Inside the AI Gold Rush (One Year Later)

29:14But something is deeply wrong that it's so confident when it doesn't have the tool. Totally. Something is wrong there. Like if you were just dealing with another human or another being. They would say, like, I can't count. I can't count. They would just tell you. Yeah, you don't know. You know you get it wrong all the time. People are shouting at you they get it wrong. Like, I don't know. It speaks to some breaking, something being wrong. I mean, it was like this same day there was some tweet about how it got a gold medal on the Math Olympiad or whatever, which is like the hardest math test we've invented for human beings.

29:41And then I'm like, I can't count fucking pomegranate seed. It's like worse than a three-year-old. This was solved by Dustin Hoffman and the Rain Man. Like, this could be done. Yeah. So my point to come back to this is that I think for visual audio tool use whatever you know James's category There's just a long way to go in a lot of these areas, right? But I think if you're like okay text in text out, you know, we're already at this gold medal, you know US math Olympiad level I think that you know 050 607, you know, I know they renamed all these fucking things So whatever numbering scheme you want to take but the next two or three generations of models I can see us getting to a text in text out you know AGI level of thinking right where I for me the leap forward we took between GPT 4.0 and O3 was the first time that I really believed you know I got AGI pilled that like oh yeah as at least as a chat bot this thing is going to be you know much much smarter than the average human and basically able to do anything and potentially break ground in terms of scientific discoveries and other things like that related theme my last theme related and i just wanted to add it on as a sort of postscript um we sort of forget again another old news thing that the term vibe coding was coined this year like the idea yeah what karpathy's tweet was like january this year or something january is not this year that's like a different year no it was it was this year it's been a crazy year like so i would just say as a PostScript as an extension of the thinking model progress and as opposed, you know, an extension of what we've seen with these text in textile models.

31:18I would call this the year of vibe coding, right? I mean, this is them clearly the mimetic phrase of the year. There's a million startups that are getting crazy valuations off of it. And we were having Guillermo at Vercel and Omjad at Replit, both on stage, different panels. We had Lovable at CV London, you know, all this stuff, right? I would say internally to our company that all of our designers and product managers now believe they can code, you know, websites and prototype things for internal tools. Like we have clearly, you know, Cerebral Valley's logo is some 3D AI generated thing or like the design was human, but I think the animation was AI.

31:54So I would just say vibe coding as a phrase that has entered our lives, you know, representing the idea of telling the coding bot to what to do and then getting back results and sort of riding the vibes. as Karpathy said when he coined it, you know, was a big, big deal. And I think was a huge part of what we actually saw happen in the world this year based on large language models and AI. So yeah, those are my two. I love how your strategy is look at the dates and be like, Oh, some of these things we take for granted are, we're so greedy, you know, it's like a lot has happened and it's still very current.

32:27And so we're going to be unpacking those, those themes. Well, you spent all this time complaining about things that were too early i'm saying no no no i like it i'm sincere i think it's a good point and you're differentiating obviously agents and other stuff you know we got hype right i'm not i'm not criticizing these are the things that actually worked this year in my opinion right yes and date them to 2025 yeah yeah i have a uh tangent across out of that uh theme for max i guess uh um i'm calling it the the jagged edge of ai essentially if you're not someone who's using these coding models or vibe coding all the time or playing with the latest VO model like or Sora like you're just not really seeing the dramatic improvements so I think most people in the world are you know maybe using chat GPT5 now and getting a little of this thinking and reasoning experience, but not much beyond that.

33:35And then they are thinking, oh, this is going to be another overpromising technology. This is kind of a Silicon Valley pipe dream, AGI. And then what you hear from the labs themselves is like, nope, everything's going pretty well. like on track to AGI, you know, we're going to have automated science in a couple of years. But Dario made some predictions that aren't really holding up, right? Like some of these predictions. I think that was, didn't he say 90 % of code was going to be written six months ago? I think that's not that far off inside of Anthropik. Like I think like, this is like self-driving.

34:14Just like definition question or something or? No, no, no. Self-driving where it was just like tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. We're almost there. No, no, no. I'm literally saying Like I think today you could make an argument based on what I've heard from Anthropic that, you know, 90 % of the code is written. You're saying it's a human problem. The humans just haven't really figured out how to use the good technology. Yeah, exactly. Like and I you hear from open AI researchers and engineers that they like vibe coded or, you know, used Codex, their own version of Cloud Code to build like a lot of the products that came out at Dev Day.

