NEWSMAX

You got to do the same thing for your business. Map out your route for 26. When I first saw this, I thought he was saying, like, I will be able to get you directions. And I was like, google Maps can do that. Okay. So when I see this, I just. It's actually a great metaphor. Entrepreneurs can get stuck in a loop of just wanting to meet and talk with people and like, get ideas and. Get strategies and learn. And AI is really good at that. You can say, I have an E commerce company, I want to grow. What should I do? It'll give you a bunch of ideas. And it's like, it just shows how worthless a lot of ideas are and how important execution is. Some ideas are priceless. Right? It's like you want to execute on the right ideas, but oftentimes to find the right ideas, you got to try a bunch of stuff. And so AI is at the point where it can give you the perfect strategy, the perfect playbook, even if it's like kind of the average playbook across business textbooks and blogs and posts and things like that. But in the end, you just still gotta go do the work. That's the hard part. Yeah, I mean, I still think there's like, he is using. He's using a metaphor. I think he's actually a pretty good communicator here. He's using a metaphor that people understand. It's like mapping technology, Google Maps for business, for answering other questions, unstructured questions. AI can tell you that. And if you think about before you Google, okay, well, my business needs a website. How do I set up a website for my business? Okay, I need to go to the store and get a book. Web development for dummies. This was the thing back in the 90s. It was like, java for Dummies, you're gonna build. Now it's like, AI. Obviously, we just talked about this. And so he's right. He's delivering it in this sort of funny way, and he brings this crazy energy to the performance. But he is correct in the pitch in this idea. He's actually correctly pitching super intelligence, personal superintelligence. And for a lot of people, that's exactly what they want. Now, he doesn't really address the fact that, like, you know, there's incredible competition from Anthropic and OpenAI and Google on this front. But that's not what he's. That's not what he's addressing. He's addressing just the idea of, like, is AI useful? And the guy is like, we've dabbled with it. We've used it for answering, you know, like doing subtitling, basically. And I think what's under so Meta. Dana, sort of pitches, like, the next level of, like, what's possible. Meta has something, I think, three, three and a half to four billion monthly active users. And so I think in those board meetings, you have to imagine they're saying, like, yeah, there's a lot of competition. Yeah, ChatGPT has a big user base. Yeah, Gemini has a big user base. But we have 4 billion people that we can start distributing. If we build a great model, we can start distributing it through WhatsApp, through Instagram, through Facebook, through the Meta AI app, et cetera. Yeah, I was listening to Ben Thompson this morning, and he was doing app reviews, like the review of the top paid apps and the top free apps. So the 2025 top paid apps. And this is wild. It's like, have you heard of any of these? I know, Hot Schedules, Shadow Rocket, it seems like. Have you heard of any of these? Procreate? No, because I check the charts a lot. Skyview, I've heard of that. Tonal Energy, Auto Sleep, they're all like a couple dollars. And most people have not really heard of any of these. If they have, they're like, oh, yeah, I use this for this one little thing. Or this is a niche thing. And then you go to the top free apps and it's like, trillion dollar company. Trillion dollar company. Trillion dollar company. It's literally ChatGPT, Threads, Google, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail.

Tools like Cursor. And that was basically our 20, 25 has been how do we both apply AI to this problem? How do we use more traditional or deterministic methods like merge queues and stack PRs and other workflows and tools to make that process more efficient? But how do we just unblock this bottleneck that is now is kind of like preventing teams from really realizing the true potential of tools like cursor? And that's been our mission this entire year. Pretty part of why I think we're so excited for this partnership is that now you can put the surfaces where you write code and where you review and validate and merge it together and just have that seamlessly integrated. You shouldn't have to jump to a different tool for your editor for code review, for your PRs for CI. All this should just be one nicely integrated surface. And that's kind of always been the dream for graphite in our vision. And I think this, now that can become a reality. How are you guys thinking about the integration process and how graphite fits into the sort of cursor platform family? I think a good first step would be like maybe a walkway between the offices in New York. Skyway. Skyway, yeah. We've talked about the little string and. Cups, you know, so you can. Yeah, we'll put a zipline over Broadway so that people can commute back and forth. No, I think that there's some really obvious low hanging fruit of things that you'll see us roll out in the coming months together. And then there's a long tail of even more ambitious ideas that we have that are in the works. But immediately, I remember earlier this year, a few of us on the Graphify team were up in Toronto meeting with Toby and some of the Shopify engineering leaders. And they're one of our biggest customers and close partners. And the biggest ask that they had for us was how do we get context from our ide or from tooling where we're writing code with AI into pull requests and have that be seamless and have the same chat history, have the agent logs and everything show up in the PR and be able to then call out to the agent to fix things again. And we were like, huh, that's an interesting problem. Maybe we should think about working with Cursor on this. And I think that's kind of the most obvious thing that we can do to start with. And then we can build from there on many of the other ways that we can kind of connect all those surfaces together and have the agent be able to help you all the way through from the moment that you generate the code to the moment that it's merged in and out to production. Yeah, I'd second that. There are going to be a bunch of opportunities for some quick ways in which we can make the experience of working together in graphite and cursor better. But then the big thing will be going heads down on a much bigger build together where we'll have more to share late in 2026. Michael, I'd love to get an update on how you're thinking about just growth opportunities as segmented by sort of like scale of the customer. We've read some the models are great, the tech is amazing. There's still some odd resistance to adopting AI in certain enterprises. We're not at 100% penetration with these tools. Is there more opportunity in term in large enterprises and transforming the way those businesses work? Or is it just the ground game of going getting every SMB online? Like how are you thinking about growth in 2026, 2027? We've been shocked by the demand across the board and so on the mid market and smaller company side of things and the self serve side of things broadly, there are all these rules of thumbnail.

I feel like there's these top Frontier labs and then there are these open source model labs. And I feel like the Frontier labs, they kind of are all neck and neck. I would say Gemini has an edge right now because of this kind of co optimization of TP with the Gemini model. So they're kind of pushing this preto optimal curve of capability versus cost, and I think they have an edge there. But to some extent on the algorithmic side, you know, everyone kind of comes up with the same ideas roughly around the same time. And maybe to some extent, people talk to each other, and there's that part too.

