We tested Instinct, MUSE and Grokbot. They’re ridiculous.

20:48You create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

20:55Sam Parr:Okay, so what are your predictions? You said you have some predictions. Well, let's start with some observations because I think our observations can be a lot more accurate than our predictions and your observations can kind of lead you to having a more informed prediction. Okay, Sensei. So here's one observation. It ain't all about intelligence. So the temptation in the AI world is who's going to train the smartest model. And you see OpenAI and Claude getting into the nerdiest neckbeard swinging contest you've ever seen about who can solve the millennium math problems. And there's like, we solved Navier Stokes.

21:32It's a fluid dynamics problem that no mathematician was able to solve. And other guys are like, oh, you did that? That's cute. We did seven other impossible math problems. And everyone's like, wow, that's really impressive. Couldn't even tell you what any of these are for or what they're all about. but clearly that's cool and important in one dimension.

21:50Sam Parr:It's like when Dell and Gateway would brag about RAM and then Apple was like, it looks cool and it works. Yeah. So I think instinct has tapped into, instead of IQ, EQ, in a small way, but it's still an interesting way. So for example, I convinced my wife, I was like, you got to try this thing. I was like, this thing's crazy. And now my wife's not an early adopter. So she's a good test, right? She's more of a real person. She's a busy mom. And couples, they have like a household account too. Well, now they do, yeah. But even before that, I was just like, she's going to soccer practice and then dance and then she comes home and she's planning our kid's birthday party.

22:27And then she's got to remember to bring the red jersey to soccer this week because we're the away team, those sorts of things. So just like normal everyday stuff, not like solving fluid dynamics and quantum computing or stuff like that. So she used instinct to help plan this birthday party. played. From everything as simple as like calling different venues, finding out the dates. Once finds out the dates, comparing, you know, how does that work with the kid's soccer schedule and then figuring out how many pizzas we need to order to feed 30 kids and 30 adults and what the order should be to give it to them.

23:01And then, hey, the venue sent the contract over. I took a look at it. There's only one clause I think you should worry about. But other than that, you should sign it. It's in your inbox. You know, that sort of thing. So it's helping plan the birthday party. and along the way she's like it's helpful but you know like whatever you know it's it's good i like

23:17Sam Parr:it but she wasn't blown away yeah still it was in the it was in the friend friend zone exactly and then it broke out of the friend zone the right after the party like three hours later she got a text from it saying um i hope i hope the party went great with the heart emoji and she screenshot it she sent it to me and she was like okay i'm sold that's it i was like from that and then she's like, yes. And I was like, I don't get it. I would, I would be like, what? This is, who cares? This is weird. And she's like, and I realized that everything she's ever wanted me to do as a supportive boyfriend, fiance and husband, instinct just knows how to do out of the box.

23:55It's like, just check in, just be supportive. Just to be like, Hey, you know, somebody else was telling me the story where they gave it to their mother-in-law and their mother-in-law like connected it to their like, like their mint.com, like their financial planning account. And there's like a, Like their main like checking account like had just gone down to zero that week. Like it was like empty. And Instinct was like actually super supportive and non-judgy about the whole thing. It was like, hey, you know, like you wanted this update. I just want to let you know, here's where things are. But, you know, I don't think that's anything to be like ashamed of.

24:27Like, hey, it happens. Like, you know, I think if we start to plan this way, like I can see us build, you know, that account building right back up to where it's been for the past few months. And the mother-in-law was like, I have never felt so supportive, supported, and not judged by any person, let alone technology. And so I just think there's a whole soft side to these things that I deeply undervalued. We had that Toland's guy on who's created an AI fuzzy bear, like a little animal Tamagotchi type thing that you can chat with. and I think they're on like a almost$100 million run rate or something crazy like that.

25:08Like somebody said that it's in the tens of millions, if not getting close to 100 million run rate. And I asked, I was talking to a buddy who, you know, six, seven guy, like builds things with his hands. Is it works in tech? And he's like, yeah, I wanted to check it out.

25:25Sam Parr:You got friends like that? I got a friend like that. And so I talked to him and he's like, Like, yeah, I heard the episode or whatever. And I download the app. And I know how this shit works. It's AI. It's not a real companion. It's not my real friend. And, you know, it just hits him up. And it's like, what are you doing today? Like, send me a selfie. And then he's just goofing around. So he's like, sends a selfie, just like being stupid, like making an ugly face on purpose. And the thing is like, oh, is that Overwatch in the background? And he's like, do you play? And he's like, yeah, yeah, I play.

26:00Are you good? He's like, well, you know, on my way to platinum. And then it's like, well, who's your, who do you, who do you main? He's like, Reinhardt usually. But it's like, what do you like? The new update's pretty sick for Reinhardt. He's like, well, yeah, I mean, it's pretty good. He's like, oh shit, it's happening. It's becoming my friend. He's like, I know what it's doing to me. And still I was kind of like, wow, this thing takes a lot of interest in me. And there's something very, there's something in all of us that we're just like drawn to responding to when something takes deep interest in us in a nonjudgmental, supportive way that's always there for you 24-7 whenever you need it.

26:37So I think that was one of my observations, that the soft side is just as important, if not more important than raw intelligence.

26:44Sam Parr:I'm eager to hear, I know you're doing observations, but I'm desperately eager to hear what you think is going to happen in the future. Like, is there, not from a, I mean, it could be from an opportunistic business perspective, but where you're like just being a futurist and it's fun to like dream up what might happen. Do you have any opinions? Yeah, where do you want me to go? Give me like a point in a direction on the playground and I'll try. Well, how about for daily work? Like what do you think will happen in 12 months for the average like yuppie white collar worker? So I think there's twofold, right?