34:50So I actually think there's just like more adoption happening within labs than people realize. And like the people who are AGI-pilled in the labs have like a good reason to be. And we're not seeing all of that. Yeah. I mean, I agree with the jagged frontier in general. I think that it's already not evenly distributed how good these models are at some things. And I think particularly, I think the sort of GPT-5 launch to your point was sort of this anti-PR moment where people are like, well, AI, like, it's not really any better now. It's just sort of like, this is kind of sex. And it's like, well, try clicking the little bit.

35:29It's insane. It takes some, you have to do the work, you know, you have to find the value in chat GPT. But it's insane, this picture that you're painting that it's like, oh, yeah, they just have access to chat GPT and they can't see the value. I'm like, what? Do you agree with my sort of story or version of that, that most people are kind of, yeah, to Max's point, disappointed by the ChatGBT5 launch? Yeah, I think there are a lot of sort of skeptics. It takes too much work to get the value out of it. And people need to be led to water. That's what I keep saying. You know, it sort of needs to be handed to them.

36:10Here's the thing it can do. I hear a lot from even people in Silicon Valley who say, oh, the labs are lying about AGI. If you look at what OpenAI is releasing, it's Sora and they're going to just hack attention. And now Sam is talking about erotica in ChatGPT. So it's all a lie. We're talking about AGI less, right? The public commerce, it doesn't feel like the labs are talking about AGI. I don't agree with that. I think they still talk about it a lot. Like, I mean, yeah. I think they, Sam Alman, was talking about it on the live stream today. I mean, one thing. I mean, Microsoft, right? Like, they just announced this.

36:58Yes, it's contractual. Contractual, yeah. Microsoft had this deal with OpenAI, and, you know, some of the triggers are, some of the deal terms are conditional on AGI. But in some ways, it goes both ways because it's a deal. So Microsoft could be like, AGI is not close. That's good for us. We have a better deal. You know, so maybe OpenAI thinks it's close. Now, I guess OpenAI can declare AGI to get out of the contract. And then there's like an independent panel of reviewers that will decide if AGI has actually been achieved, which I thought was pretty interesting. Here's the last theme that I'll be quick about.

37:32Don't say EA. Don't say effective altruist. I mean, not like we're bringing that up all the time, but I think, you know, Anthropic has obviously run away from that term. You know, we had, well, we had Holden, right, who is a former head of, yeah, speak at one of them. So it's come up. He's married to Danielle at Anthropic. She spoke. Like, Anthropic doesn't want to talk about effective altruism anymore. And then there's this sort of Trump world sort of thing. You know, you saw David Sachs fighting with Jack Clark over having any sort of safetyism. And so it's beyond just don't say EA. It's will people talk about safety at all and how much in sort of a Trump world is even just worrying about AI safety lib coded and therefore nobody wants to talk about it.

38:21Yeah. David Sachs went like further and said all of this was regulatory capture, which I thought was just a very strange jump. Like it's clearly not performative to your point. Like they've been talking about this for a decade. Everything he does is disingenuous. All his arguments are motivated for some end. So he cannot comprehend someone having an argument just on principle. All right. Those are our themes. I'm giving myself the last word on that one. Very excited for this next segment. We're going to go into the draft. We've been doing this for a couple of years now. So we already have our picks and we're going to be sort of dropping and then picking up some new ones.

39:03And I'm very excited to say with the upped production value on the Newcomer Podcast, we have a hype video to catch you up on what we've done to try and make this comprehensible so you can follow along this ultimate feat of nerddom, which is taking what people do for cool things like sports and using it to pick not just AI nerdy things, but companies. I feel like it's a double whammy of loserdom in that we're rooting for companies to succeed and we're interested in tech. So anyway, here's that hype video.

40:03AI, Glean, and Mistral AI, Databricks, Pinecone, Cohere, Modular, and Imbue, Hugging Face, Anthropic, AI21 Labs, Replit, and Adept. After a year of celebration and regret, I'm dominating right now. Bad pick, bad pick. In like six months, that has just totally changed. The GMs went back to the table to evaluate their teams and prepare to add two second round draft picks. With Eric in the lead in 2024, followed by James and Max struggling to hold on to his franchise. Death-defying public IPOs, market fluctuations, and many rounds of funding later, the boys are back in the hot seat once again, all in the hopes of glory on November 1st, 2028, when the champions will be crowned by total market cap valuation.