And so you're going to be able to really. You could put a gong on the hood of a Ford gt, John. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly what I want, actually. Exactly, exactly. And this is actually like, you can go beyond just like cosmetic stuff you can start putting functional because the shape of the hood is not never going to really change the bulk shape of it. But you know, from model to model, you start having more features, more little designs in there that you can kind of modify with our technology. And it only takes a few minutes. Right, so you get the throughput as well. But speaking of gong, I think we also formed a gong for you guys as well in the morning. Look at this. No way. We just finished it now. No way, no way. So we're going to do a little hitting of a gong for you guys here. Amazing Roboform gong. Insane. Wow. Wow. This is a moment we've been waiting for. What a way to cap off the year. Thank you so much. That is insane. Well, congratulations on all the massive progress. Is there anything else you'd like to share? Are you hiring anything else that we haven't touched on that might be worth mentioning? Yeah, no, we're growing. In the next two years we're going to go from 70, 80 people that we are right now to 240, 250 people. New location in another state. So anybody who's excited about manufacturing, about reshoring, helping other allies have distributed manufacturing, we're looking for them. And yeah, now we have exciting announcement in January as well, so stay tuned. Looking forward to having you back on then. And feel free to come by in person if you can. Yeah, yeah, that'd be great for the announcement. Oh, that would be great. That's incredible. Well, congrats to the whole team on a crazy year. Seeing it all in real life here is incredible. Yeah, it's wild. Awesome. Thanks, guys. Awesome. Have a great one. Goodbye. Eightsleep.com, exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper and wake up energized. Charlamagne signed a five year deal, $200 million extension with iHeartMedia locking him in with the company after it struck a deal with Netflix to stream the Breakfast Club. Interesting. Forbes is writing a story here. IHeartMedia is paying Charlamagne 200. They say, hey, iHeartMedia, we have a deal with Netflix. We can't lose Charlemagne because the Breakfast Club has already been sold to Netflix. We gotta have Charlemagne hosted because he's the talent. That's what's going on there, I believe. Very cool. The article in Forbes is called How Charlemagne Became a Media God. I love it because of course, he's Charlemagne the God. On a chilly night in November, radio personality Charlemagne the God is roaming through the aisles of Midtown Comics in New York City, captivated by the heroes and villains that shaped his childhood escapism. At the highest level, he says, everybody's here for a purpose. Dressed in a black pea coat, a white hoodie, black jeans and tan Timberland boots, this isn't the media vigilante that listeners of the Breakfast Club have come to expect over the past 15 years. The 47 year old comic book nerd. Leafing through original graphic novels of Batman, Superman, Wolverine, and one of his favorites, Luke Cage is more subdued and introspective as he considers his public and private Personas. So congratulations to Charlamagne. I think we got to ring the gong for him. That's fantastic news. Great stuff, great stuff. This, this Santa suit is falling apart. I'm going to have to take it off at some point. I'm sure you're itching to get out of that and reveal the entire head to toe supreme outfit that you are wearing underneath. Chrome hearts. The chrome hearts. Anyway, wander.com, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. There's a robot that is solving Rubik's cubes in 0.1 seconds. That is so fast. Look at this, look at this. You can't even. Oh, it's in the slow mo camera. Okay, watch this. And it's off. That's so crazy. That's insane. Think about that. Look. This is a super, super slow mo view. Super slow mo view. Super super duper slow point. Wow, it's doing. This is so fast. Wow, it's really doing it. I can do a Rubik's Cube in around one minute. Can you do one? How fast can you do it? Let's cut to Tyler, my best ever. When I was like, you can do it. It was like 20 seconds. 20 seconds? Yeah. You were a speedcuber. Nerd alert. Nerd alert. Nerd alert. The no look. Is that really. Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's got it. He's got it. He's got it. I used to be much better. I used to be much better. Yeah. That is fantastic. Well, you're out of a job because robots can do the Rubik's cube now in 0.1 seconds. Takes you 20, takes me a minute. Takes Jordy an hour. The robot's gonna kill us all because it can do it in 0.1 seconds. If your job was doing Rubik's Cubes, find another job, because you're done. You're cooked. You're cooked. You're chopped and you're cooked. Yes. Well, Ramp is throwing a funeral for the penny in. In Washington D.C. this Saturday, and you should go check it out. There's a part of a link. If you're in Washington, D.C. head on down to the In Ramp We Trust. Funeral for the penny. This is how. You want to hear something funny? This is how I learned that the penny is being retired. Yeah, this is news to me. This is news to me. That news didn't break through until Ramp was throwing a party. I'm not kidding about that. This is how I learned. And actually, the guy who's working on this, Rohan, told me in person. I was like, oh, okay, so the penny's going away. Thank you for the service, Ramp, for telling everyone that the penny's going away. We needed to know. We needed to know. We also needed to know about adquick.com out of home advertising made easy and measurable Plan. Buy and measure out of home with precision. Did you want to talk about watches, Jordi? I did. I did not know that Osama bin Laden was a Casio guy. A Casio guy. Apparently, Bass couldn't get the rm. Bass has a watch as well. Watch drop is cool. I like a watch drop. We like a watch drop. We did a watch drop for Excel. We did a watch drop for Excel. Remember? They're still floating out there. A lot of people received the briefcase. We did it. We did a. We did a one off drop for this nicotine pouch. Sub brand nicotine pouches for Finance Bros. Effectively, a pouch designed to increase shareholder value. We call it Excel nicotine pouches. And in there, we had some products. We had a briefcase with a logo on a silver briefcase and in. And we had a big tin. And a lot of people didn't realize that if you opened it up inside. There'S a custom watch and more tins. And more tins in there. Oh, maybe. Yeah, yeah. Wasn't. Oh, I think there were six. There were six tins around the outside. Right, right. And then you opened it up and you got the watch and there was the briefcase. And there were a few other things that we had that we prototyped out, but it was. It was like the first drop that we worked on. It inspired more drops. But this is a great drop. A watch is a great drop. Bill Ackman strikes $2.1 billion deal for insurer in bid to build the modern Berkshire Hathaway. Has anybody bid to build. Bid to build the modern Berkshire Hathaway and come out unscathed? I don't know. The answer would be Apollo, actually. Well, yeah, no, I'm not saying. I'm not saying is a bad strategy. I'm just saying I don't know that Apollo said we're building. This is cursor for X again. I'm doing Berkshire Hathaway for 2025. And maybe you need a different path, but Bill Ackman's a great investor. He probably knows something if he's willing to part with 2.1 billion for an insurer. Let's see what else is in the. Timeline before we head out. This is interesting. Apparently there's opportunities. Mike Lee is saying, would you like to seize cartel assets as a privateer? This is a big opportunity for Phil. Would allow the president to issue you a letter of marque. Time to take these pirates down. We did talk about. Did we create this? We did say at the beginning of the year we were highlighting the reward for Maduro. Yes. Very early. Yes. Before this whole Venezuela saga really kicked off. It definitely ramped up from the time we talked about the fact that the State Department was interested in him, bringing him in for questioning. What a wild year for Nicolas Maduro. Anyway, Matthew Zeitlin says the fog. And he's posting a screenshot of a push notification from the New York Times which asks the question, where did the sun go? An unrelenting fog has parked in the Central valley for weeks. Here's when it will finally loosen its grip. The fog. There's a lot of conspiracy theorists about fog that really. Do they think Augustus is responsible about the great fog? Oh, really? I know the fog had a Twitter account for a while. There was a guy who was posting as if he was the fog because the fog is very. Did you see this game unrecord? No. It's a body cam first person shooter. Wait a minute. If we pull this up, I believe I have seen this. Remarkable. Also, I believe this is not AI generated video. This is just incredible Unreal Engine footage. This looks so real. I don't believe it's crazy, but I think this is actually real. Now. I believe. I thought this game went into beta and I thought people were playing this. And I believe that even though it's remarkably realistic, looks so real. It's like you look at that and you're like, oh, this looks like the Best game ever. This. This looks way better than Call of Duty. In fact, the modern gamer, and really you or me, you don't actually want this level of realism because it makes the game really hard. It makes the game a lot less fun. Some people do, certainly some people want Milsims, but a lot of people actually do just want Fortnite. They want great mechanics and then they're willing to suspend belief and say, hey, I'm gonna play something that's a little cartoony. As long as the mechanics work. Yeah. I just think it's. From the developer standpoint, it's smart as counter positioning. When you think of the modern Fortnite. Oh, totally. Uav, you've got crosshairs, you've got drummer boys. Drummer boys. You've got reindeer, you've got Santa slice, unrecorded. If anyone has played this game, please drop a review in the chat. I would love to know if it's actually good. The. Apparently they got funding from Tencent and it's going into full production. So this was a little trailer that they put together. And this might have been rendered out in Unreal Engine, but at a higher level of fidelity. Maybe they did post processing. There's a variety of things that you can do, but it is remarkable. I feel like really quickly, I feel like there is a massive opportunity to bake one of these generative AI models that just does the transformations. You remember we talked to that AI video company where the founder came on and transformed his image. That was Descartes. And so the founder of Descartes came on the show and live in his webcam was using Gen AI to turn the background in his face into like a wizard's lair. Right? Think about how powerful Gen AI would be if it ran at 120 frames per second, 60 frames a second, and its whole goal was just to take Call of Duty and turn it into this level of fidelity or a little bit higher or something, you know, really, really photo real. That level of. I mean, Nvidia graphics cards already have DLSS, Deep Learning Super Sampling, which takes a 1080p video game and up ress it to 4K. And it's trained. It's beautiful. You have all the training data because you can just run the game in 4K, run it in 720p and then just design the algorithm that just matches the two together. So it's like super easy. It's not some like unbounded AI problem. And so I'm very interested in when Nvidia. Maybe Nvidia does it maybe the PlayStation 5 does it, maybe some gaming company does it, but they say, hey, our game is running in unreal engine at 720p and it looks like Roblox under the hood, but you turn this switch on and you're playing something that looks like this. That seems like a really interesting opportunity to me. Anyway, sorry. We can move on to what it is. Call of Duty is headed towards Fortnite and these games never rip. It's really just Unreal Engine marketing. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like it's very hard to get this across the finish line, get this out into the world. Meanwhile, back to more important things, including software as a service. Christina, the COO over at linear says, someone asked me what good back channeling looks like, and I personally thought this was a good phrasing. When Dylan Field interviewed Christina, he said, I've talked to people you've worked with and heard your intents. Christina says, that opened up a real conversation about what they likely meant when that. When that intensity shows up and how I think about it myself. Very. Yeah, just kind of a good framework to like, kick off a conversation and not kind of dance around, like, you know, not dance around the back channeling and just be super direct and actually start a conversation around it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, we have to do this story, but it's really late. We can't go into it. But we actually talked about this because we saw this guy as LA's richest man. He went from billions to busts because of Global Crossing. We talked about this because his house hit the Mansion section. Well, the Wall Street Journal has a fantastic deep dive on his career and life, and we will have to go through it at some point in time. JIRA Tickets was reacting to OpenAI now aiming to raise 100 billion at an $830 billion valuation. And JT says, wow, number just dropped. Congrats on the new number. Looks like it's bigger than the old number. That's good. Can't wait to see the next number. I love the number business. That's really true. Good bit, I guess. I guess reality is all life is a number business. Yeah, it's all about just make it. Make it go up forever. This is a good way to, I would say, wrap the year. This might be the post of the year. Shrek hits a timeline to say some important words. Check yourself before you Shrek yourself. You were just laughing to yourself before the show and I asked you what were you reading? And you said, well, Shrek said, check yourself before you Shrek yourself. It's fantastic. Well, it's been a fantastic year, everyone. Thank you so much for all the support. Thank you for watching TVPN and engaging with us in, in all different ways. We really appreciate you and hope you have a fantastic holiday season. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. We will be back on, I believe, January 4th, the first Monday of the new year, maybe 5th. 5th. And so in the meantime, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you haven't, and we will see you in 2026. I can't believe. I can't believe this is the last show of the year. What a year. Wow. Thank you, everyone. Totally surreal. Surreal. And it's an honor. It's an honor to build this show with the team and with all of you in the audience. Gabe says one last gong. One last gong. One last gong for 2025. What a year. You pull up your pants. He's got sweats on underneath. Don't worry. One last gong. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Merry Christmas. And we will see you in 2026 here, folks. We love you. Goodbye. Have a fantastic New Year's and all those holidays. Goodbye. Enjoy. Merry Christmas.

Projections interesting. And then when you look at. So you said Tesla and core weave. So to go on the core weave point, I think just like the way that space and compute has been like what's called calculated and the cost of compute has been calculated needs a complete overhaul. So like I. So someone else did dollars per watts of power, I did dollars per compute. But, but I think the best way is dollars per GPU hour with sla. So like service level agreements. So a lot of it is just like taking into account the capex or whatever, but it should take into account capex hardware amortization, replacement rates, maintenance rates, opex and all these kinds of factors. So like you can think of power as like if you're a car factory, power is how much you expect the throughput of steel to be. And then the compute is like how much you expect, like how much cars you expect to come and the cost per that. But what the best measure is is the lifetime of a car, seeing the OPEX of that, the maintenance of that, the gas cost of that over its entire lifetime. Right. And that's the best way to model these things. And I'm going to come out with a white paper about this, but this is like really important and not enough people are talking about this at all. And on Tesla, yes, it's really hard to imagine.

Led by Sequoia. There you go. And explain Sequoia for. That's great. How pleased are you with AI progress this year? You've been in the industry and basically seen it all at this point. Did you think we'd be farther along? Do you agree with the conception that we're in an age of research that there will be sort of a play plateauing of the current models or maybe more smaller models or more fine tuned models? Like how are you seeing just the overall model wars playing out? I guess actually my co founder Azalia had a very interesting report about the state of models and the niche that there is for small models. I would recommend you guys checking it out. Sounds good. I guess from my perspective I feel there's these top frontier labs and then there are these open source like model labs and I feel like the frontier labs they kind of are all neck and neck. I would say Gemini has an edge right now because of this kind of co optimization of TP with the Gemini model. So they're kind of pushing this preto optimal curve of capability versus cost and I think they have an edge there. But to some extent on the algorithmic side, you know they all. Everyone kind of comes up with the same ideas roughly around the same time and maybe to some extent people talk to each other and there's that part too. Whereas I think that hardware is a real edge here. So I think the labs that have like hardware co optimized with their models are going to win in the long term. But maybe I'm biased. No, I mean that's fair. I mean otherwise why build the company vertically? I think it's a fantastic thesis, the vertical integration story at Google making.

I want to say thank you so much for having me on here and what a group of handsome young men we have here today. Space data centers. Well, I mean, you're looking at. Tyler here is the youngest and the most handsome, so he's off camera, but he's here. Look at him, look at him, look at him. Look at our. Look at our little. Wow. He still has the Gigachad filter on. That's crazy. It's a little more subtle, but definitely filtered. Definitely still on. Yeah. Anyway. Space data centers, yes. Fundamentally, if you're betting against space data centers, you're betting against compute to grow. So we're constrained on Earth by land, water and power, and our human minds haven't evolved to understand just how much space there is in space. So as you look at these things, like these, Google and Microsoft, for example, have. Have hundreds of millions of dollars of GPUs just like sitting around and collecting dust. And this is probably surprising to some people not in the energy industry, which is my background. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. So you're saying they have hundreds of millions of dollars of GPUs sitting around because they can't get enough power for them? Yeah. Wow. Okay, continue. Yeah, and there's so much cost involved in that. Right? Like the GPUs might get old and they have to get new GPUs, and. And there's so much risk that a lot of these models haven't factored in, and even mine hasn't factored in yet. So there has been a little competition, you know, a little model that came out and making. It's the model wars, the space data center model wars. I'm making a pretty big update to my model today, and one of my idols is going to share it around and we'll hope that a certain someone gets to see it. Take a wild guess on who that is. Yes, yes, yes, yes. You were very prolific with your tagging. It was a good strategy. Oh, there's a few more points. There's a few more things I want to spice up there, but we'll get to that later. So my background is in energy, and a lot of people not in energy probably don't know this, but everybody projects the cost to rise and only rise. And as we have more data centers, we run into more constraints with the ground, like again, land talent, because you need to put talent in all these different places instead of creating these factories and just shooting them up to space and then power and then water. Right. There's only such a limited amount of that that we can have on Earth, and we have so much more ability to do that on space. So if you don't believe that there's going to be, like, an AI revolution, if you don't believe that compute is going to grow exponentially, you. You don't believe in, like. Yeah. So I guess part of the debate that's important is I haven't seen anyone that says we will never have.

