, does someone have the permission to spend it? It has memory. So once.
Of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Double kill, of course. Jeff Bezos is back in the arena. Jeff Bezos creates AI startup where he will be co CEO and it's called Project Prometheus. John, what happens to Prometheus? He had a really good run. Prometheus. Everyone seems to focus on the first part of the story with Prometheus when they name their AI project. So Mark Zuckerberg named his his AI data center cluster project Prometheus as well. Now Jeff Bezos has also called a Project Prometheus. People love the Prometheus brand. No one can seem to properly trademark it. I don't know what's going on in the legal division of, of, you know, the Bezos Bezos family office or whatever is going on there, but they're both using Prometheus. And it's a very odd story because in Greek mythology, Prometheus is a titan responsible for creating humanity in its earliest days. You might have seen the Alien movie Prometheus. Great film. He defied the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology. And so it's a great analogy. We're stealing fire from the gods and giving it to us. AI is fire and this is what we're going to steal, I guess. And so he creates knowledge and civil. But fast forward a little bit. Fast forward a little bit. He gets punished for this. It's not a good ending for Prometheus. He gets punished for stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to humans. How does he get punished? He gets bound to a rock and an eagle, which is the emblem of Zeus, is sent to eat his liver every day. And then it would grow back. Thaler in the chat says everybody want to steal fire from the gods. Don't nobody want to have their liver eaten by an eagle for eternity? That is true. So his liver grows back overnight only to be eaten again the next day in an ongoing cycle. And I was thinking about like, what is the metaphor here? Let's continue to extend the metaphor. Like what is the liver in this metaphor of building big AI projects? And then what is the eagle? Is it possible the eagle is like blue owl is more of an owl Private credit. Maybe blue owl is coming and eating your liver. And the liver is the free cash flow that you had on your balance sheet. Because if you're one of these hyperscalers, you have a lot of free cash flow, but less and less as you sign these big debt deals. And the blue owl comes and eats your free cash flow every day for all of eternity. And eventually, eventually there is a little bit of a reprieve because Hercules comes and breaks the chains of Prometheus and Prometheus is freed and his liver regrows and Hercules slays the eagle. And so I think obviously in this analogy, what did you say? Who would be Hercules in this analogy? Jerome Powell. Jerome Powell who comes in and slays the debt dealers with low interest rates. Right. And so clearly we can see where this metaphor is going. They're all winking. Both, both Zuck and Bezos are winking and saying, hey, hey, come lower interest rates save us because we're about to get our livers eaten with our Promethean startups. Anyway, let's actually dig into what he's doing because it's not just a found. It feels late to get into AI. It feels late to get into foundation modeling and training routes. Big Euro summer.
After the co stewards. That is possible. Maybe it's Andrew Reed. Anyways, the company project Prometheus is coming out of the gates with 6.2 billion in funding, partly from Mr. Bezos, making it one of the most well financed early stage with authority. That is a massive round strong 6 billion out the gate. Let's go. Congratulations. This is the first time Mr. Bezos has taken a formal operational role in a company.