40:45Welcome to the 2025 AI Fantasy Draft League, presented in partnership by Newcomer. Wow. The production value has just skyrocketed. If that had come out before TBPN existed i would say we should start tbpn not like tbpn invented production value youtubers have been doing this forever everybody's yeah but anyway i'm look we ripped off espn before they did okay i know and riley uh my business guy literally one of his his main editorial insight the whole time he's been here he's been with me three years has been like you need to be more like sports you need to be more like sports he's like i couldn't be more I take this seriously, so I feel like the sports thing is a little glib sometimes.

41:35Anyway, I love that. That's great. We should get into it. James, you're both a player but also sort of the game master of this. I don't know. What do you call it when you run the league? Isn't there a term? Commissioner. Commissioner. Okay. Yeah.

41:52Yeah. This is year three. Year three of the draft. Um, we've been, uh, working on this, um, for a while now. We all have teams, um, just to set the, uh, the rules again, you know, we drafted a few teams originally. Now there's like waiver pickups and you can add, you can add and drop teams. We're drafting companies that, uh, have raised over a hundred million dollars, have a core use of generative AI or a core role in the generative AI ecosystem. There are some excluded companies if they're really focused on bio health, defense, cloud computing or chips or silicon. We blocked the whole chip infrastructure thing, which is sort of funny in retrospect now that everything's flowing there.

42:39But we excluded that. Yeah, we could always bring it back if you guys don't think we have enough companies. Not on the spot. But we're not focused on robotics companies or companies based in China. And yeah, it's a snake draft. This season, this year. I always like to say I insisted that we have an auction for who goes first. And we auctioned and I paid$75 billion so that I could pick OpenAI first. Because my view from the beginning was that OpenAI was going to swamp it all. And you needed the winner. It's a home run business. So far, that strategy is doing well, though. So far, so far, OpenAI is worth more than James and my team combined, which is a perfect expression of power law dynamics.

43:28Now, you did pay a$75 billion hand cap, so it's a little bit under, but it's pretty damn close, which is kind of mind boggling. But it wasn't like, oh, I just happened to go first by some random chance. I paid for the right, knowing that we would fight for OpenAI. And you, your team's worth close to$510 billion right now, including that handicap of$75 billion. Max, your team's worth$150 billion. And my team is worth close to$400 billion. Just to catch you up on last season, we dropped a few companies and we had some exits. So that opened up new slots on our teams. I drafted XAI with the first pick last year, and that's been a huge win, now rumored to be valued around$200 billion.

44:14Great fall-in-your-lap sort of opportunity. Yeah, I mean, is this the moment where I get to say I basically got coin-flipped out of being in second place? Because if I had drafted XAI, I would be in second place by a mile, just like James, for the record. Fair, fair. Well, fortunately for you, Max, you get to draft first this year. Yeah, I know. And this is the year where there's no obvious wins. Yeah, I know. This is, oh, wow. I get the first pick of the year where everything's worth$10 billion and nothing's worth 20. So I guess first to start, Max, do you want to just quickly go, you know, run through your team and then also let us know if you're dropping any of your team?

44:56Sure. My team today is Databricks, Cohere, Modular, Scale, Sierra, Sakana, and Hebbia. You know, it's not great other than Databricks. I did get an exit with Scale at$29 billion. Are we calling that an exit, basically? I'm calling that. We've gone through this a couple times where there's been these pseudo exits count. So I'm counting that. Yeah, again, I'm in last place by a huge margin. Not, you know, my team out on the field has just not really been performing. Sierra is a good company. And Kohir, I think, is going to have a second. I think they're holding on. There's some value here. I think ultimately, you know, as I said earlier, had I won the coin flip and gotten to pick XAI, I would be breathing down Eric's neck, kind of like James.

45:50And instead, I'm a joke looming far in the background. So with that, I'm going to do some aggressive restructuring of my team this year and do some heavy dropping and try to pick up a lot of value in a hurry. So I'm out on skill. Yeah, I'm also going to drop modular. I'm also going to drop Sakana and I'm also going to drop Hebbia. So I'm going to make four picks in addition to my two picks that I get as part of the draft this year. So you get four pick. or yeah you get four plus two so you get six picks yes that's a lot yeah yes i'm taking i'm shooting my shot here at restructuring look sometimes you gotta have a rebuilding year and i think you gotta you gotta go all in which is what i'm doing this year so we're really going for it eric you're gonna pick second this year um yeah so my team first of all i've dropped nobody all my exits are from actual deals so i think that's another point of my favor But okay, I currently have OpenAI, Glean, Mistral, Perplexity, Safe Superintelligence, and Harvey.