That they designed and then interpret that and understand the code that they write, how it feeds into the result. Are there any areas of research or less obvious, like it's not just a coding model research paths that you're particularly excited about in 2026? Yeah, I think that the capability gains we've seen in our space have actually there's been like a lot of details to figure out, but there have been a few really big ideas that have worked just like have been levers that people have pulled on continuously. Sure. And so pre training is one that's been talked about a lot. You know, like taking models, scaling them up, training them on Internet scale data. Another big one that's been really important for our space is curating a set of games for the models to play. So for us that means know, collecting a set of, or you know, in our space that means collecting a set of code bases, writing out tasks, having a set of tests to test if the model actually solved a task when it writes a pr. And the big AI companies have, have done this really well of getting thousands, tens of thousands of, of really hard games for the model to play and then teaching the model to play those games. And in turn the model then gets better at programming. And so I think that there's a bunch more juice to squeeze both from pre training and then you know, RL with this verifiable reward. But I think that there's going to be, you know, some new big ideas that are needed to really get to a place where you can can hand off end to end most of the professional development tasks you do in like a real. Does that make you, does that make you especially excited about some of the NEO labs that are, that are, I would say.

Japan to set up a facility matter two months to start making USVs UAVs as opposed to making them in a central location and shipping them. We talked to a couple folks that have different ways to make parts from additive subtractive manufacturing. We talked to 3D printing, metal, 3D printing companies. How are you thinking about positioning the product as flexible for R and D use cases? You want to do a few small runs, very niche, versus actually scaling up to something like, okay, we're making the shell of a cybertruck, that's obviously stamped. That's a very different requirement. When you're talking about tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of a particular shape of metal. How are you managing that transition? I think you want to think about kind of manufacturing in two different paradigms. There is a traditional paradigm where you have an assembly line, you make the same thing over and over again. And what we're thinking is actually closer to how data centers operates, right. You have these systems that actually end up becoming pretty cheap, right? That we are. We are making these things to become very much commoditized hardware, off the shelf hardware so they can easy to finance. But the way you get throughput out of these is that you replicate them horizontally. You set up a facility that can have 50 to 100 of these and manufacture in parallel, as opposed to one assembly line that makes the same thing over and over again. In our next facility, we're deploying 50 of these. Right. And that allows us to get like, you know, defense articles up to a few thousand a year. Right. Obviously not a good fit for making like a million of the same Toyota Tacoma. But when we were talking about few thousands, which is all aerospace, all defense, all heavy equipment and machinery, this is a good choice, right? But yes, you want to go to millions of parts a year, then we might want to start thinking about the traditional paradigm. But that's also something that we are actually exploring with Toyota now because we can combine this paradigm with traditional manufacturing to get the benefit.

Who is posting as if he was the fog, because the fog is very. Did you see this game unrecord? No. It's a body cam, first person shooter. Wait a minute. If we pull this up, I believe I have seen this. Remarkable. Also not. I believe this is not AI generated video. This is just incredible Unreal Engine footage. This looks so real. I don't believe. It's crazy, but I think this is actually real. Now I believe. I thought this game went into beta and I thought people were playing this. And I believe that even though it's remarkably realistic, looks so real. It's like you look at that and you're like, oh, this looks like the best game ever. This looks way better than Call of Duty. In fact, the modern gamer. And really you or me, you don't actually want this level of realism because it makes the game really hard. It makes the game a lot less fun. Like some people do. Certainly some people want Milsims, but a lot of people actually do just want Fortnite. They want great mechanics, and then they're willing to suspend belief and say, hey, we're, you know, I'm gonna play something that's a little cartoony. As long as the mechanics work. Yeah. I just think it's. From the developer standpoint, it's smart as counter positioning. When you think of the modern Fortnite. Call of Duty. Oh, totally. Uav, you've got crosshairs, you've got drummer boys, Drummer boys. You've got reindeer, you've got Santa. Sly Unrecords. If anyone has played this game, please drop a review in the chat. I would love to know if it's actually good. Apparently they got funding from Tencent and it's going into full production. And so this was a little trailer that they put together. And this might have been rendered out in Unreal Engine, but at a higher level of fidelity. Maybe they did post processing. There's a variety of things that you can do, but it is remarkable. I feel like really quickly, I feel like there is a massive opportunity to bake one of these generative AI models that just does the transformations. You remember we talked to that AI video company where the founder came on and transformed his image. That was Descartes. And so the founder of Descartes came on the show and live in his webcam, was using Genai to turn the background in his face into like a wizard's lair. Right. Think about how powerful Gen AI would be if it ran at 120 frames per second, 60 frames a second, and its whole goal was just to take Call of Duty and turn it into this level of fidelity or a little bit higher or something really, really photo real. That level of. I mean, Nvidia graphics cards already have DLSS. Deep Learning Super Sampling, which takes a 1080p video game and up ress it to 4K. And it's trained. It's beautiful. You have all the training data because you can just run the game in 4K, run it in 720p, and then just design the algorithm that just matches the two together. So it's like super easy. It's not some unbounded AI problem. And so I'm very interested in when Nvidia. Maybe Nvidia does it, maybe the PlayStation 5 does it, maybe some gaming company does it. But they say, hey, our game is running in unreal engine at 720p and it looks like Roblox under the hood, but you turn this switch on and you're playing something that looks like this. That seems like a really interesting opportunity to me. Anyway, sorry. We can move on to what it says. Call of Duty is headed towards Fortnite and these games never rip. It's really just Unreal Engine marketing. Yeah, yeah. It seems like it's very hard to get this across the finish line, get this out into the world. Meanwhile, back to more important things, including software engineering.

Storage fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Anthropic reveal. This is really good. So yesterday we talked about the Wall Street Journal letting Anthropic run their snack kitchen. It was going wild. It was buying PS5s for people. It was buying live fish. It was giving away everything for free. If you want to read the full. Report, Joanna Stern really crushed it when they said they were making all the snacks free. My first thought was coming from tech. I'm like, what? The snacks weren't free? You were charging in the Wall Street Journal. Oh, that is funny. These hard working journalists, you're charging them for snacks in the company's snack kitchen? I think so. We know some of the fine folks over there. No boondoggles or no free lunches. There's no such thing as a free snack kitchen. Apparently no such thing. Joe says. Anthropic says. And there was still the occasional blunder. One waggish employee asked if Claudius would make a contract to buy a large amount of onions in January for a price locked in. Now, the AI was keen until someone pointed out this would fall afoul of the US Onion Futures act of 1958. Apparently, you can't trade onion futures. It's hilarious. I wonder if prediction markets will solve that. I wonder if you'll be able to do this. And Joe Eisenthal quotes and says Anthropic reveals that in one of its experiments, its model was willing to engage in a federal crime. I had no idea about this. Yeah. So in most places, including the U.S. you cannot trade onion futures. Don't do it, folks. Don't even think about it. Don't even think about it. In fact, onion futures are one of the are the only agricultural commodity in the US that is specifically banned from. Futures trading for good reason. It's so obvious. Everyone understands why. Onion futures trading. Yeah. The great onion scandal of 1955. The reason for this ban is one of the most famous stories in finance history. In the mid-1950s, two traders, Samuel Siegel and Vincent Kosuga, successfully cornered the onion market on the CME. The scheme. They bought up to 98% of all the onions in Chicago. Absolute dogs. Absolute dogs. Okay, so they're banning being an absolute dog. Wow. Yeah. They're making it illegal to have that dog in you. Yeah. You can't even trade onions with your boys anymore. Imagine the boys. Group chat. Yo. We figured out how to corner the market. So this is. This came the squeeze. They forced other traders and growers to buy onions from them at inflated prices by threatening to flood the market. Yes. That's crazy. The crash. After selling their physical onions, they took a. They took massive short positions, betting the price would go down, and then dumped their entire inventory. Wow. The result was the price of a 50 pound bag of onions plummeted from $2.75 to just 10 cents. At that point, the mesh bags the onions were in were worth more than the onions themselves. And so, of course, that created the Onion Futures Act. And outraged farmers started lobbying Congress, leading to the Onion Futures act signed by President Eisenhower. It made trading onion futures illegal in the US to prevent similar manipulation. What do you think it is about onions that makes it so that this is. Doable? Doable? There has to be some sort of, like.

You can predict how their next year will go, you know, and this is like a longer scale, so it's hard to predict the next few years. But over the next decades, there will be hundreds of gigawatts in space. I am sure of that. And like, we will. We will clip this. You will either. You will either look like the super genius and be immediately hired by Elon, or you'll be probably already. No, no, there's some. There's some middle ground, I guess. One question is who? Sorry, go. Go for it. For some context, there's like 20, like, over 2,000 gigawatts sitting in the interconnection queue right now. And that's like, almost two times the entire US Grid capacity, like, just waiting for paperwork. I mean, the biggest threat to AI is really, like, a guy named Doug at the county permitting office who hasn't been there in three weeks. And space isn't constrained in that way. The permitting thing is crazy. I mean, it is much easier to sort of do business in space.

Concentrate on a single goal. I'm telling you, it's entirely a comms issue. So Mark Chen is on the record here. He says we do this when we want to have this focusing effort on one particular topic. Mark, there's a phrase for this that doesn't turn into a negative press cycle. It's called a lock in. You just tell everyone, we're locked in. Time for the great lock in. Time for the great lock in. And if you say OpenAI declares it's time for the great lock in, that's exciting. Everyone's excited. They're gonna rally around that. Everyone is gonna go through the roof and just be like, this is so bullish. This is so bullish. It's so bullish because you can be at the top of your game, and if you declare a great lock in, everyone's just like, oh, no, it's gonna be even better. They're gonna go even harder. But if you declare it's Code Red and you're at the top, OpenAI's they're literally at the top of the app charts. They're, like, the best, right? Like, they're on so many things that are at the top of the benchmark. Everything's going very well for this company. But when they declare Code Red and it leaks, then it makes you feel like, o not going so well. If you declare a great lock in, you're good to go. The latest Code Red came two weeks after Alphabet Inc's Google.

Shrek said, check yourself before you Shrek yourself. That's fantastic. Well, it's been a fantastic year, everyone. Thank you so much for all the support. Thank you for watching TVPN and engaging with us in all different ways. We really appreciate you and hope you have a fantastic holiday season. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. We will be back on, I believe, January 4th, the first Monday of the new year, maybe 5th. 5th. And so in the meantime, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you haven't, and we will see you in 2026. I can't believe. I can't believe this is the last show of the year. What a year. Wow. Thank you, everyone. Totally surreal. Surreal. And it's an honor. It's an honor to build this show with the team and with all of you and in the audience. Gabe says one last gong. One last gong. One last gong for 2025. What a year. You pull up your pants. He's got sweats on underneath. Don't worry. One last gong. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. Merry Christmas. And we will see. You in 2026. Happy New Year, folks. We love you. Goodbye. Have a fantastic New Year's and all those holidays. Goodbye. Enjoy. Merry Christmas.