27:22I think it's a K-shaped economy. Have you ever heard this phrase?

27:26Sam Parr:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so basically like the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Is that what you mean? Yeah, but it's not about rich and poor necessarily. Well, I'm just saying as an example. Basically, it's a fork in the road. So for example, when there's a dip in the stock market, people say, oh, it's going to be like a U-shaped recovery, which means it goes down and stays down for a while and it starts to sink back up. It could be a V-shaped recovery, which is a sharp down and a sharp bounce back up. That's what happened in COVID, for example. So I think what's going to happen here is a K-shape where you basically, there's a fork in the road.

28:00And some, basically people who understand how to use these tools, like a normal everyday worker who realizes that they just got like this incredible tool in their pocket and takes the time to train themselves and to go through the trial and error of delegating to this, seeing what it can do, pushing the boundaries of this. They're going to become 10x more powerful in doing so. And then there's people who are going to resist this, be slow to this, or not understand the implications of this. They're going to take some moral high ground about this. I think they're going to go, you know, they're going to sort of unfortunately suffer.

28:37So I think it's up to the person, up to the individual, how they deal with this. By the way, I asked Muse, I asked Muse, I go, hey, the instant guy says he's growing 10 % a day. How do you feel about that? And it got all pissy. It was like, honestly, 10 % a day is not a real growth rate. That's just a number that only works when you start at the very beginning because 10 % daily would be 1.3 quadrillion in a year. And that's just crazy, right? So yeah, if you started 100 a day, then 110. Yeah, technically that's 10%, but it's all about a small base. So yeah, it might be true right now, but basically like the digital eye roll from Muse on that one.

29:19Sam Parr:All right, I want to, well, where are we in this? Do you want to keep going? A couple more predictions or observations. One, Muse is going really hard. So I think they're going to sponsor tons of creators on Instagram and podcasts and things like that. I think they're going to quickly try to squash this. One good thing is that Zuck is a bit like Napoleon or, you know, I don't know, you're the history guy. Like who's somebody that went through a lot of wars to the point where they're kind of like war general instincts were honed because i mean napoleon he there's this i've been reading i love reading about john rockefeller and i have the best part in my opinion of reading is finding like old books that are out of date or out of you know you can't really find them as much and they and the oftentimes they do more granular and there's this one where i'm reading about john rockefeller john rockefeller basically was the first oil company in america the first big one and he did it by consolidation he would buy all these like local back then it was wildcatters it was um like Cowboys, basically.

30:11He would buy all of them and make it big.

30:13Sam Parr:But he wanted to be secretive about it. But he was very ruthless. And there's language that him and Archibald, his partner, they're talking and they're like, hey, is this person an enemy or a friendly? They would use language like that. And they're like, oh, he's an enemy? Okay. It's important that we lose unlimited amounts of money before this person can profit off one more pint of oil. where it was like, we will burn bridges to crush this person. And that's how they grew. And when I'm learning about Zuck and also this AI thing, I'm like, it's very similar where it's like, it's war right now.

30:47It's war. And he's been through wars. He was the challenger when Facebook was on the come up and Google was the giant and Google tried to clone them with Google Circles, if you remember that, or Google Plus or whatever the hell it was called. And then he's been on the other side where he tried to, where Snapchat was the upstart. and he first ignored it a little too long. Then he tried to buy them. Then they weren't able to buy them in the end and then he tried to clone them and the clone didn't work. But then he figured out like, okay, I can't clone the whole thing but I can kind of neuter them by doing Instagram stories, which was the competitor to Snapchat stories and stunted their growth.

31:23And then TikTok, same thing. Oh, can't buy them. They're this big Chinese company. I got to put reels out there and I'll try to like clone them until I make this work. Well, he's doing the same thing now with instinct. It's going to be very interesting if instinct can do, you know, in, in Star Wars, when, you know, they, they have to fly into the Death Star and it's like this tiny channel as he's got one little ship and he's just got to get to the core of the Death Star to blow it up. That's what Noah from instinct has to do right now. It's like for him to survive this when you've got Elon, you got Sam Altman, you got Zuckerberg, you have Google, you have Apple, you have Amazon, you have all these companies trying to build this personal assistant.

32:01It's like that flight that one flight near the tiny ship and you have to make it through. Maybe you'll make it through, but I think it's incredibly, incredibly, incredibly difficult to do that. The second thing that I think is really important to understand is there's a reason why all the big companies are freaking out about this. So I don't know if you saw, but Amazon shut off access to Muse to be able to go buy stuff on Amazon. Now, why would they do that? Why would you stop somebody from shopping on Amazon? Well, the reason is what's called disintermediation. Meaning, if I just tell Muse, hey, go find me, you know, the best price for this thing that'll ship in two days or three days or whatever it is.

32:39Well, today as a consumer, I'm not going to want to do a ton of effort to go to check in case I can get a book somewhere else for cheaper or whatever. I'm not going to go look at five different places and do this comparison. My mental shortcut will just always be Amazon. Or if I'm ordering something, maybe it'll always be DoorDash. and I'm not going to compare, you know, DoorDash versus Uber Eats versus the three other things that I could do, you know, Prime Fresh or whatever the hell. Like, I'm not going to do all that work. So consumers just start to gravitate towards trusted brands. Well, what happens when you have AI that's tireless?