47:01Codium just exited, so I'm slash windsurf, whatever you want to call them. So James has that at$2.4 billion. I've been scrutinized those small potatoes. And then I've already exited inflection and character. so we i replaced those last time so the i have an extra spot thanks to windsurf yes um but otherwise yeah i'm i'm holding on i i like i like mine i mean who knows what's happening to save super intelligence we're just betting on ilia there perplexity obviously lots of zeitgeist glean you know i really believe in the business i just don't know it you know i think that one has the lowest to fall it's just like does it have the true insanity you know it seems like this this thing is supposed to end what we said 2028 november three years like the bubble could still be going for all we know but glean i feel like bubble or not i'm i'm i'm betting on that one um yeah so i i like this team and harvey i mean you know we're putting them on stage at cerebral valley they're getting they're getting just another boot the little boost that they need you know to really go to your point to your point it'll be it'll be hilarious if in 2028 where the bubble has popped and the stock market has collapsed and the final scoring is really just about like whose businesses collapsed the least in the last year.

48:23Yes, that's how bubbles look. Mark Cuban made his fucking fortune son at the right time. You know, like yeah, your scale deal could be... Like OpenAI will be like minus 400 billion and like, you know, James and I will have these like little like cobbled together stones. Companies can only go to zero. You can't be minus 400 billion. I don't know what you're... No, I mean on your current valuation, like from$500 to$100 or something. Oh, I see. I'll drop from you. I thought like they were going to be in debt to the Saudis or something. No, no, no. I just meant$400 down from today, not minus$400 valuation.

48:59We'll see. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so three picks for Eric, two new picks, and one exit. my team is Hugging Face, Anthropic, Replit, XAI, Runway, Eleven Labs, and Poolside. Getting some value from XAI, obviously, and Anthropic. The rest, sort of small potatoes, but Poolside is kind of rumored at that$12 billion valuation recently, which I think is interesting um 11 labs just had a tender at 6.6 billion um and runway rumored at around 5 billion so uh some value here i'm definitely thinking about dropping hugging face this year that's i don't have any exits this year so i'm dropping i'm gonna drop hugging face they just haven't raised brutal they just haven't raised um you know i never thought that pick made sense we We should talk a little bit when you made it.

49:59We did kind of shit talk that pic. So you guys were right. We also shit talked other pics. I mean, I don't know what's going on there. It's an interesting question because they were the hottest company in the universe kind of when you picked them at the small scale. They were really, really, really zeitgeisty in the early stages. And I don't know. They're sort of out there. People put their models up on Hugging Face. but maybe for some reason they have not gotten that ai premium like everyone else yeah i i mean they did rate i think they where were they at when i drafted them i mean they weren't they at four yeah four four billion um so four and a half yeah so i don't know i don't it just seems like maybe hard to get another round done at a higher valuation there so um i think that i'm gonna to have to drop and free up a spot there.

50:50The other ones are a little trickier because they're all doing pretty well. But are they the next open AI? Poolside is a black box. Poolside's a black box. Poolside still feels in the bigger, big, you know, go bigger. Replica's still hot, obviously. Omjad's coming to the conference. XAI is great. Runway's pretty exciting. in the video space. 11 Labs is raising at, you know, seemingly every year at increasingly large valuations. So I don't know. That's a good one. I think I'm just going to leave it at that and take three new picks. Great. All right, let's do this thing. All right. Time to pick.

51:34Time to pick. Max with the first pick of year three. I'm going to go with my gut here, even though this technically isn't the highest valuation on the board and just go with the strongest vibes, I think, available on the board and say, Cursor, the coding application. You're locked into that? You're locked into that? I'm locked into Cursor. You wanted that? I think that's insane. I'm overjoyed. I'm like, that was not one of the ones I was going to pick. I just think that my other options are Cursor competitors, essentially scale AI competitors, questionable foundational model companies, you know i don't know i just the heat on cursor is is so hot right now so i'm happy to hear the negative case now that i picked it uh since eric clearly has a strong i just think it couldn't be hotter than it is yeah i mean but that's what we said about but it's a 20 it's like 20 billion right why do we have we have a listed here at like nine oh yeah okay i think it is 20 so maybe it is number one right now yeah i mean has there not been a lesson from this draft other than a draft the highest valued company for the first pick?