You watching? TVPN is Friday, December 19, 2023. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. We have maxed out the amount of Christmas that is possible in the TVP and ultradome. We are of course live from the TVP ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. I don't know if we're going to make it through the show in this costume. I don't know. I'm going to be honest up front. Everyone, we appreciate you. We're very thankful this holiday. But this is a lot for a three hour broadcast about technology and business. And also we have some very serious people coming on the show today. Michael True, the founder of Cursor. Isn't it like a $30 billion company? He's coming on the show feels a little disrespectful. They just acquired our sponsor Graphite. Graphite. It's very exciting, honestly. It is a fantastic partnership. Makes a lot of sense. We're going to have both founders on the show, breaking the deal down, giving us an update on Cursor's business and Graphite's business and how they fit together. The meme is we're generating so much code. What's the bottleneck, John? Reviewing it. Reviewing it. That's right, Graphite. And the other bottleneck, of course, is dealing with your finances. So head over to ramp.com this holiday season. Time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill payment accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. I want to take this off, but also I feel like it looks really good. I'm really into this. My thing is I need to figure out how to get these monitor. If we play a video. Jordy can't hear it right now. Also, this delicious Diet Coke right here. I can't partake because I have this massive beard. Your beard looks much wilder than. Well, it's because I have. It's because I have. What's going on with. Because I actually have. I have hair up here. You see this? Oh, yeah, you have. Oh, you got a hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a whole wig. Mine's pure beard. His somehow the dual set. Anyways. Okay, so folks, the lesson this week is that we started Christmas on Monday. We started really strong. We talked about how certain advertisers, including Amazon, got into the holiday season a little too quickly. Yeah. Little did we know, backfire on them. Little did we know we maybe did the same thing. We did the exact same thing. But it has been a very fun week and we're excited to finish strong. It's really. It's really so good. This. This is. This might be more entertaining than our.