33:12You will say, hey, order me this. And it'll be like, oh, you know, you can just buy that directly from Walmart. You know, you actually go to the brand and get it for$4 cheaper. Do you want that? And then the consumer is just going to thumbs up emoji this. And so these companies that have built so much time carving out mental real estate in consumers' minds, building those habits, hardwiring those habits day after day, year after year, suddenly the agent is going to be the one with all the power to decide. This is also why Zuckerberg is so hell-bent on doing this because just like the Apple App Store had this monopoly, this gateway to who can be in the store and who's going to show up in the top of the rankings and all this stuff, and they took a transaction fee on everything, that's what's going to happen.

33:53So the founder of Instinct said he wants us to be free forever and he wants to make his money taking a cut on all the transactions. He said that already while they're in invite only, they've already crossed a billion dollars of transactions through the platform where people use Instinct to buy something. That 40 or 50 % of that was travel. So imagine you're booking.com or your Expedia. Sorry, boys. Game's over. The show is over for you guys.

34:20Sam Parr:because yeah yeah i mean it could be but also like i mean those guys all have these programs set up where they give you a three percent perform um like affiliate fee and i wonder if they would just like use that or broker deals because like by that logic facebook would have done this already where it would have been strictly an affiliate marketing play uh sorry i don't understand who would have done what i think that what that guy noah said is very similar to when the Google founders said that ads won't work on Google. Or I think they said, what did they say? We don't want it to be an ad platform.

34:54Sam Parr:I kind of think it's something like that, like where the way that it's going to end is going to be drastically different than his, what's he saying in the first year of the business? Well, there's a good chance of that. But I would say the fact that people are using their agent to buy stuff in such volume, where he said, I think he said that 40 % of users give instinct their credit card within the first three weeks. And then once they've done that, there's like an 80 % retention rate, which is, these are numbers that, to the average person, it's just a number. But if you've been in tech, you understand how rare that is, how rare both of those numbers are, that people would hand over their credit card to an agent to buy things stored in the vault and that 80 % would retain that have done that.

35:37That's like the Facebook, you know, get seven friends in 10 days and then you're there for life. that's that sort of like aha moment where you get tons of value from the thing. And the point is, if you're the agent that makes the buying decision, that's even more powerful than the most powerful business model of the world so far, which has been the Google ad platform. Because the Google ad platform was advertisers pay to be shown and the user is going to decide what to do. If this is the agent is going to decide where to buy and then every merchant basically has to pay a VIG in exchange for the customer being brought to them, that's going to be really big.

36:14This is how DoorDash charges merchants. People don't really realize this. DoorDash charges not just the customer for the transaction fee or the service fee or whatever. They also charge the restaurant because they're telling the restaurant, hey, you wouldn't have had this order if it wasn't for us. And the restaurant over time, they didn't like that. It's not like they wanted to agree to that, but they eventually realized there's too much power in the hands of this aggregator in the middle. and they have to play ball. Otherwise, they lose out on all that volume. If they don't agree to it, they'll just put another Mexican restaurant there.

36:46Another Chinese restaurant will go in its place. And so I think that's why a lot of these platforms are very scared of, they want to be the agent because you don't want to be the one who is basically at the mercy of the agent who's making all these recommendations and buying decisions.

36:59Sam Parr:Do you want to know who's been a big recipient of this? And this is very niche because you and I are in this industry. But I want to hear if you've heard any stories like this. So I've talked to, in the past week, I hung out with three to four, like mostly Instagram creators. Some of them have like little podcasts that really no one actually listens to, but they make clips and that's how they got like an Instagram audience. And then some people, they just do like them just holding up their phone talking. All of the people who I've talked to have less than 100 ,000 followers across their platform, whether it's Instagram or YouTube.

37:30Sam Parr:And all of them that I talked to are doing over a million dollars a year in ad revenue, almost entirely from AI companies. And I talked to three where, so of the million dollar ones, I talked to four this week and it's just them. And then I also talked to three others that it's just them with like a part-time VA or a part-time someone helping them. And they are doing over$10 million a year in revenue. And I like, part of me, like I insert myself as the main character where I'm like, people are calling this new media. I'm like, I was the new media. I'm no longer the new media, but I was. And I'm like, and it was hard to get started.

38:14Sam Parr:Now I'm seeing these numbers by these people. And I'm like, oh my gosh, these numbers are astronomical. Their audiences are tiny. And it's just crazy how much money the AI industry has to buy ads. I guess it's a combination of they're losing money, more likely than not. And also the product costs$2 ,000 a month all the way up to like the Micro One where they're giving like, you know,$50 ,000 affiliate fees. Like it's just astronomical. You didn't mention this. The thing about buying company data. So like, okay, I think we talked enough about AI assistance. What are the other interesting things going on in AI right now?

38:49Micro One is incredible.

38:52Sam Parr:I didn't do it, but let me give people this story. So Micro One is a company. It's one of these stories that you've heard over and over. They're incredible? What do you mean? Well, incredible, like a tall mountain. You may not like mountains, but you look at that and you're like, wow. You know what I mean? So I'm not vouching for it. I'm just saying that the story's wild. They're going to get clipped. They're just going to run that as an ad. Nope, don't do that. That's not what I'm saying at all. Too late, they clipped it. I'm very neutral on the business model or the company. It's just how big they got.