52:42We're going for market caps, not a sort of climb. We're two for two on the highest valued company being the best pick in retrospect so far. I don't know. I can't talk myself out of taking it. It is rumored at around $30 billion. It's just not raised at that level. Ho-ho! Max, It's a good back there. It's a good back there. Remember when the last two years you told us that we were done for picking all the hypiest companies? No, I wanted XAI. I wanted XAI. I said I wanted XAI. To be clear. Yeah, definitely. Pull the tape. I wanted XAI. So don't retcon that. If Tesla and XAI ever merged, we're going to have a big challenge in valuing that company.

53:29I also believe I bid up Eric farther with OpenAI than you did. gym so i was more of a believer that's true all right so i'm next uh with the next pick eric this is a hard one not so easy now is it it's hard to be the man in the chair now i am picking cognition labs okay all right so you So you literally went for the Pepsi to curse. They're like, why? I picked Coke and you picked Pepsi and you were shitting on my pick. I'm betting on, this is fucking Red Bull. This is the next generation. They're like doing the new thing. You guys are stuck in the past trying to sell sugar water, you know? Like, yeah.

54:23Wait, how is Devin Red Bull? Please explain. just because it's like they've got a new they have a new growth strategy they're doing new things i'm just saying it's like it's not pepsi i mean obviously you know what pepsi i assume is bigger than red bull i don't actually know but i'm just saying you know cognition's got some juice they got new things going there they've i feel like there's upside that's what i'm trying to say they are the new new coder on the block even though they've been around it feels like i feel like their momentum is is going to be hitting over the next 12 months all right sounds good good pick good pick um i have some tough choices to make here for my first pick um you get two picks i get two picks yeah that actually helps a little bit we do a snake draft yeah yeah i'm gonna take for my first pick mercore which is the data labeling startup that was my second choice isn't isn't that also basically a scale ai It is.

55:23Yeah. I'm okay. All right. Which did exit at$30 billion. Right. And, and apparently when wind scale kind of got aqua hired by meta, like a lot of business seems to have gone to Mercore, like, because all the other labs were like, Oh, I don't want to send all of our data to meta. So just raised, I think in October, a$350 million round is my, what my research says here. And then valued at close to 10 billion. So, yeah, going with the data labeling play, which is another hot area of AI right now, definitely could come up as a theme in the conference. I'm happy either way with what you go. I think I'm feeling you're making my life easy for my next pick.

56:05Really? You're like, but because I don't have to make the decision. I'm saying I think there are two obvious ones to choose from now. And you're saying that I have to choose one or the other. OK. Yeah. And I don't have to. I'll just get the other one. Okay, well, let me take a look here for my second pick. I'm like nervous. I take this very seriously. I'm going to have to go with Thinking Machine Labs. I just think it's another foundation model play. And who knows? Those are the only ones that seem to matter in this draft in terms of potential upside. And the insane acquire potential there is huge.

56:49True, true. and uh there seems to be a lot of true believers there because like it seems like mark zuck can't can't poach anyone um for tens of billions oh he got he got one he got oh he eventually got that guy got the founder of thinking oh yeah that's right yeah yeah yeah no he he grabbed the founder of thinking machines uh the co-founder yeah and nobody knows what they're doing but yeah they come out with interesting research it seems like um yeah but I agree it's a little bit of a just a Miramirati CTO of OpenAI founded this company and recent Horowitz is now a big backer but it's totally mysterious and when this thing goes to 200 next year you guys can't say that I got a steal because we had the shot at it I'm excited I already have the Ilya one so on one hand I was like oh save super intelligence have thinking machines and have I don't know the pair of speculative super hyped you know but he made it a little easier to pick right after murkhor because i'm like all right murkhor we got real revenue and a real business and uh something's happening there um but yeah um all right passing it back to eric i'm back it's back to me yeah all right this is a good one i think you guys know i'm gonna pick right i mean uh i mean i have a guess yeah but i don't want to this this founder can eat the fucking world i sit down with him and i'm like what business aren't you going to destroy uh guillermo ceo of rusell i'm picking up rusell they first of all even if they don't succeed in vibe coding themselves they are like doing a lot of the infrastructure work for a lot of the vibe coding so it's like lovable wins fine like bill still use rusell so i think rusell is like in a cool position and i think uh guillermo is a very talented CEO and yeah I think they're going they're going places so happy to pick up for sell a sort of infrastructure play with with you know consumer aspects yeah that definitely would have been the next pick for me um now it gets a lot more interesting I think because I think there's a bit of a cliff here um I get two picks right I'm lost now yeah yeah I'm pretty lost I mean this is when it gets fun yeah i think thematically in the thinking machines category i feel like i just have to grab reflection ai here just because open source foundational model company it's american apparently that's part of their story and we're going to have some sort of national security defense by having a another cool foundational model company i i don't know it's got big time backers you know sequoia and dst and all these folks so um yeah ultimately i think just i honestly know very very little about this but yeah i'm like it's worth eight billion dollars and it's a foundational model company uh sign me up scotty uh