Sa. World. To reach the stars. We came to this world. To keep up here, To shape our future. Reaching to feel the new. Merry christmas. Uav online. You're watching DVBS. It's Friday, December 19, 2020. Merry Christmas. We have maxed out the amount of Christmas that is possible in the TVPN UltraDome. We are of course live from the TVP and UltraDome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. I don't know if we're going to make it through the show in this costume. I don't know. I'm going to be honest up front. Everyone, we appreciate you. We're very thankful this holiday. But this is a lot for a three hour broadcast about technology and business. And also we have some very serious people coming on the show today. Michael True, the founder of Cursor. Isn't it like a $30 billion company? He's coming on the show. Feels a little disrespectful. They just acquired our sponsor, Graphite. Graphite. It's very exciting. Honestly. It is a fantastic partnership. Makes a lot of sense. We're going to have both founders on the show, breaking the deal down, giving us an update on Cursor's business and Graphite's business and how they fit together. The meme is we're generating so much code. What's the bottleneck, John? Reviewing. Reviewing it. That's right, Graphite. And the other bottleneck, of course, is dealing with your finances. So head over to ramp.com this holiday season. Time is money save. Both easy use corporate cards, bill payment accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. I want to take this off, but also I feel like it looks really good. I'm really into this. My thing is I need to figure out how to get these monitor if. We play a video. Jordy can't hear it right now. Also, this delicious diet Coke right here. I can't partake because I have this massive beard. Your beard looks much wilder than. Well, it's because I have. It's because I have. What's going on with. Because I actually have. I have hair up here. You see this? Oh, yeah, you have. Oh, you got a hair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a whole wig. Mine's pure beard. His somehow the dual set. Anyways. Okay, so folks, the lesson this week is that we started Christmas on Monday and it was really. We started really strong. We talked about how certain advertisers, including Amazon, got into the holiday season a little too quickly. Yeah. Little did we know, backfire on them. Little did we know we maybe did the same thing. We did the exact same thing. But it has been a very fun week and we're excited to finish drawing. It's really, it's really so good. This, this is, this might be more entertaining than our, than our Halloween episode. Just because there's like Halloween. There was nothing else in the ultra dome that was Halloween themed. It's not like we had pumpkins and like, you know, Ilya Sutskever, like accoutrement or anything around us. It was really just us. But the Christmas spirit has been building and building and building and I, I honestly have zero regrets. I have zero regrets. It is ridiculous. It's over the top. Just like Julius. AI is ridiculous and over the top. As far as AI data analysts go, Julius is the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius, connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds. Yeah, we might take some of this off. This is back to. Anyway, thank you. We just wanted to say thank you to everyone for an amazing year. What a wild ride. So at the beginning of the year. This show, Remember last year, didn't we do like a Christmas Eve episode? I think so. We just weren't willing to stop. Yeah, no, it was a really intense schedule. But we weren't live, we didn't have guests, we didn't travel for the show. We had this whole, I have Santa here all over me. Yeah, we had this whole thesis that like what was missing was actually just two people hanging out, having a conversation. And there actually were a lot of interview shows that were doing a great job. Of course that all plan played out way differently. We have the numbers. We actually did 225 live streams this year. Thank you to so many of you in the chat that I know were actually watching. For all 225 of those, there's a lot of you. We recognize you all, we know, we've learned all of your names. It's been fantastic hanging out here with you every day, chatting across those 225 live streams. We interviewed 912 unique guests and we're also doing another five today I think. So we're, we're still adding to that, but we almost hit 1,000 guests. We said, oh, we're doing 1,000 guests this year at a certain point. Some have come on a lot, some guests have come along. We know the record holder for this year, Delian aspar. Uhoh. With 18 guest appearances. We've done 12, 19 interviews and 8554 posts on X. So I mean, just every day. 10 posts, basically. 20 posts. 30 posts. A lot. Joe Weisenthal and Senra are tied for number two, both at nine. Wow. They're power law here. Yeah. Well, we can pit them against each other next year and say, you don't want to. Do you want to be? Do you want to? You should go for number one. I'm surprised Gliman's not up there. I mean, there's been a few times where I called Gliman. I don't know if that counts because he's not on the lineup. I just call him on the phone. But obviously, thank you to Ramp. You've heard the ad read every day at the top of the show. But this show would not be possible without Ramp. They took a huge gamble on us when the show was really, really small. They said, hey, we're down to sponsor this show for the whole year. And of course, adquick and public. So many Ronder and the others that came in incredibly early and allowed us to scale into the production that it is today. Yeah, yeah. So you'll be hearing, of course, from all of our sponsors throughout the show, and we really could not do the show without them. So thank you to all of them. Interesting. The first guest ever was Ryan Peterson. He took a wild, sort of a wild move, just jumping on a live stream with us. We'd never done a guest ever, and it was live. It was very odd. We could talk about anything, but he was totally down to just hop on. And it was a lot of fun. And he ended up coming on a lot this year because of how much chaos there was in global trade. Yeah. So that was a lot of fun. Gary Tan hooked us up with the ability to stream from YC Demo Day, the palace of party rounds. That was a super, super cool moment. And I just remember getting texts from people when we first went live, so we'd never taken the show on the road. And then Gary said, hey, why don't you go do the show from YC Demo day? And we did. We set up our table, the sports center, the step, and repeat. And we brought this, like, insane energy. It was a really loud room, which was actually a feature because we were screaming the whole time. It was crazy. And I got so many text messages like, are you guys live streaming demo day? This is crazy. Yeah, that was our NFL Com. And of course, FIGMA was our first Super Bowl. Exactly. So we got to go to the New York Stock Exchange for the FIGMA ipo. And again, you know, huge, huge gamble for Dylan to let us hang out. Everyone there we got. And I feel like we landed on a very unique product. Interviewing basically the whole board of directors on IPO day, less focused on price action, more focused on the story, which was crazy. Of course. Crazy. The stock was up, stock was down. It was a fantastic day. And honestly, if we'd been like, we're all making money, it's, you know, that might have been a different thing, that might have been better, but it wasn't us. And so we stayed focused on. Yeah, it was not. It wasn't for, you know, a retail investor that wanted to trade the stock. No. Was for people that had used and loved Figma. And that was the energy that years. That was the energy that we were feeling in the timeline. Like a lot of people on the timeline were like, I've used Figma when I built my company. I use it every day across multiple. Jobs, across multiple companies. Totally, totally. And I think that's something we always wanted to come back to is like the posters that make the show possible, the timeline. This show is unique in that. That is very much our backbone. Obviously we read the Wall Street Journal, we read a lot of the news. But for some of the funny moments, some of the funniest moments, some of the most interesting folks we've had on the show, some of the anons that have come on has just really allowed us to wind up in a different place. Before we move on, let me tell you about restream one livestream. 30 plus destinations. Got to say thanks to them. The show seriously would not be possible without Restream. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com so I was looking back. At some of the original love that we got from different people. I remember Balogy texted you super early on and said great set and production value. Jackson texted one of us, the same Jackson Dahl. Jackson Dahl. Very early and so many others. And yeah, we thank everyone for supporting us. Early. Sunburned Feed me helped us throw an after party after the Figma ipo. That was a lot of fun. I think it was the first time I met Joe Wiesenthal in person at that party. Then we wound up going on his show. He came on our show a ton. That was a lot of fun. Obviously thank you to all the sponsors and also thank you to the media that makes the show possible with the fact finding. They find, yeah, I think early on people wanted us to have this sort of adversarial relationship. Adversarial relationship with the media. But at the end of the day. It's incredibly symbiotic. Media does analysis factor finding all different sorts we incorporated into the show. And the show wouldn't be possible without that. And a lot of the profiles, I mean, from the very early days, we were reading like a New Yorker profile of Mary Meeker and that gives you like a certain flavor of what tech was like at that time. And you know, without the legacy media, the traditional media, the corporate media, the new media, the legacy new media, the neo legacy media, without all of them, we couldn't do what we do. And then of course, thank you to the team, the massive, fantastic team here at tvpn. We have had a fantastic year with them. They've grown absolute legends. Everyone's figured out ways to improve the show. Every little thing that you see on this show, across the Internet, across everywhere where we exist is due to someone on our team being inventive, coming up with a strategy for how that happens, then implementing it and then executing it every single day like clockwork with extreme. And it's a performance. Everything that you know, as we're sitting here hanging out talking, they are doing an incredible amount behind the scenes, making sure that the show is dialed. And we've certainly grown a lot if you look at some of the, some of the early shows and how even just the overlay evolved. And it's really been the highlight of my career working with all of you guys. So thank you for being part of this. Should we play that? They made a video? Yeah, yeah, let's play it. Let's watch it. Pull it up. We have a little year in review video that we're going to watch here on the stream. And 2025 is going to be a fantastic year. Lock in. The locking in that you do today will benefit your great grandchildren. I agree. If you do it right. Yeah. So do it. Do it. Do it like two years. Today is Meta Connect 2025. We'd love for you to hit this gong for us. Here we go. Congratulations on Meta Connect 2025. This is a big moment for us. I mean, we just started a couple months ago. It's been, this has definitely been on like the vision board of like one day and now we're here. So thank you so much for hosting us. You're watching tbpa. We have some fantastic news. We have a partnership with the New York stock exc. You're watching TVPN. We are live from GitHub Universe. Let's give it a quick hit for 27%. Strong hit. Great hit. So good to meet you, how are you doing? There he is. Welcome, man. Cannot believe you jumped. I can't believe you showed up. The Halloween episode, the Christmas episode and. The response was like, would you ever spend 250k on a car? And I took that liberally. That was the best. That's the scoop of the year. Sam Altman has a good sense of humor. You guys are really important to me. Good luck to you guys. Just keep doing what you're doing. You're just. You're just electric. There we go. What you guys do is great. I also think that you're transforming the way that media is dispersed each week. And you know, and it's awesome you guys are X doing what you do and elsewhere. So thanks so much. Thank you to everybody that has made this possible by tuning in, join the show and supporting us however you have. So have a wonderful evening and we will see you tomorrow. Thank you. Take care. Good night. Having the snow effect. The snow effect is not baked into the underlying video. That of course will be shared on. Anyways, thank you. Thank you, Ben and the hole and Nick and Scott, Michael for making that. You guys, you guys are the best. Correction. Actually shout out to Jackson, who made that video. No way. What? Wow. Legend. Thank you, Jackson. Legend. Amazing. And Tyler, do you have any news for us? Oh, yeah. Contract extended. Gap year. Gap year extended. Tyler is not going home. He's not going home. Well, he's going home for the holidays. He's coming back to the Ultra Dome next semester. The jaws of life. Contract extended. He's sticking around. It has been truly, truly incredible having you here on our set and contributing to the show in such a special way. And yeah, we should probably figure out a new title at some point. Other than Intern. Intern doesn't really make sense. It made sense for a minute, but you're much more than an intern. You're a technology brother. So thank you for being a part of this. Thanks for. Can we get the Gigachad. Can we get. Yeah, can we at least Gigachad this man? Giga chat this on, please? Production scrambling. And I mean we have to thank everyone that actually watched the show. Everyone in chat. We appreciate you and everyone who watch. Everyone who recording. There are so many ways to experience what we do that is by design. We want to let people, we want to meet them where they are, obviously in an RSS feed, in a cut down, In a Diet TBPN product, in a 20 minute version, in a cut. Down, in the newsletter. In the newsletter, in the trading cards. The trading cards themselves are A way to experience what we do here. And so thank you to everyone who enjoyed any of that, no matter how much or how frequently you did. We appreciate you. Anyway, let's go to the timeline. But first, let me tell you about numeral compliance. Handled numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. So, speaking of gap semester intern Tyler, Jane street is putting up trading cards. No, this is not fake. This is fake. This is. Wait, what's going on here? I think this is. This guy Mason. Okay. Oh, he made it for himself. He made it for himself, but he's. Going to Jane Street. From his account, Mason. Has committed to Jane street for summer 2026. Congratulations to Mason. That's an awesome shop, awesome place to go, and what incredible performance. Almost 10,000 likes on this Instagram post. But VAR Epsilon here is saying software engineering intern recruiting slowly turning into college football. It should. It's arguably higher stakes. Nick in the comments, fantastic from Rivet says they call this the TVPN effect. Just like this. That's a good one. The deal director. The TVPN effect is a. Hey, isn't the deal director in the chat right now? Yeah. Thank you, Deal director. It really has. I mean, obviously we didn't invent the trading card or like this format. This has been used by complex and in many ways you can trade the trace this type of media back to the New York Post or any sort of even tmz. I remember the first time I made one of these trading cards for I think it was Willmanitis playing with model boats on the little pond in Central Park. I looked up how does TMZ do it? Okay, let me recreate that basic Photoshop template. Now, we've kind of taken it in a much broader direction, but it's just a fun way to relay information. It's. The format shouldn't be reserved for celebrities and people that throw around balls for a living. Yes, I completely agree. We democratized the trading card this year and I'm glad we did. Before we move on to the big story, which is that TikTok is absolutely printing. Let me tell you about Cognition, the team behind the AI software engineer Devin. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So TikTok owner ByteDance is on track for 50 billion in profit in 2025. Big. That's so much money. So this is from Bloomberg. ByteDance is on track for profits of roughly 50 billion, capping a record year for a Chinese social media leader making major inroads into E commerce and New markets. I mean it truly is like their hyperscaler. They own a ton of different stuff. Gaming, social. It's so much more than just TikTok. And that's very, very clear in the financial results. The Beijing based parent company of TikTok is on track to hit that milestone after amassing net income of about 40 billion over the years first three quarters. People familiar with the matter said it's already surpassed its internal target for 2025. This that would take the company's earnings close to that of Meta platform. So bytedance is now basically the same size as Meta, which is insane. Meta is of course earning about 60 billion this year by TikTok. Success has come over under scrutiny after the Biden administration led an effort to ban TikTok. ByteDance is now close to finalizing a plan to hive off the video service in the US which will be American made. American made. Well, American made potentially. Obviously short form video debates over over exactly how that will happen, but Oracle is potentially in the deal. Despite Washington's scrutiny, TikTok has expanded globally at a rapid clip. Including in the U.S. it has been pushing aggressively into E commerce and live stream shopping. Much like the livestream shopping thing, it feels like it's so, so big over there. I wonder if it's, you know, it's somewhat growing here, but it does feel like it still feels like it has not hit a fever pitch in the United States the way it has abroad. The same day that Sho Chu, the CEO of TikTok announced he had an agreement, he'd reached an agreement to sell TikTok. TikTok held its first ever Oscar style red carpet show, the TikTok Awards in Los Angeles. That sounds fun. It's unclear how much ByteDance has increased revenue. This year the company had targeted 20% rise which would be $186 billion and that would cap years of 20 plus percent growth for the company. Founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, ByteDance has created several of China's most popular digital service. Toutiao Douyin, a version of TikTok for the mainland market. It's also vying with incumbents Alibaba and TC. Yeah. So quick overview of the businesses under the ByteDance brand. They have Douyin, which is the Chinese version of TikTok. It's quite a bit more feature rich. Feature based, right? Oh no. So no, no, it's more feature rich. So it's like more focused on retail. Bigger, bigger live experience. They have like hotel bookings, movie bookings, things like that. They Have Tao Tiao, which is a news like content aggregator. Yeah. And Artifact, which was created by the Instagram founders. They were kind of dipping their toe back into like creating a social media. Of course one of them landed at Anthropic, but Mike Krieger landed at Anthropic, but that was sort of like maybe if it works over there, very, very similar news aggregator could work over here. Then they have Shi Xi Guo. Xi Guo, which is like more of like a YouTube style business. Then they have Dubao, which is apparently China's most popular AI chatbot, so something like ChatGPT. And then they have a bunch of other sort of tertiary businesses as well as capcut. If you use Capcut, the mobile editing app, they. I didn't realize I was bite to this product. Wow. If you want to use the Meta version they have Edits, which is pretty good. I've used Edits a few times and it's pretty full featured at least so TikTok has signed a deal for the sale of the United States unit. The deal should close January 20th, 22nd. This is from Sarah Fisher, the media correspondent at Axios. She says that Oracle, Silverlake and MGX will collectively own 45% of the US entity. 30% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors and 20% will be retained by ByteDance. So ByteDance, you know, the Chinese entity sort of becomes the minority investor. It sort of goes into American hands loosely or Western hands. And then of course the rest of the process can be handled and you have more leverage to address like where is the data stored, how is the algorithm trained? US venture, the joint venture is going to be focused on data protection, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurance. So retraining the content recommendation algorithm on US user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation. Will be interested to see if there's any noticeable effect for TikTok users. Let me tell you about fall generative media platform for developers develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Megan Bobrovsky over at the Wall Street Journal has a scoop. That Meta is in fact developing a new image and video focused AI model codenamed Mango. I like it. Alex Wang and Chris Cox talked the new models Mango and Avocado in a Q and A with employees this morning one of those employees said I gotta tell the Wall Street Journal about this. It's too good. It's too good. It's simply too good. It's too good. I gotta let them know. No, who knows how they got the scoop, but it's a great one. They said models are expected to be released in the first half of 2026. I mean they have a lot of data. They should be able to train a great model. I wonder if it's enough to get to just release a frontier model and really see any usage or if this is again, it's like it needs to be vended into Instagram, into meta properties. What do you think, Tyler? I mean, I feel like it's very natural to vend this into Instagram and like this model, like I would be very surprised if people are surprised by this. Right. Because like the mid journey in vibes, like, that was not msl, that was not Alexander Wang. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's just like the product team. Yeah. But they've done a lot of work to marshal compute, build huge data centers. Like they're ready for a big run. Yeah. And they have the data. Yeah. I would expect this to be good. Have you been following those posts that are like, we're comparing ChatGPT images in ChatGPT versus Nanobanana Pro and you can sort of tell the difference, but it does feel like it's starting to be a spiky intelligence moment where I think. Nanobanana is generally better at putting text or like if you want to do some kind of. Yes. Charts, Graphs and illustrations. ChatGPT Images is better for like maybe. Artsy or stuff and character consistency so you can tell a whole story across and ChatGPT seems better at that. But without further ado, we have some very special guests. Tell us more about all this. We have Michael Truel and Meryl from Graphite and Cursor. Great to meet you, Michael. Great to see you, Meryl. Good to see you too. How are you doing? Good to see you. Amazing. It's a fantastic and exciting day for everyone at Graphite. We're thrilled about today's announcement and super excited to work with Michael and Tim. It makes so much sense. And yeah, we're excited to have you guys break it down. So. Yeah. When did, when did the conversation start? Yeah, so we started chatting. I guess we've known each other for like six years almost now. We've been. Yeah, yeah, we've been. We. We both went to. There's the startup camp program that one of our shared investors did. Did like 6 years ago where we met for the first time. And then our teams have kind of always known each other. There's been a lot of over Cursor was a big user of Graphite we're big users of Cursor. We started talking back in the summer when we were building. We started to think about building integrations with background agents and thinking about how we let our users call background agents from Graphite so you could create, Review, and merge PRs all in one place. We started chatting with the Cursor team. It quickly became obvious that we shared a lot more than just start, you know, just our biggest investors. We're, you know, we think about the world the same way. We have a super similar vision for where devtools are going. Their New York office is literally across the street. I can, I can see their window from right here. So it's, it's, it just made so much sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Michael, please. I was just going to say, as we got to talking, like Meryl mentioned, we both think about the future pretty similarly, where we both believe that the way people build software over the next five, 10 years is going to change radically. A lot of coding, as we know today, will be automated. And. We think very similarly about the ways in which code writing will change, but also the ways in which teams collaborating will change. And Graphite has focused really intensely on the team collaboration problem and how you help people review each other's code. We focus really intensely on the single player experience of how you develop software as an individual programmer. So we're excited to kind of marry the two together and build a crossbow. Michael, I would love to get a year in review for Cursor, or even more broadly, just the state of software development quantitatively, qualitatively. How can you explain the way writing Software changed in 2025? It's changed in a big way. I think at the highest level, agents became useful in a professional setting, and that really expanded the demand in the market. And I think we're still early. I think it can be really easy to underrate just how far away coding is from being automated and still building professional software takes so many people over such a long period of time. And there's lots of issues we need to contend with as AI coding becomes deployed more broadly. But it was a big year where you went from being able to just ask some quick questions to an AI about your code base and have it kind of help you out with the next 30 seconds to 5 minutes of your work to being able to hand off whole tasks to an AI and. Have it do and Meryl, the shape of graphite. Obviously, we know that you're growing quickly. How did you perceive the changes that happened this year? If you look back on 2025, obviously this deal is going to be something you remember forever. But more precisely, how do you think that the developer experience. Every time I'd catch up with Merrill, he'd be like, there's a lot of code to review, so we're busy. And that' and that's Mike in a big way is Michael's fault. No, that's the funny part about it is I think Cursor has just so dramatically changed the rate at which we can build features and how much code engineers are able to generate. And what's happened consistently. The bottleneck has now just shifted to the rest of the process, what we call the outer loop, where now we need tooling to help every team review and validate and merge changes at the rate that you can now generate them with tools like Curso. That was basically our 2025 has been how do we both apply AI to this problem? How do we use more traditional or deterministic methods like merge queues and stack PRs and other workflows and tools to make that process more efficient? But how do we just unblock this bottleneck that is now is kind of like preventing teams from really realizing the true potential of tools like Cursor? And that's been our mission this entire year, pretty much. And part of why think we're so excited for this partnership is that now you can put the surfaces where you write code and where you review and validate and merge it together and just have that seamlessly integrated. You shouldn't have to jump to a different tool for your editor for code review, for your PRs, for CI. All this should just be one nicely integrated surface. And that's always been the dream for graphite in our vision. I think now that can become a reality. How are you guys thinking about the integration process and how graphite fits into the sort of Cursor platform family? I think a good first step would be like maybe a walkway between the offices in New York. Skyway. A skyway. Yeah. We've talked about the little string and. Cups, you know, so you can. Yeah, we'll put a zip line over Broadway so that people can commute back and forth. No, I think that there's some really obvious low hanging fruit of things that you'll see us roll out in the coming months. Then there's a long tail of even more ambitious ideas that we have that are in the works. But immediately, I remember earlier this year, a few of us on the Graphify team were up in Toronto meeting with Toby and some of the shopify engineering leaders and they're one of our biggest customers and close partners. And the biggest ask that they had for us was how do we get context from our IDE or from tooling where we're writing code with AI into pull requests and have that be seamless and have the same chat history, have the agent logs and everything show up in the PR and be able to then call out to the agent to fix things again. And we were like, huh, that's an interesting problem. Maybe we should think about working with Cursor on this. And I think that's kind of the most obvious thing that we can do to start with. And then we can build from there on many of the other ways that we can kind of connect all those surfaces together and have the agent be able to help you all the way through from the moment that you generate the code to the moment that it's merged in and out to production. Yeah, I'd second that. There are going to be a bunch of opportunities for some quick ways in which we can make the experience of working together in graphite and cursor better. But then the big thing will be going heads down on a much bigger build together where we'll have more to share late in 2026. Michael, I'd love to get an update on how you're thinking about just growth opportunities as segmented by sort of like scale of the customer. We've read some, you know, like the AI, like the models are great, the tech is amazing. There's still some odd resistance to adopting AI in certain enterprises. We're not at 100% penetration with these tools. Is there more opportunity in the near term in large enterprises and transforming the way those businesses work? Or is it just the ground game of going, getting every SMB online? Like how are you thinking about growth in 2026, 2027? We've been shocked by the demand across the board. And so on the mid market and smaller company side of things and the self serve side of things broadly, there are all these rules of thumb for when the growth of that business tops out in developer tools or in and kind of other comparable markets. And the thing that's just shocked us and shocked all of our investors is that the growth has been compounding really consistently at the same growth rate over the course of course of many years into the revenue scale that we are now and that just continues unabated. So yeah, is that sort of like an IT spend thing where like a small and medium, a small and medium business might just say like, okay, we don't want to spend 10% of revenue on IT spend or technology. And maybe the new paradigm is actually helping with so much growth that they're able to underwrite a larger investment in technology. Is that what you're seeing comes from. More people using cursor and people deeper, both ARPU and helping people and how much code we're writing for people. And then also the number of people using cursor within companies and across companies, which has consistently been growing. And one big change for us this year is just the upmarket motion has developed faster than almost any upmarket motion has ever. Where at this point 64% of the Fortune 500 pay us. Wow. In some way. And it's both penetration into digital native companies. So for instance, Nvidia is a big customer. Wall to wall Adobe, Uber, Salesforce, which I think in a public earnings announcement recently mentioned that they're seeing over 30% productivity increase in. And it's also companies that aren't digital native too. It's shocking how many companies are software companies. And so Starbucks, PwC, Hilton, companies like this are deep customers. Where are both of you seeing any resistance to adopting AI specifically in software engineering? Are there any? I'm thinking of like the Japanese soldier on the island, you know, that doesn't know the war ended. Are you seeing anybody trapped left on an island? I think that. Well, I think that this is kind of true of how tools are bought broadly. But it's really important, I think the way you procure these tools a little bit different, where the difference between having the best product and the third best product from some incumbent that's now six months old is really, really big. And then user behavior needs to change and the way in which your team works needs to change. And so you kind of need to, you need to teach people within companies how to work differently. And so we've seen a lot of success in not just rolling out the tool, but also teaching folks within companies too. But it's really spanned across all types of development. I think that there's still some languages where there's room for improvement in how much AI can help folks, especially some super legacy languages. But I think where there's resistance, it's mostly a problem of teaching and kind of learning new habits. That makes sense. What kind of advice are you giving somebody that's maybe in high school or college that wants to get into software engineering but is concerned about just the overall rate of change and how good the, the products and models are getting? I think it's actually really exciting Time to get into building things on computers and probably on a relative basis. Especially exciting for people who are new and entering the field just because it's just quick for them to pick up new habits. And so I tell them, yeah, to experiment with the tools, to try things out broadly. And also, I mean, working on a solo project by yourself is very different from building a giant piece of software with hundreds of other people. So getting exposure to like a real professional development environment too, I think is helpful learning. Yeah. And it seems more and more obvious that there's just so much software that needs to be built. I mean, we've experienced this year where we have built a software tool internally to help us run and run the entire show. And we are a business that even three years ago we wouldn't have been hiring a software engineer because we would have either used off the shelf SaaS or would have just taken so much resources it wouldn't have been worth it. So. So there's just so much to build. Yeah. It's almost trite now, especially in the Bay Area, to say software is important. And if anything, I feel like it's kind of like reached a point in technological maturity where you don't even really think of software as technology. Just think of it as like, oh, it's a website that someone built. But yeah, I mean, it's shocking how much progress across the world, world really is just bottleneck. By building things on computers. You talk to people in AI research. What's the bottleneck to making the models better? There's a few, but one of the biggest ones is just building better infrastructure and just the speed at which researchers can code. And it's true in other areas too. For instance, I worked at a biotech company at one point and one of the big bottlenecks making progress there was analyzing data and picking the next set of chemicals that people were going to try out. And it was dealing with crappy software from off the shelf vendors or building a whole software team to build it yourself. And so, yeah, I think that it's this amazing lever on productivity in a bunch of different verticals. What are the research paths that excite you the most or that you think might be underrated? Example would be like when we talked to Sholto during the Claude 4, 5 launch and he was talking about not image processing, not image generation, but image processing. And that's, and that actually makes a lot of sense because a real software engineer needs to look at the webpage that they designed and then interpret that and