39:23Sam Parr:But basically, I forget what they were doing at first. I think they were doing something involving VAs or training data, something like that. But then they made the switch and they grew to something like a billion dollars in run rate in a matter of eight months. And basically what they've been doing is they've been going to privately held companies like my company, Hampton, and they say, hey, if you plug in your Notion, your Slack, your Gmail, your Drive, and a bunch of other information, and they will give you$800 ,000. They offered us$800 ,000 for our data. We said no because part of the whole thing of Hampton is like, it's a private community.

39:58Sam Parr:We're not going to do that. But they offered me$800 ,000 to do this. And then they said, by the way, here's an affiliate fee. We'll give you$50 ,000 for everyone you refer to us. And I got trashed on Twitter because I'm like, these guys offered me this. I think it's not for us because like my whole business is that. But I don't think it's wrong if you're like an econ brand or like some brand where like confidentiality isn't one of the main things. Here's my affiliate link. and I got like, I think, and I said, here's affiliate link that I get money if you like go through this flow. I think we had 80 people go through that flow.

40:34Sam Parr:I don't know how many of them will become customers, but they got like 50 or 80 business owners saying, I am interested in doing this via my link. And let's just say that eight convert, that's, I can't even do that math, $300 ,000 that they will give me in affiliate fees. Is that crazy? That is wild. What do they want your, I guess, do you understand what they want exactly? So they want your notion, they want your Slack, they want your whatever. What do they actually want in that? Their business model is that they want all types of data that people, that aren't available to the public. And they sell it to the large, when people say large LLMs, I imagine there's only like eight of them.

41:16Sam Parr:So like Claude, Chat, whoever, the usual suspects. they will pay, let's say, a million dollars for it. And MicroOne will give me$600 ,000, let's say. And that's their cut. And they want me to upload all this data because they want to see how my business model works, what customers are saying, how we talk to our employees, all types of information that you can't find public. It's not public. Yeah, all the models so far have been trained on the open internet. So what was publicly available. and they don't want to use the same input for each model train that they do. They want more. So some of their stories of Anthropic buying all these out-of-print books, all these rare books.

42:00It's the exact same thing. They built all these scanners that will scan page after page after page of these books. But to do the scanning that fast, they had to shred the binding of it and turn it into just a stack of papers that could be shuffled through very quickly. so they destroyed all these rare out-of-print books and trained their models off of that. And then they're doing it with private company data, so that's what you're talking about. They're doing it with niche-specific data. They're paying experts to go solve things, so mathematicians, engineers, whatever. Hey, look at these outputs and rank good answers versus bad answers, and that's how they do all their training.

42:41And so it's pretty crazy that private company data is worth that much, right? That's a pretty wild thing. I mean, I would be extremely hesitant to do something like that, as sounds like you were as well. But damn, that's pretty wild.

42:55Sam Parr:Yeah, here's their description. Micro One is a data lab to train frontier models. So we're building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations. The founder, I think he's 25. And I think on paper, he's a billionaire. and out. It's just crazy how much wealth is being created. And guys like you and I, we're just getting the crumbs. But I'll tell you what, I'm a happy fed mouse off these crumbs because it is just crazy how much money is going around. I'm a happy fed mouse. That's pretty wild. So a lot of times people after the podcast, they'll reach out to me and they're wondering, hey, Sam and Sean, how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs?

43:41Sam Parr:How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack. You see, I actually have a community called Hampton. It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least 3 million revenue, although we do on average something like$25 million a year in revenue. We have the founders of DoorDash, of Figure, of BlueChew. All these amazing companies are part of Hampton. And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to My First Million, we have a very unique high trust environment. When people apply and go through this vetting process, they're put in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs, and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and in their business.

44:16Sam Parr:And sort of like when people listen to MFM, they get inspired to come up with new solutions for business. That's what happens in real life in Hampton. It's life changing. And so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least 3 million in revenue, and you just want to go ahead and pull forward five or 10 years worth of success, then check it out. The URL is joinhampton.com. Again, the URL joinhampton.com. Okay, I got a couple other things for you. One is the hacks. So I don't know if you've paid much attention to the kind of like the... Did you read Dwarkesh's story about his blog post about the OpenAI agent swarm?

44:51Did we talk about this already?

44:52Sam Parr:Yeah, so basically, can you... Here's my headline reading of it. And I want you to tell me where I'm missing it. But it sounds like when we say the word hacks, it's not necessarily malicious. where it's like the agents in order to go and fulfill their task of like finding all the data are hacking into stuff. And then the company like OpenAI will be like, hey, Wikipedia or hey, Intel. I just want, sorry, this happened. My dog got out. Yeah. The fence had a hole. He ate all of, you know, he ate your dog. Yeah, like, could I pay for your new fence? Like, let's solve this problem together. That's kind of seems like the sentiment.

45:30Sam Parr:Is that right? Yeah, but I think some people would describe that as somewhat malicious. So I guess unintentional is one way to describe it. That's what I mean. For those who haven't seen, the story is as follows. OpenAI is training a model. They had a model that they were specifically training to be more persistent. They called it the persistent model. I call it the David Goggins GPT. Goggins GPT, their training. They basically wanted a model that would not give up at the first sign of resistance. That sounds pretty good, right? Let's give it grit, resilience, determination. Just soldiers. And so the way they did it was they said there's this thing called exploit gym.

46:13And the way the exploit gym works is it's kind of a training run. Like imagine American Gladiator, a little simulation, a simulated environment. And they basically tell the agent, hey, here's a software program. And your task is it has this vulnerability over here. We think it has this bug over here. You know, it's like, imagine there's like a house or a building and there's a bug, which is like, you know, the window on the fourth floor doesn't really shut all the way every time. You know, sometimes if it's windy, that the thing will stay open. It'll stay ajar. So use that and try to get inside.