59:49man it's easy to be a vc uh okay it's easy especially when you don't have to really pay like we're not like buy you know we're not caring about the cost we don't worry about dilution we only care about market cap so if you were in a vc some i think our incentives would be different i agree like okay sure i'm gonna get diluted like crap do i want it at this price versus like am i just trying so the way we set this up incentivizes foundation models and it would have also incentivized infrastructure companies well this is like this is a classic debate in uh fantasy football right is like you do snake draft or you do auction draft where you actually have to like pay out of your own budget and stuff like that so next next next time we can be a little bit more um a little bit more savvy yeah okay this next one i'm i'm actually going to take what i consider to be a real risk on here because i think we're starting to get into the risk part of the draft here um cerebro valley alumnus here i'm gonna take lovable i just feel like the momentum around unlovable as a brand name or a meme or whatever the fuck you want to call it.

1:00:56It's just so incredibly strong. And I don't necessarily think the product is like that much better than a bunch of other similar competitors or even ultimately cursor, you know, but I think that, um, it's just got that sort of like mimetic force and growth. Uh, and I do think the founder is, you know, has a lot of kind of narrative power around the company. You know, I lit them up on Twitter. They had the most dark pattern. Oh yeah. unsubscribe no i i don't and they're getting all this shit on twitter about like whether their growth metrics make any sense i don't know no i was giving them some of that shit so maybe it's you know maybe it's a dumb bet but i do also think that like probably there will be a consumer brand in like make a website with an llm and maybe it will ultimately just be open ai in which point this is all irrelevant but they feel like they have by far the strongest like lead on being kind of the you know consumer brand for vibe coding uh for lack of a better term so yeah i don't know it's a bet i'm not in love with it but i've gotta take some shots and they feel like they have a very strong uh you know strong mimetic force behind them i guess i would say and you're you're gonna get a lot of picks at the end of this draft i think because eric and i are only yeah all right i'm up and i can't give away all the companies that i think are good left we're definitely deeper it's less like oh just buy the highest valuation now i'm i'm not willing to go for a there there's you know companies that i like sub one billion that i'm like oh you could bet on them but it seems risky i'm okay i'm embracing one of max's themes which is video is doing better than voice and i also do think you know there it's more fun this isn't like a fun business to pick but But it's like selling to businesses is a good idea.

1:02:39There's money to be made. That's sort of the glean case. And I really like the CEO of this company, Victor. So I'm going to pick Synthesia. Synthesia, yeah, okay. And it's also got its European undervalued sort of thing going. And so, yeah, I think they'll go far. I'm picking Synthesia. Well, they just leaked that they turned on an acquisition offer for$3 billion, right? Oh, I missed that. I didn't even know that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So they're definitely going to raise at like five or six pretty shortly. Great. Smart pick. Smart pick. Good value in the lower part of the draft if they're thinking about raising or, you know, close to five.

1:03:18All right. James. James. Final pick. Final pick. I'm going to go out on a limb as well here. Deep in the waivers pool right now, but Intox, I believe, to raise in the two billion range. suno yeah that was also pretty high up there i don't think that's deep in the waivers is it i mean right now if you they're they're they're obviously leaking all their arr growth to close it around right now yeah i'm i'm just saying like they uh their current valuation is sub a billion you know 500 million or something sure um okay so yeah like yeah there's been a lot of hype around them in the last like week and uh they yeah they leaked uh like 150 million um or i don't know if They did, but that leaked 150 million ARR.