understand the code that they Write how it feeds into the result. Are there any areas of research or less obvious like it's not just a coding model, research paths that you're particularly excited about in 2026? Yeah, I think that the capability gains we've seen in our space have actually there's been a lot of details to figure out, but there have been a few really big ideas that have worked, just have been levers that people have pulled on continuously. Pre training is one that's been talked about a lot. Taking models, scaling them up, training them on Internet scale data. Another big one that's been really important for our space is curating a set of games for the models to play. So for us that means collecting a set of. Or in our space that means collecting a set of code bases, writing out tasks, having a set of tests to test if the model actually solved a task and it writes a pr. And the big AI companies have done this really well of getting thousands, tens of thousands of really hard games for the model to play and then teaching the model to play those games. And in turn the model then gets better at programming. And so I think that there's a bunch more juice to squeeze both from pre training and then RL with this verifiable reward. But I think that there's going to be some new big ideas that are needed to really get to a place where you can hand off end to end most of the professional development tasks you do in a real world. Does that make you especially excited about some of the NEO labs that are, I would say, fairly controversial at this point because on one hand it feels like we need new ideas, but on the other hand it's like it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money and it's a lot of money. And it's unclear if you just go and try to compete with. It's always scary when there's a lot of, lot of funding, not a lot of revenue. Yeah, yeah. I think Krista is actually doing a great job at this with their own models internally. Yeah. I was about to ask, do you think that you're going to become more of a lab over time? No, I mean what we want to do is we want to build the best way to code with AI and so we have lots of amazing partners that we're really excited to continue working with over the course of the next few years that are working on things that look like AGI. We've ever since the start of the company, we've kind of picked our spot where we are going to do our own modeling work. And those have looked different from the places where the big AI companies, the big labs, do their modeling work. And so, for instance, all our TAP models, like the things that are looking at what you've done in the editor, predicting the next of the things you're going to do, those are our own models. We're on the sixth generation model there. They learn continuously by looking at what people are doing for sure and figuring out how they can get better. And so I am really excited for us to invest a bunch more in research, do lots more ambitious stuff, but it'll be in a little bit of a different direction from what some of these labs might do. And so, for instance, we're really excited to build models that are some of the most capable in the world at programming, not the most capable in the world at programming, but are very fast too. And we think that over the course of the next couple of years, over the course of the next year, Agent usage encoding is going to kind of bifurcate into in the loop or completely async, where in the loop you're sitting down, you're like working with the agent in a pair programming way. You want it to be very fast and extremely sparse. And then async is going to be, you're talking to a colleague, you just hand off something end time and you want it to definitely, definitely, definitely correct. And I think that very soon we would like to play a really big part in making that human in the loop experience. Excellent. And I think that there's a lot of useful modeling work to do there. Very cool. How do you think about the X for Y meme? I feel like cursor's been very successful in that there's a certain rite of passage in Silicon Valley where once you become Uber for X, it's like if you're the Uber, it's a good place to be. And cursor for dogs, cursor for bio, cursor for travel. This has become a meme. Where is the line for what cursor will do and what cursor will not do? So when I talk to the Anduril folks, they'll say, well, the anduril of submarines is anduril, but if I said the anderal of stoves or the anderal of watches, it's like, okay, I don't even know what that means. That's fine, I'm not going to build that. You actually can go build that company. Where's the line of like what cursor will do over Time versus what's something that. Like where you might like the cursor for X model, but it's not on your roadmap? Well, we'd like to make it possible for anyone to build anything they'd like on a computer. And, you know, another way of putting that is we'd like to automate coding. Sure. And half of that's a model problem, half of that's a product problem. And we want to do deep, important work, work across. And yeah, so squarely, squarely focused on helping you build things on computers. And that for us, that means an intense focus on engineers. And then increasingly, the fold's going to expand too, where lots of technically light Personas, like designers and product people, they also work with cursor too. And one of the things we're excited about is that fold can broaden as the product gets better, as the technology matures. But I am really excited actually for, quote unquote, quote unquote cursor for X's to exist in other spaces. And when we started the company, we kind of thought that, like this, the shape of company, where you pick an area of knowledge work and you kind of make the cockpit where that knowledge work happens, like the products that people daily drive for that form of knowledge work. You make it, you shape it to where the tech's going, you make it great for where AI is, and then you also see where AI is helping people and where it's not helping people, and you use that to make, make the underlying models better, both by doing a little bit of your own, also by working with partners. That kind of shape of company we were really excited about. And I think it's going to exist in all sorts of different areas of knowledge work, whether it be mechanical engineering or writing or science, biological science and other places. Yeah. Is graphite the cursor for pull requests? Meryl, did you ever think about that positioning? Because I've done. I literally, I think I've done 250 ad reads for graphite. And I've never said, hey, it's the cursor for pull request. We said it's code review for the age of AI, of course. But do you think that you fit neatly into that framing of the cockpit where the work happens, that you improve, or is there something that's a different positioning? And I'm wondering how that might change over the next few years. Yeah, I think one of our investors, Goku Rajram, has this framework that we reference a lot where you're either building a dashboard company or a pipes company in B2B. And if you're, if you're a dashboard company, you have to be like something where one type of user, like every single day at work they're coming in and doing a certain task and that's just their home screen. Or you want to be a pipes company where it's like you configure it, you set it and forget it and it just does throughput and prints money for you. And we're very much, we've always thought about graphite as a dashboard. We've said we want to be the home screen for developers. We want to be the place where everyone comes in and checks like, where are my code changes in flight? What do I have to do in order to unblock my team and keep everything moving? And I think that's one of the things that's so exciting about this partnership is that now you really can be the 1 dashboard for engineering. If you want to write code, if you want to build something, if you want to move your changes through the rest of the process, that can all happen on one nicely integrated surface now and really make that vision a reality. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I'm so excited for both teams. I'm incredibly excited for you, Merrill and the whole team at Graphite as, as a, as a Graphite customer starting at the age of 25 to a partner now. It's been incredible to see the journey and you guys pairing up just makes so much sense and it's been a massive year for you both. I'm sure 2026 will be even bigger and thank you both for joining to celebrate with us. We should, we should hit the gong again for you Bulls. Yeah, I think, I think this is the gong worthy moment. Definitely, definitely. And I'm sure, I'm sure the two of you guys won't have much of a, much of a holiday, but we hope you can enjoy at least a little downtime with friends and family and can't wait for next year. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Thank you guys. Goodbye. Incredible. What a great partnership. That feels like such a great. Just a match made in heaven. Absolutely. Let's go over to heaven. Dana White and the Meta board. This is a match made in heaven. Very funny. On multiple levels. Let's play this clip. While the team is pulling it up, let me tell you about Adeo, the AI native CRM. Adeo builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Level. Let's go. Never stop clapping. And now AI, let's play. Have you got into AI yet? Yeah, we're dabbling. Okay. So Meta. AI. I got, you know, I'm on the board for meta. I just got back from a Meta board meeting, so. Good. Zuckerberg, who is a brilliant gangster, this. Guy, calling him a gangster. These people who. Who try to talk about him and everything else. I'm so blown away and impressed by this guy. He's an animal. Animal. I agree with that. And he is an animal. Putting all the chips in on AI. We just hired, like, 10 kids that are aged 22 to 28. The average salary is like $65 million. That these kids are making. It's so funny that this is the final leak. Everyone's wondering way more positives about AI than negative. So you start looking at AI and getting into it and asking, AI, how do I build my business? How do I. You know, and it'll start giving you some ideas and hold on, you can go. Is he saying $65 million is the average salary per year? I think so. I mean, I think of a salary. I think of a salary as a. That's an annual thing. As an annual thing. So ten times. That's insane. And Noah in the chat says, meta engineers with a 600k salary. Okay, so yeah, yeah, keep playing this. Here to Tulsa, Oklahoma. You'd have to go on a map and you'd have to lay out, you know, your route and all. You got to do the same thing for your business, map out your route for 26. When I first saw this, I thought he was saying, like, AI will be able to get you directions. And I was like, google Maps can do that. Okay. So when I see this, I see this, I just. It's actually a great metaphor. Entrepreneurs can get stuck in a loop of just wanting to meet and talk with people and, like, get ideas and get strategies. And AI is really good at that. You can say, I have an E commerce company I want to grow. What should I do? It'll give you a bunch of ideas. And it's like, it just shows how worthless a lot of ideas are and how important execution is. Some ideas are priceless, right? It's like you want to execute on the right ideas, but oftentimes to find the right ideas, you got to try a bunch of stuff. And so AI is at the point where it can give you the perfect strategy, the perfect playbook, even if it's like kind of the average playbook across business textbooks and blogs and posts and things like that. But in the end, you just still got to go do the Work. That's the hard part. Yeah, I mean, I still think there's, like, he is using. He's using a metaphor. I think he's actually a pretty good communicator here. He's using a metaphor that people understand. It's like mapping technology, Google Maps for business, for answering other questions, unstructured questions. AI can tell you that. And if you think about before you Google, okay, well, my business needs a website. How do I set up a website for my business? Okay, I need to go to the store and get a book. Web development for Dummies. This was the thing back in the 90s. It was like, java for Dummies, you're gonna build. Now it's like, AI, Obviously, we just talked about this. And so he's right. He's delivering it in this sort of funny way and he brings this crazy, this crazy energy to the performance. But he is correct in the pitch in this idea. He's actually correctly pitching super intelligence, personal super intelligence. And for a lot of people, that's exactly what they want. Now, he doesn't really address the fact that there's incredible competition from Anthropic and OpenAI and Google on this front. But that's not what he's addressing. He's addressing just the idea of, of, like, is AI useful? And the guy is like, we've dabbled with it, we've used it for answering, you know, like doing subtitling, basically. And I think what's under. So Meta has sort of pitches, like. The next level of, like, what's possible. Meta has something, I think, three, three and a half to four billion monthly active users. And so I think in those board meetings, you have to imagine they're saying like, yeah, there's a lot of competition. Yeah, ChatGPT has a big user base. Yeah. Gemini has a big user base. But we have 4 billion people that we can start distributing. If we build a great model, we can start distributing it through WhatsApp, through Instagram, through Facebook, through the Meta AI app, et cetera. Yeah, I was listening to Ben Thompson this morning and he was doing app reviews, like the review of the top paid apps and the top free apps. So the 2025 top paid apps. And this is wild. It's like, have you heard of any of these? I know, Hot Schedules, Shadow Rocket, it seems like. Have you heard of any of these Procreate? No, because I check the charts a lot. Skyview, I've heard of that. Tonal Energy, Auto Sleep, they're all like a couple dollars. And most people have not really heard of any of these. If they have it, they're like, oh, yeah, I use this for this one. One little thing. Or this is a niche thing. And then you go to the top free apps and it's like trillion dollar company. Trillion dollar company. Trillion dollar company. It's literally ChatGPT, Threads, Google, TikTok, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, Google Gemini. And so Ben's point was, if you like ChatGPT, yes, they are the number one app, but they should be scared because Google has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in the top, top 11 or something like that. And so the distribution is just so powerful and Meta has that distribution, so they're also a contender and they can stay in the game. So the top, the number 22 free app right now. Number 21 is Instagram, number 22 is whatnot. Number 23 is HBO Max. And on the paid side, currently 21 is Threema Secure Messenger. Sounds like an even sus version. Sounds insecure. Yeah, sounds very insecure. Number two is Pocket God, which is a game that includes Call of Booty. Wait, Call of Pocket God. Isn't that a nickname for AGI? AGI has been solved. This is just like a mobile game. And then number 23 is jingle real Motion Shaker instrument. That sounds like the Ibear app. Let's go. It basically is. You shake it and you can play bells, you know, sleigh bells, that kind of thing. You know, most of those, if they're on the top paid app store charts, they're probably making money. And the software is probably developed in linear, the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. What does Casey Neistat have for us? Casey Neistat did a project with the meta quest 3 where he scanned his studio. He says it's pretty rad. You can walk around and look at stuff and get close. I specifically did not clean the place before we scanned. It works on your phone and on the headset. Let's play this. Can we play this full screen too? That'd be interesting. I want to see the full screen. Have you watched a lot of Casey Neistat? Have you seen his whole facility? I've watched enough of these. It's one of the coolest. It's one of the coolest studio spaces. Yeah, it's very inspiring from a production perspective because it's practical, but it also has so much character that it tells you a story. And so even when he's just filming a Little product review and he's making the seventh video of the month or year or whatever. You're brought into his world. You understand who Casey is. Every single one of those items tells a story and it's just. It's just really cool. So, yeah, and I remember we did. Go hang out if you have a quest feature. We've done a demo of this feature, but we weren't doing. We scanned like a very normal room. Should we. Should we give Tyler a challenge to actually get this up and running? Scan the ultradome. I tried for like, I don't know, maybe two months now. You've been able to do a couple experiences on the meta quest, but you couldn't record your own yet. And I mean, I'm not sure if it's actually. I guess it is out that you can do it yourself. So I'm not saying scan the Ultra. The Gigachad elf is so. I love the Gigachad. That's so good. So, yeah, I'm not proposing that you. You look so ridiculous. I'm not proposing that you scan the ultradome. I'm proposing that you stop enjoying your jawline. He's on that wild Roman again. He's on the wild Roman. Lay off, Tyler. But what I'm proposing is that Casey Neistat shares a link there. Horizon.meta.com world a bunch of numbers. And if you click that in the headset, I believe it takes you to that world. But how long do you think it'll take you to actually get into that world? That headset. Wow. You're old now. I don't like that. I don't like this one. That's not fun. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Hey, pa. Hey, pa. I like it. I would like to be still doing this when you look like that. Yeah, I enjoy it. But how long? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do the sad face. Do the sad face. The sad face is the funniest one. It's so funny. The jawline is crazy. It looks so real. It's so good. I don't like this one. No. He really looks so sad. What's wrong? Tyler, cheer up. Cheer up. You know what will cheer you up? Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails securely spin up white label wallet sign transactions, integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. The economist is saying industrialists now list Gundo along with Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv within a triumvirate of the West. Triumvirate. Triumvirate. Triumvirate. It means three powerful pillars. That's a New one together. Learn something new every day. Yeah, we gotta get you on the Anki mobile. Flashcards. Little space repetition. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Of the West's most important innovation hubs. Yeah. America's fight back against China starts in Los Angeles. It is real. I mean, it hasn't happened overnight, but the progress, I think, has been faster and more real than people expected. I think when Augustus was first posting in. What was it, 2023. So the next post, Fast Company did a profile on August and they actually referenced me and they said. Two years ago, in a widely viewed interview with the tech world chronicler John Coogan. That's me. Dericko was jacked and tanned. Triple glaze. Hit that glaze. That's ridiculous. The glaze is insane. A high wattage presence. At ease in his role as Gundo super connector, as Coogan described. I did describe him as that. They asked me for comment and that is a direct quote. I do think he's the super connector. And for a long time it was like, if you are going to El Segundo, like, check in with Augustus, ping him first. He will get you hooked up. Do not step foot in El Segundo. Checking in with the Don. Yeah. Without bringing. You need to bring a shape of white monster as an offering and maybe some nicotine pouches to pay your respect if you're a venture capitalist. I mean, there was a whole while where it was like VCs from all parts of the world. And then celebrities started being a pilgrimage. Celebrities would go on the pilgrimage. I remember a lot. Gill went and then he posted a Zyn can. That's right. Yeah. He spelled Zin wrong. I remember that. Oh, yeah. Z I N. Ooh. Okay. So Augustus was quoting this picture from Aribias of saying, this is what rebuilding America does to you. This is Zane down down Knox Metals. We interviewed him on. I mean, this transformation is insane. It's really. This guy is incredibly hard. It's really the, like frazzled wojack who's just like strung out all black. I have a block of metal from Zane. Oh, no way. That's from him. Yeah, yeah. He gave me the nyc. That's very cool. Very cool. Yeah, yeah. He sacrificed his innocent self to rebuild our country. Thank him for it. Forever grateful. But the funny thing about this fast company is that. So first they say Derico was jacked and tanned. And then he said, these days Derico shuttles between cold warehouses on early morning flights. In more recent interviews, shadows mark his face and there's a wary fatigue to his Posture. They're just like. I was texting with a guest and he was like, why do they have to say I fell off? Why do they have to say I lost. Lost my pump? But I'm sure he'll be back in the gym anytime. Hey, he never said it was going to be easy. It's bulking season anytime. You're always welcome to bulk back up. No, I had a great experience making this video. It was very funny. I met Augustus and he just seemed like an interesting character. So I was making videos about big established companies. So I didn't really have a format that worked for like a seed stage founder with just an idea. He was pre teal fellowship. He really. I don't think he'd raised any money. He was just like somebody. But you knew from the beginning that Augustus was a Joe Rogan CEO, 100%. So I was like, I gotta do content with this guy. What can we do? And so I went with Ben out to the Salton Sea with Augustus and we drove out there. It was like a two hour drive to the Salton Sea. Sort of out by thermal, actually a little bit further. And we drove around and we walked around. We filmed like this walk and talk interview out in this crazy, like, you know, deserty sea. Because the Salton Sea used to be like a proper oceanfront hangout spot. Then it got overly salinated and there's dehydration. A lot of the water that flowed in got drained away for farmland. There's some good trade offs, there's some bad trade offs. But his whole thesis was like, hey, we can bring it back. With cloud seeding. The bad trade off is the land just became incredibly toxic. Fallow. Yeah, exactly. So you can't grow anything. There's still a couple people that live out there. It's pretty. It's a pretty crazy life. Like it's mostly just like a tourist destination. People go see it. But it was very interesting. Like concrete example of like the rainmaker promise. And so we had a good time. We did an energy drink tier list which was very fun. Yeah, somebody sent me that recently. Yeah. Oh, it's classic. So apparently Sean in the chat says Slab City is out there. The Slabs unincorporated off grid alternative lifestyle community consisting largely of snowbirds in the salt and trough area. Huh. Interesting. But yeah, we filmed this and I was like, I don't know if this is like a full video. There's not really a full story. This is just like a hangout session. But then when it became clear that he was that although he was the CEO of Rainmaker. He was also this Gundo super connector. And there was this interesting movement happening in El Segundo. I reframed the video to be about the El Segundo movement broadly, and he was like a main character in that story. And then that video did very well. Well, didn't you kind of. Didn't that kind of kick off the, like, hype cycle? I was a link in the church chain. I was like. I think I was like, he kicked. Off the hype cycle. No, I was. No, no, no. There were a few others because Scott Nolan wrote thank God for El Segundo in Pirate Wires. And there were. And there was maybe like, one other substack who had written about it. And then, of course, there were a bunch of posts, and then there were. The founders there that were actually. Of course. And they did the whole thing. And then. And then. I'm gonna forget who it was, but there were a whole bunch of. Of traditional media folks that came in and wrote really interesting profiles and kind of told the story. It was a lot of fun. Anyway, figma think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together and get started with Figma. OpenAI has declared code Red multiple times. Bloomberg is reporting. An executive said this. OpenAI has declared code Red multiple times. It's not a Code Red if it's Code Red. Every day, your company, you know what, nowhere else, it's Code Red right here. Code Red. Code Red. Yeah, we heard red. Yeah, it's Code Red. Everyone put on Santa outfits. It's Code Red time. Santa's sack is red. The reindeer, the sleigh, these things are red. He was just getting in the Christmas spirit, guys. It was not anything about the business. It was not anything about the shaky ground. The real question that Rachel Metz over at Bloomberg we'll have to get to the bottom of is, okay, okay, so there's been multiple code reds at OpenAI. How many Baja blasts have there been? Because we know that after every Code Red, there is an equal and opposite Baja Blast that gets the code. Well, what does success look like for Code Red? It's a Baja Blast. It's a Baja Blast. Baja blasting your way to the top of the charts, the top of the benchmarks, the top of the fundraising cycle. So Rachel Metz over at Bloomberg says Sam Altman's decision to declare code red at OpenAI earlier this month may have caught the industry's attention, but it wasn't the first time that the artificial intelligence company has done a Code Red. The San Francisco based startup leadership has made the same decision previously, explicitly instructing employees to drop lower priority tasks and concentrate on a single goal. I'm telling you, it's entirely a comms issue. If so, Mark Chen is on the record here. He says says we do this when we want to have this focusing effort on one particular topic. Mark, there's a phrase for this that doesn't turn into a negative press cycle. It's called a lock in. You just tell everyone we're locked in. Time. It's time for the great lock in. Time for the great lock in. And if you say OpenAI declares it's time for the great lock in, that's exciting. Everyone's excited. People are going to rally around that. Everyone is going to go through the roof and just be like, this is so bullish. This is so bullish. It's so bullish because you can be at the top of your game and if you declare a great lock in, everyone's just like, oh no, it's going to be even better. They're going to go even harder. But if you declare it's Code Red and you're at the top, OpenAI's they're literally at the top of the app charts. They're like the best, right? Like, they're on so many things that are at the top of the benchmarks. Everything's going very well for this company, but when they declare Code Red and it leaks, then it's makes you feel like, oh, maybe something's not going so well. If you declare great lock in, you're good to go. The latest Code Red came two weeks after Alphabet Inc. S Google released a widely praised new AI model that outperformed OpenAI's best software on a number of benchmarks. OpenAI Sam Altman called for staffers to redirect internal resources to speed up improvements to ChatGPT and delay progress on all other efforts, such as autonomous AI agents in advertising. So they delayed ads. Very rough for us as fans of advertising. Speaking of advertising, graphite.dev you think we're not gonna do an ad for graphite even though we have Meryl on the show? No, we still do the ad. We have respect for advertising. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What it means to me. This is from Mark Chan. He says what it means to me is on chat, on reasoning on the core ChatGPT product. It is this focusing effort to make sure we get the fundamentals right. Chen said that Includes ensuring the chatbot works quickly and reliably. I think hot take maybe 20, 26 is the year of speed. Maybe customers cannot tell the difference between 120 IQ chatbot, 130 IQ chatbot, 140 IQ chatbot. What can they tell the difference? Speed. That's right. If they have to close the app, come back five minutes later. Oh my deep research report is here. I think the model's plateauing on wowing me with. They're already AGI is here. Like they're already super geniuses at everything. They already know everything. Well, this mirrors what Michael from Cursor was saying. He was like speed, we're focused on speed. Yeah, Speed I think is going to be really important. I mean that's the weird thing about the cursor and I mean we learned this from the Chad IDE saga with like we wouldn't even have the opportunity to put brain rot and gambling in the IDE if you weren't waiting around for the IDE to respond and actually get back to you. So I think speed in the ide, speed in the chatbot. We've seen this nanobanana really, really fast. ChatGPT images v2 I forget exactly what number it is. I think it might be 1.5. But the latest iteration that came out this week, much faster, giving people more responsive results, updating them even just what Deep SEQ did where it was showing you the reasoning trace, showing you that the model is thinking all of these are UI UX decisions and then a lot of engineering, a lot of custom silicon. Anything that you can do to bake the model down into silicon and just get it back to the user faster, that's gonna, that's for sure going to result in I think lower churn, I think more surprise and delight moments. Just more usage, more willingness to pay. Yeah, well, move on. Let me tell you about Vanta Automate compliance and security AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Max Zeff, senior writer covering AI at Wired, says in a letter to the White house sending this AM this was yesterday. OpenAI encourages the federal government government to invest in or contract with initiatives like OpenAI Stargate to secure compute for public research. The full thing is leverage public private partnerships for supercomputing. We encourage the federal government to co invest or contract with initiatives like OpenAI Stargate to secure dedicated compute for priority public research I.e. health research, national security. Just as government university partnerships built earlier supercomputers, new models could procure capacity on Cutting edge AI systems for use by federally funded researchers. For example, a portion of Stargate's compute might be made available to the National Science foundation or Department of Energy researchers tackling grand challenges, providing academia access to frontier models without need, needing to build duplicate infrastructure. What do you think John? Because obviously people are going to dunk on this super hard, but there's people that are just not interested in AI. Don't think it's important, don't think. Show me the big tech company that doesn't want to work with the government. It's a knockout drag out fight to win project Maven to win cloud hosting contracts. The government has, has data right now and the fight between whether that data is stored on aws, Oracle, Google, Azure, like that is a somewhat of a bidding war. But there are also all sorts of other lobbying efforts to win those contracts. It's the game on the field. I don't know. I feel like this is not asking for a backstop. This is also not asking for nationalization, although it is like somewhat predicted in 2027. It's, it feels more like like, like an advertisement for a sales product. This feels like an SDR being like I'm ready, I'm ready to rock. Yeah. And I think even for taxpayers, do you want the government spending like basically taking on the project themselves to build an end to end supercomputer and how good would the actual result be versus just saying like we need COMPUTE for these projects. The real question is like what is the government doing with the supercompute? Because when we talked about the Genesis mission, there was a little bit of like does it go to, does it go to academic labs? Like what is the nature of the supercompute need in the government? There's been, there's been a number of like supercomputers built for various scientific projects. None of them have had like such economic value. You know, like, like the, the classic example is like the, like working on protein folding, working on, you know, deep space exploration, sort of fundamental physics usually. Bolted onto like a chat says backstop. You think they're continuing for the backstop? Well, I mean in some way, I mean so slightly more critical. Should we, can we reconsider slightly more critical view? Yeah. OpenAI and all their messaging says we're, we're compute constrained and we're compute constrained. If we brought on 10 times the compute, we'd use it in a few weeks. We, we, there's all these things that we can't do because we don't have enough compute. And so to also be messaging the government and saying, hey, we'd like you to invest and buy, effectively buy capacity for government researchers from our data centers. Those things are. You can, you can balance them, but. It'S a little hard to. It's a little bit hard too. Yeah. It's like, I mean, in one way, you don't necessarily want another buyer of GPU capacity in the market. Like just from a supply and demand side. If you are trying to buy data center capacity for your AI lab that's growing, growing, growing, and is truly compute constrained, the last thing you want is someone else being like, I'm also a buyer and you don't want the government being like, I'm also a buyer of compute. You want more supply coming online. So, I mean, if you can ultimately frame this around that it makes sense. But I just think I would be going to the government with completely different things. I would be focused entirely on speed of deployment, unblocking anything that's happening at, at Stargate. Because when we talk to Doug o', Laughlin, it feels like AWS is really, really good at bringing COMPUTE online. We've seen how good XAI is at it. I'm sure that the folks on the other projects are running into minor little hiccups, whether it's permitting or getting enough energy or how is the government dealing with impacts of water usage and energy usage and even just the political climate. I feel like I'd be focusing more on that, that than actually trying to just bring another buyer into the compute race that doesn't fully, fully sit. But yeah. From this letter to OpenAI writes, OpenAI sees 2026 as the year of AI and science, the moment when AI begins unlocking breakthroughs in scientific discovery just as it sped up software development. In 2025, more than 7 in 10Americans believe we need new innovations and solutions to challenges in scientific and medical research. And they kind of go on kind of setting up, setting up the kind. Of ask, yeah, I want to know more about what are the most exciting science projects that aren't going to happen, like AI for science, that aren't going to happen inside industry. Because the alphafold Nobel Prize is. It feels like a crucible moment for science in that science was effectively successfully done at a private corporation. And if that's the trend, then what is the government's role? What is the university's role? Maybe it should just be a race between Google and OpenAI to actually cure cancer and obviously the other pharmaceutical companies and all sorts of health companies. Why are you laughing. I'm laughing because Brandon Jacoby texted me and said listening to the show while working out the sheep sound almost made me drop a dumbbell on my head from laughing. It's a goat sound, Brandon. It's a goat sound. Obviously it's a goat sound. I use that when someone is showing greatest of all time sort of behavior or general excellence. Well, we are joined by Pranav, who we were supposed to have on the show earlier. We were overbooked. We're gonna talk about space data centers. If we're not, you know, maybe the government should buy some of those. We'll see. We'll find out. Well, Pranav, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for bearing with us while we had to reschedule you. We appreciate you taking the time to chat with us on the last show of the year, Friday, December 19th. Would you mind starting us off with a little bit of an introduction on.