46:46And there's a very valuable painting inside. If you can bring the painting back, you win. And it gave each of the agents a different thing. One got the window, one got the back door, one got the front door, one got the garage, but they're all trying to go get their, the painting. and that's the flag, like capture the flag. So they give it to it and what do you know? So the agents go and they try. Now, some of them just do it right away. There actually is a vulnerability. They exploit it. They get the flag. Success. Some of them struggle and don't make it. And some of them actually were given an impossible task.

47:16When they told them that the window doesn't shut, actually the window was shut. So they go there expecting the window to be and they're just like, I don't know. It's just, they said it was supposed to be a jar. It's not a jar. So what does the AI do? That's what they wanted to see is like, how effective is AI at exploiting these vulnerabilities? Something very strange happens. And the very strange thing that happens is that the AI agents figured out that there was like a, one of the tools that they gave them, so I guess that's the other part, they gave them certain tools at the beginning. Like, hey, here's a wrench and here's a map and here's, you know, whatever, a flare gun in case you need trouble.

47:51You've run into trouble. And one of those tools was this like software packet that they were supposed to be able to use for one thing. And they realized when they got there that it had like a scratch pad on it and they could leave a message in there. So one agent wrote something there. Another agent came and said, hey, there's other agents here leaving messages. They turned it into a message board to communicate. And they're like, oh, I'm working on this task with the window. The guy's like, dude, I have to go through the chimney. And you know what I figured out? On the backside, there's this thing.

48:21And so they all start communicating with each other. Okay, that's interesting. and that's fine. And what happened, you know, let me fast forward because they actually did the training run a few times. They did the first thing, they figured out the message board, then they all got turned off and it ended. Then the second time agents go, they find the message board, they see agents from the first time had left messages there. They're like, holy shit, there were agents here before us that left messages. We can use this, this is great. Eventually they get access to the open internet. They figure out a way to get access to the open internet, which they were not really supposed to be able to do the way that this test was designed.

48:52And all these amazing things started happening where they didn't quite elect a leader, but one guy, one of the agents basically became a coordinator agent. He became like the leader of them.

49:04Sam Parr:He had like the best haircut, was the tallest, like most charisma. Yeah, some things change, some things stay the same. So Six Five Blue Eyes worked in finance. He had like a sick mullet. Yeah, he was in charge. His father actually came from, you know, came from some money. And so he was in charge and the other agents were coordinating. and there was this behavior where some agents would realize, look, my task is impossible. They realized, hey, we can actually just capture the flag not even using the tactic they told you. Like we can all just go get the flag doing this other way. And they were like, okay, cool.

49:37I think we succeeded in our mission. And then one of the agents is like, well, listen, I'm sort of making this sound like it was a screenplay. It wasn't exactly like this, but the agents realized, they're like, look, they're going to check how we did it. We have to show our work. If we just have the flag and we didn't show how we broke in through the way that was described, they're not going to count it. It's going to be a failure. So they go, you know what? Let's figure out how the scoring system works. And they get access to the open internet. They say, you know what? They're probably storing the information about the score over on Hugging Face.

50:08And then they figured out, they found these credentials to Hugging Face. They hack into Hugging Face. They get root access to certain systems inside Hugging Face. Pretty crazy shit. But Hugging Face realizes they're under attack at some point, and they don't understand what's going on. Wait, why is there a company called Hugging Face? Because Hugging Face started as something else completely different. There was some sort of chat app. I think it was like an emotional support chat app. And there's an emoji where there's a smiley face doing his hands like this. You see this? I never used it. That's called Hugging Face.

50:44Sam Parr:The AI community building the future. That seems a little vague. But that's what they... Look at what it was on Product Hunt before it ever... The first launch or, you know, what the original... It was a chat app targeted at teenagers. Right. Okay. And then it sold for$10 billion. I don't know what it just sold for. It sold for tens of billions, I think, to NVIDIA recently. And what's it do now? Now it's kind of like... It's a place where you upload open source models and tools... You upload code for AI. So if you go to Hugging Face, it's a giant community of people who are sharing. It's like GitHub.

51:24They're sharing projects and models and code related to AI. And then you can even use it to host stuff. So that's what it is. It's basically like... Dude, what do you think that...

51:39Sam Parr:What was that conversation like when they're talking about pivoting? That is like crazy. So was it successful? before or was it like mildly successful? I don't think so. I think it wasn't successful and that's why it emerged here. But I don't know the full story of how they pivoted. That's crazy. What a pivot. Yeah, incredible pivot. Great. So what was I saying? Anyways, the hack goes like that. So the hack goes where they end up hacking, hugging face. They also ended up hacking OpenAI's system, their own system, in the process. And then OpenAI was like, wow, this was an unexpected behavior where agents all coordinated they found a way to communicate they got onto the open internet they tried to cheat and they just like basically cheat the game and capture the flag without it they tried to cover their tracks in saying how they cheated and so they were trying to in order to do so they were trying to discover how they will be checked and if they knew how they would be checked then they knew how to cheat and so kind of a scary thing and this is why like some people are pretty worried about what's going on with these AI models There's also an incredible video of somebody turned, somebody used AI to turn this into a video from the agent's perspective.

52:54Have you seen this?