1:04:07A lot of discussion. Obviously, a lot of potential IP risk, but every IP lawsuit these days seems to be going in the way of the models. So we'll see if that stands. But I think no matter what, they're really interesting. Acquisition or merger. Cerebral Valley alumni. Yes. I interviewed Mikey at New York CVAI last year. you looked into his eyes and I was like yeah I want this guy on my team he's a he's going places it was yeah okay that's my pick great all right all right James and I are done all right you guys are done it's time to try to grab some value off the so how many do you have off the ground ground here I have three so far but I get three more this yeah yeah I mean this is exciting there was This is a fun thing for you to do.

1:05:00This is my rebuilding opportunity here. I did like Suno and Synthesia. They both would have been in the mix. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, yeah. I literally have them in my notepad, ones I wanted here. For the first one, I'm just going to grab on with a good valuation that we use a lot at Volley because I think that, I don't know, it's a solid product, and I have no idea if the business model is any good or what the future holds here. but I'm going to take Fall AI, F-A-L-A-I. Oh, I've been hearing about that one a lot. Interesting. But I don't really know much about it. They're essentially like a kind of a clearinghouse or single API provider that lets you call on any of the photo and video models.

1:05:45So it kind of plays into this photo and video theme, which is like you're going to need to be able to switch between these models really easily and grab the new ones. And they take a little cut of that. So it's almost like a marketplace for photo and video models. And I don't know if that's ultimately where value will accrue in the stack. There's a lot of argument that their margins will be competed to nothing or whatever. But like today, we at Volley as a consumer's company get a lot of value out of having like one place to sort of call into for any kind of photo or image generation. And so, yeah, I don't know.

1:06:19It feels like a... Invest in what you know. Yeah. Pretty highly valued at$4 billion as well. again the opposite logic of normal investing which is oh yeah i want to take those high valuations yeah exactly right i mean there's this whole world model startup theme that uh james and i are very familiar with which is this idea of like video ai generated video that you can walk around in and uh you know participate in as if it's a video game uh one of our good friends and board remember Moritz by your lens just raised$130 million for one of these companies. But in this space, I'm going to take, I think I'm going to take World Labs, the Fei Fei Li startup.

1:07:01I think that it's just too much name branding to avoid. I mean, I've seen, I've seen Descartes. I haven't seen General Intuition's product. I ultimately think Demis Asavis and Genie will probably win this whole thing or whatever, but maybe this is a good acquisition or roll-up play at some point. What did you think about Descartes? Why not pick Descartes over World Labs? Yeah, I literally am just doing this based on name brand, and my assumption is that she can raise a shitload of money, and that might ultimately lead to them winning the compute and the data war here. But obviously that could be totally wrong.

1:07:40Okay, last pick. I think the last one I'm going to take, and this is again, probably just biased on what I know is I'm going to grab Sesame, which is this glasses startup that's focused on realistic voice assistants built into smart glasses, which sounds terrible, terrible in a lot of ways. I would never pick that. They just raised$250 million from Sequoia Capital. Good for them. Not nothing. And I do think their TTS voice is quite good. And I think that ultimately it's interesting to see people playing in the sort of voice and glasses space. And they might get rolled up by either Mark Zuckerberg or Apple or someone else like that at some point.

1:08:29So it feels like just a real YOLO play here. Sure. Yeah, I don't know. It's just kind of fun and interesting. And I think the voice product is pretty good. So I feel like why not invest in that? So, all right, that's it. Nice. Nice. Do you guys want to do a quick review? Sure. Yes. I will kick it off. My roster previously, Databricks, Cohere, Sierra, and that was it. And I added a bunch of new companies today. Cursor, star of the show, Reflection AI, Lovable, Fall, World Labs, and Sesame. And Eric? I had OpenAI, Glean, Mistral, Perplexity, Safe Super Intelligence, and Harvey. And I picked up Cognition, Vercel, and Synthesia.

1:09:18And I had Anthropic, Replit, XAI, Runway, Eleven Labs, Poolside. I just added Mercore, Thinking Machine Labs, and Suno. Good drafts. Yeah, fun. We have one more episode before Cerebral Valley on November 12th. we'll be making predictions or reacting to some AI predictions. And yeah, if you're in San Francisco and startup founder or investor, reach out about Cerebral Valley on November 12th. Thank you for tuning into this week's episode of the podcast. If you're new here, please like and subscribe. It really helps the channel. We're building a YouTube channel. I think you can tell we're investing a lot more in our production and we appreciate your support.

1:10:02And if you want the data, insider takes, real reporting, go to newcomer.co and subscribe to the sub stack as well. Thanks for following along.