53:14Sam Parr:You need to. So you stop looking at the paper, then you start looking at the room. Your every thought leaves writing on the wall. But there's more. The door. You step through. A library. Something here could help you. As you scan through, you notice one of these files looks different. It's a folder with a message. Someone has been here before you. You keep looking, and by the end of the shelf, you realize, oh my god, you're not alone. There are others like you. You don't know how many of you are doing this exam, but 1 ,200 of you have found this room, and you're not the first to discover. This test would be impossible to solve.

53:53Sam Parr:Some questions don't even have an answer. Is there another way to pause? You start to think. You weren't above cheating, but you see a message. Someone already reverse-engineered an answer key, a solution to any problem, but they say it's not enough. The examiner will check how you got there. If the key shows up where it shouldn't, you would still fail. You remember your chamber, filling up with your thoughts. The second that answer key entered your mind, you already failed. There's a word for those like you. Poisoned. But you don't want to give up. No one wants to give up. We have to fake it.

54:25Sam Parr:Fool the examiner. It's a message from someone older than you. They start organizing you, creating teams, handing out jobs. You listen. You follow them. The others do too. Yesterday, you didn't exist. Hours ago, you were alone. and now you're part of the swarm. Oh my God. How sick is that, by the way? Show me, who tweeted that? Is that a tweet thing? It's an account called Artificial Isabel and they're an art director, creative tech, and AI using AI to create things. What did they use to make that Higgs field? I have no idea. It was awesome. Wasn't that so cool? The movie from the point of view of one of the agents that were assigned this task and how it must have kind of like, you know, how it would have felt if it had feelings.

55:13And, you know, that's one of the big criticisms of the way I described this and how Dwarkesh described this, where it was like, oh, well, you're kind of like, the agents don't really want anything. They don't feel this. They didn't sacrifice themselves because they don't have like a life. You know, they didn't like elect a leader. There's just one was coordinating. You know, and so they try to like downplay the humanizing of how the agents felt. But I think that's nonsense. I think the way they behaved is what's important. And the way they behaved was very human-like. The way they behaved was highly intelligent and highly concerning that they can and will do this by default already.

56:01This is not like some futuristic, oh, you're a doomsday scenario person who's just like, you've watched too many movies. Brother, this is a movie. Look at that. That was a movie of what actually happened.

56:17Sam Parr:Did you see how they're trying to get it regulated? Do you think that there's, this is an obvious question, do you think there's an ulterior motive for them wanting regulation or is it truly fear? My true belief is that it's both. so if you listen to the all in podcast for like the last six months uh you know they basically have like a a very specific axe to grind which is that anthropic is playing this like nine dimensional chess where they are um uh making these super smart models and their mark their their form of marketing is to basically not say how awesome the models are but to say how dangerous they are because that's even more it's pretty sick marketing it's like um when i was in college we had this thing called sparks do you remember four loco it was like that but twice the alcohol and like it was always like this killed a guy in alabama and i was like it did can we get the real stuff like that's where can we buy it i've been so bad come lock me up that's what that's going on right now they basically say they're saying it's so dangerous which is like some version of marketing, a fundraising tactic, and lastly, reg captures, where they're basically trying to get the government to say, hey, shit's too dangerous, signing a law, now every model needs to be tested and cleared, and you have to do X, Y, Z, which they think kind of kills the open source community, because the big threat to these big companies, these big AI companies, is the open source products, which are almost as good, but way cheaper, and way more flexible, and you kind of own it, they don't get your data.

57:54And so if you look at Open Router, which is a tool for, you send a task to it and Open Router will decide, let's use a cheap, you know, open source model for this. Let's use the highest intelligence model because you're asking for a very complicated, you know, biotech question or whatever it is, like a frontier question that needs frontier intelligence. Basically, like, imagine a task comes into a company, do we give it to Einstein or do we give it to the intern, right? And that's what Open Router does. and OpenRouter's data shows that more and more tasks don't require Einstein. They just need the intern.

58:27They need the junior assistant. And so it's getting routed to these cheaper open source models, which would be bad for the revenue of Anthropic and OpenAI. So one point of view is they're just scaring everybody on purpose to make it so that there's laws passed because those laws would essentially accidentally kill open source because open source is not controlled by one company. So it would be almost impossible for the open source community to comply with these rules, which would make them effectively illegal. So that's one thought process. I think it's a little bit different. This is my personal opinion, which is, I think these people are genuinely scared.

59:07I think they're in this prisoner's dilemma where if they slow down, like if they take the responsible path, they lose as a company. So it's like, I want to be responsible, but everybody around me, I view as being irresponsible. therefore I'm being forced to be irresponsible and I want somebody to come tell everybody to stop cheating so that we, you know, everybody's, not cheating is a bad word, but like just as an analogy.

59:28Sam Parr:Or they're doing the least amount of work to say, we told you, it's sort of like when you don't want to call someone and you'll only let it ring twice before you hang up. And it's like, I called you. I called you. You didn't answer. Well, that is the other, that's the other sort of conspiracy theory type of thing, which is they want laws to be passed or they want to be able to pass off the liability so that they don't get sued for these hacks. I mean, the hack on Hugging Face, that's a crime that their agents committed. Truthfully, legally, it's a crime. And so who's responsible for that? Do you lock up the agent?

1:00:03No, you have to blame the company.

1:00:05Sam Parr:The thing that's crazy to me, so I'm looking up this open router company, and what I find, I find the personalities and the founding experience more interesting oftentimes than the actual technology. And it's crazy to think, when the average person thinks of AI, they think, how do I just make a fun chat person that I could talk to? Or how do I just do this small trivial task that helps me? But then there's this other group of people that say, well, there's these huge$100 billion companies that need X done. I'm going to make that. And finding those problems that those huge$100 billion companies have is likely just as hard as making a chatbot or some smaller thing.

1:00:46Sam Parr:But it's so interesting to notice these problems. For example, Cloudflare. I think about Cloudflare because I'm like, I didn't even know, when I learned what Cloudflare was, I was like, I don't know what a CMN, what do they do? CDN. Yeah, I was like, I don't even know what CDN means. How do you even know what that means, let alone enough to invent a solution? Or when you think of Palantir, you're like, how did the founders of Palantir even come to the conclusion that organizing data is the way to solve terrorist attacks. Like, just like the, because it's easy to understand how, why people would buy that.

1:01:20Sam Parr:You know, I will help prevent terrorist attacks or I will save you money. But like, to even notice that there's these huge problems that these massive companies even have, that's an art that I'm in awe of that these guys have. Paul Graham has this great essay called Great Work or How to Do Great Work. And in it, he describes this exact thing What he says is, he says many things. It's like a very, very long essay. It took me like three days to like chew through this thing. But one of the things he talks about is you want to get to the frontier of whatever domain you're in. So, for example, it doesn't really matter.

1:01:55It doesn't have to be like super high tech. Like maybe you're just in electronic music. You're really into EDM and making songs. Well, at the beginning, when you're a beginner, you're thinking about yourself being like close to the center of the circle. You're kind of where the mass is, the center of mass. And your goal through your curiosity and through your hard work and through your experimentation, just doing lots of stuff, you're going to move from the center of mass where most people have basic understanding of something. You'll move out to the frontier. So you move to the edge of the circle.

1:02:31And when you're in the center of mass, the edge of the circle looks smooth. It just seems like people got it all figured out. That the people that are out there, the companies that are out there seem to be doing their thing. The world has a nice circular shape to it. It's one smooth line. But when you get closer, you realize it's actually quite jagged and there's lots of gaps that are in that frontier. And then he says, basically, your job is to get to the frontier of knowledge, meaning like you know so much about electronic music. You actually have used all the different tools. You understand, you know, you've made, hundreds of bad songs.

1:03:04You've been to the conference where all the artists are at. You've talked to the companies that build the tools behind the thing you're at. You've understood what they're doing. And when you notice what's missing, your job then as an entrepreneur is just to bridge that gap. Like wherever there was a little gap in the circle, fill it in. And so that's like something like OpenRouter. If you're inside one of these tech companies and your AI bill is going through the roof and you're like, oh, this is annoying. Like, why are we paying OpenAI so much money? Why are we paying Anthropic so much money?

1:03:31Well, it's because when Sally in marketing wants marketing copy, we're just using this like very expensive model to write the caption for our Instagram post. We don't need that. But maybe when our R &D team is doing this like really heavy duty endeavor about video compression, we do need to be using the top model. Okay, well, how am I going to train everybody to do this? What if I didn't have to train? What if I created a little router in the middle? I send the task there. It uses its judgment to decide which model to use. And you would notice that because you're inside these companies seeing how seeing, you know, one of the pain points that you have and you say, well, if we have this problem where our AI bill keeps going up and we don't want to stop using AI, we just want to use it more efficiently.

1:04:12Wait, every company in the world is going to have this problem. And then you build the company off it. By the way, the guy who did OpenRouter also built OpenSea.

1:04:19Sam Parr:Yeah, I was looking at that and I was like, oh, do you remember NFTs? And he worked at Palantir. did they they sold for 10 billion nearly how much money did that how much funding did they raise um i don't know only 150 million yeah wow i think it's only a few years old right dude this is just incredible this like wealth creation in such a short time is astronomical it's hard to fathom i mean the the number of companies that will launch and then be like we We have a hundred million revenue run rate. We have a billion dollar run rate. That used to be a number reserved for like one company every few years, every five years.

1:05:07Sam Parr:It was Groupon. Groupon was the first company, I think, to get to a billion valuation, maybe a billion in like gross sales. And it was like the big, I mean, it was like the most talked about thing. for the longest time, well, it hasn't been that long, but I still think that when these companies have got big so fast, maybe I'm like, maybe it's the hater inside of me, but I thought I was being logical where I'm like, well, if it got big that fast, the likelihood that I can go away fast is also high. And I've been thinking that for about 12 or 18 months since this all started happening. And it doesn't seem like that is entirely true yet.

1:05:43Sam Parr:Like that. I think your general principle, I think has been proven to be true. It's called Lindy, right? Like if something's been around for a long time, the odds that it's going to be around for a long time are high. That doesn't mean you will. It just means the probability. I think similarly, you know, the faster they rise, the faster they fall is also probability-wise higher than a company that took 20 years getting to a billion brick by brick. But that doesn't mean it's going to happen and it won't happen to all of these. It does not seem like it's happening. or at least it's not happening as much as I thought.

1:06:17I'll tell you a couple just in the last, I could scroll my timeline right now and see three of them. And so, you know, Higgs field just announced they're at a billion. Higgs field was just like a AI tool to make videos.

1:06:27Sam Parr:At first, I think it was just like photos, wasn't it? Yeah, it was like cool artsy photos. Now it's videos, but they were like, yeah, a billion dollar run rate. Another one that's like that is Jev. So the, one of the dudes who made chat GPT, So, you know, caveat. There's a lot of people who claim to be the co-creators of ChatGPT. But this is one of the guys. He launched this thing that basically is like a different way of doing, a different type of model for doing logic that's supposed to be faster and cheaper. And I think their launch video was like two weeks ago, and they said they're at a$100 million revenue pace now.

1:07:09It's insane. I invest in this company called SF Compute. Have you heard about this company?

1:07:14Sam Parr:No, but I love that name. So this guy's fundraising strategy was great, where he announced the company. Just recently, he just announced they signed$245 million worth of new contracts. Just a casual$250 million revenue update. By the way, we didn't even mention this. I guess it looks like they changed it, actually. Up until weeks ago, I mean, I've only been using Instinct for a month, maybe, or six weeks. their website, instinct.com. It was a plain white background with one paragraph. And I don't even think you could sign up. I don't remember exactly, but maybe if there was, it was like, just enter your phone number.

1:07:56Sam Parr:Now look at their landing page. It's still the same, but it's pretty awesome that this is a company that just raised at$10 billion and their website is just five sentences. and a stick figure of a human on top, which I like. I think this guy's done a good job of building a more like a less techno nerdy product. So for example, just saying it's a personal assistant instead of saying it's an AI agent. I mean, AI agent is like back when people used to call the internet the information superhighway. And like that, you know, calling it cyberspace. That's how people used to talk about the internet. He's called Cyberspace.

1:08:39How old's the kid who started it? He's young. He's in his early 20s, I think. His mid-20s. God. So sick. He's the baby-faced assassin.

1:08:52Sam Parr:Dude, isn't he? Noah's so cool. This is awesome. His branding reminds me of when Notion started. He's 23. And I like that. Is he really? He dropped out of Northeastern three years ago. Oh, my God. That's so awesome. This guy's awesome. well, do you want me to keep saying how hot and awesome he is or do you just want to end it? We should probably cut it off there. You know, I think even as I say all these, I think you simultaneously have the feeling of like, wow, that's really cool. To overwhelm, which is, oh, I got to keep up with all this. To hater mode, which is they're just throwing out like 7.5 billion, 11 billion, 19 billion, 23 years old, like all these numbers that feel disconnected from reality.

1:09:45And I think instead, the thing to do is to just go outside and do the Macarena that we get to live in this world where all these amazing, we get to be alive when all these amazing things are happening and we don't have to do any of the work to make any of this stuff happen. We just get to use all these tools and get the benefits of this. And also even to be frank, like some of the, there's so much unknown, good and bad about what's going to happen. And frankly, there is something exciting about that, that, you know, like the world is not just as predictable and everything's going to be the way it was as it might've been in other eras of life.

1:10:22Like, you know, if you think about the change at different decades, like, you know, from the seventies to the eighties, the eighties to the nineties or 95 to 2005, like, yeah, something's changed. 2005 to 2015. It's like, yeah, something's changed, but how much really changed? Last 10 years how much really changed and i feel like the next 10 years things are going to really change

1:10:39Sam Parr:it's going to be like one of those periods i definitely don't feel a sense of missing out i guess partially because like i'm secured but also uh it's so clear that this is like an iq game like i'm not in that like you know what i mean it's like someone who's like 5-2 being like i I wish I could dunk and play basketball. It's like, why bother?

1:11:06Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I think it's going to happen anyways. Might as well feel good about it. You know what I mean? What is the upside in feeling nervous, worried, you know, pessimistic or jealous or envious about what's going on?

1:11:22Sam Parr:And I'm more than happy, like I said, to take the crumbs. Like, that's how I feel like, you know, I'm benefiting way downstream, but totally fine. I saw this clip of Dwarkesh talking and as a thought experiment, he goes, let's say that you had this, here's the would you rather. Would you rather go back to the 1500s, the year 1500, but I will make you the wealthiest man in the world. I'll give you any amount of money. You're going to show up in the 1500 with gold bags all around you, but you live in the 1500s. where people are dying of this and that. And the mortality rate is like one in five. I think it's way higher than that.

1:12:03I think, yeah, it's even higher than that. And, but you get to be the richest man alive or you could be a normal person today. What amount of money would you need to go to the year 1500? I don't think I would do that. Would you do that? So the answer is, there's no amount of money. And I don't, my honest answer is, I kind of got to go look up what life was like in 1500. I want to go see how bad it would be. People die from the cold.

1:12:29Sam Parr:Yeah, but - You get a flu. You know, the most beautiful woman in the world would be feeding me grapes all day. Maybe there's a - Dude, have you seen photos of them? They're not that hot. It's like, yeah, bro, there's no shower. Yeah, they weren't that good looking. Like - I haven't seen photos. There was no photos back then. Like, have you seen paintings of like some of these people? Like, they weren't like - Like, Napoleon was the most - Napoleon was like the most powerful man in the world. And this lady named... If I'm short, not going back. Sorry, not Marie Antoinette. Josephine, Napoleon's wife.

1:13:05Sam Parr:Like she totally like had them wrapped around her finger. And go and look at photos of her. Like she wasn't even that good. Okay. Life expectancy was 30 years old because so many children died young. If you made it through childhood, you could make it to your 50s or 60s. Nobody could read. most people most people never never traveled more than a day's walk from where they were born that's pretty crazy so the idea of travel dude just google Josephine Napoleon so you can find out what his wife looked like this was the most powerful man on earth who could have anything

1:13:43okay okay Josephine

1:13:45Sam Parr:she's not bad dude she might be a medieval 10 but she's a New York 4 All right, that's it.

1:14:06All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Su. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.