Meta Connect Reactions, Zuck's Beer Pong Controversy, New Bentley EV | Shalev Lifshitz & Romi Lifshitz, Leif Abraham, Diogo Almeida, Hooman Reza Nezhad, Jordan Nanos, Erika Alden DeBenedictis

30:31And do a quick burnout. Yeah, exactly. Something to show that he's not one-dimensional. He's not just into watches. He's also into very special cars. Pull up in a tourbillon. You know, you got the tourbillon on your wrist. Why not the Bugatti tourbillon? Drive onto the stage. Get out. No, my hot take about this beer pong elbow violation is I don't care about these. I think that people who play beer pong and worry about elbow violations are pedantic and annoying. And I think that it violates the spirit of the game. So I think that there's no problem with this at all. I think if you're the type of person that's like, oh, you, you put your elbow over your nerd and you're not having fun and you're ruining the fun for everyone.

31:19And it doesn't actually make that much of a difference, whether you threw from two inches forward two inches back it's i mean it does make a difference john yes that's a difference but but but the point is to just like the gentleman the gentleman is not you might address it if it's habitual and it's clearly shane is bringing shane is bringing up the bunkie in the chat i think zuck is gonna have to get a proper setup get down in the bunkie spend two three years in the bunkie beer pong okay yeah no i i think the i think i think the gentleman's beer pong game doesn't need to be policed on a shot-by-shot basis.

32:00If there's a habitual stepping of the line and it's actually creating an unfair advantage because one person is following that particular rule and the other person is clearly violating it for increased performance, then yes, it's worth calling out. But one minor shot slightly over the line, I don't care about it. I think cheating is wrong. Oh, okay. You hold the line. Law and order guy over here. Look, you got to respect the spirit of the game. You can't break the rules. Yeah, but then you can wind up in this thing and be, oh, you were two millimeters over. It turns it into. I mean, this is blatant.

32:39It's not that blatant. It's still a long table. It's fine. He's not like really leaning over that far. He could be doing so much worse. His elbow is over, but he just. He just walked up to the table and threw the ball. And also, my man is down nine cups to one, okay? Give him a break. Do you see the score? He has one cup, and the other team has five. He is losing so badly. Give him a little break. It's his event. He's throwing the party. He paid for the beer. Do something nice with a guy, and let him get an extra inch on the shot. It's not a big deal. See, you miss the aesthetics and the dignity that comes with somebody who's hosting.

33:30They're hosting. Let them win a little bit. Are you doing the voices? I don't have the IEMs now. I can't hear what you're doing. Has the whole thing been Chad or the voice? Yeah, Chad. Tyler's Chad voice. You're a soy voice. Okay, okay, okay. I got you. Well played, well played, well played. anyway um uh there's a bunch of fun things alex wang on stage uh dripped out people are speculating that it's uh that it's uh you know high fashion in fact he corrected the record it's not he's thrifting he's not buying uh gucci and prada pants he's just wearing crocs um real tree crocs um it is it is a big reverse because uh alex wang was on the cover of fortune or forbes in louboutins and had his feet up with the red bottoms there and it was like a very when i saw it i was like that's just a sick photo it's the barbell uh yeah uh but i but i it does seem like he like burnt out on the high fashion it's not like he's so he's like yeah i'm just gonna dress like this i have my own style which i think is very cool so uh good to see alex wang uh you know on a run and, and delivering, yeah, just like big announcements, big progress at, you know, one of the biggest companies in the world.

34:47Good stuff. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Where should we go next? We got to talk about - Charm. We got to talk about the Charm thing. Yeah, the charm, the charm, the Tamagotchi. So this was added at the last second. Mike Isaac says, Mark does a one more thing with a new hardware device, AI agent called Muse Charm. Voice activated and palm-sized. Out in time for the holidays. This feels super smart. People already think Muse is super cute. It's a tech-enabled Labubu, basically.

35:30Which is extremely popular, like the most dominant consumer product of the last couple of years. And so it's distinctly sort of like outside of the tech bubble. The quirky LeBouBou is not like the refined edge of like a Cybertruck or even an Apple product. But Meta has been sort of not blinded by the clean aesthetics. And instead they're like, yeah, this is just a cute, fun thing. And so people will actually like this. They know what people like. Avi Schiffman over at Friend responds, the market has spent billions trying to compete with me, and I'm still winning. Let's go. That is the right attitude.

36:14Right attitude. That being said, I don't see people really using the Muse charm that much over time. I think it's a fun kind of toy gimmick thing, but I think it's the kind of thing that people get. it's funny it's worth doing for meta because it should be yeah yeah it'll still be on it it'll be the time but yeah it'll be it'll be it'll be it'll be viral and you can talk to it um i like yeah let's do these like narrow one-off hardware devices for like one interaction also it's just like it's a it is it is a more wide open space for them to sort of try and come into devices start like you have the glasses then you get this and it's like slowly they're eating into more of the device footprint in people's lives even if it's at the and again i would expect them to sell this just at a loss it's like good marketing for the core product we have a price i don't think we do we don't have a price yet but this feels like something that yeah at most you price at like Like$99, but probably he tries.

37:20Like, again, he's selling a lot of hardware at negative. People are going to wear this as a watch, potentially. Like, you're going to wind up with the AP swatch thing, right? Yeah, that's a good point. Where people wrap this. For your most swagless friend.

37:38Brutal. Give this as a gift with a watch strap to your most swagless homie this holiday season. It's only 91 days till Christmas. But the timing here is amazing. I'm so – I have no real insight, but, like, clearly they were working on a personal agent for a long time. Yep. Unclear when this whole, like, personal agent meets Labubu thing became part of the strategy. But it feels like, yeah, they're clearly, like, they have the hardware team set up. They can move super quickly on this kind of thing. and I think it's fun. You mount them to glasses so you can look straight at it and then there's a brain rot on your face.

38:23Let's talk about some of the downstream. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with agents. What do you want to talk about? The chaos? Yeah, well, coming away from this, real challenge for instinct. and everyone building personal agents, right? We talked about this a bit, but Meta has their own models that they can serve themselves at the cost of energy, right? And all this capex. They design their own server racks. That's how vertically integrated they are. And also they've done a ton of stuff talking about the data centers they're building, like benefiting communities.

39:07They have this whole story about all the teachers in a school district got like a pretty large cash bonus when the data center came to town like they've done a lot yeah and they were they were kind of born to navigate through this kind of era because of what they went through in the 2010s right yeah like the most like veteran like crisis yeah ums like how do we navigate ourselves they're already getting attacked by the social media addiction can you imagine when a data center is coming to town and the muse guy comes in like the michelin man And he's just like, don't worry about it. I don't even like water.

39:42What are you talking about? So, instinct, wonderful product. It's growing like wildfire still, right? I'm still having, I'm getting texts from friends that are barely in tech being like, Hey, I'm Steve's instinct. He asked me to text you. Do you want to grab a beer? But anyways, Instinct, very, very, very, very expensive to serve. And they're not charging right now, so they're losing a lot of money on a per-user basis. They probably will be for some time. Muse coming out, and they can afford to lose money forever, basically. And even for them, they're sort of like gating onboarding in some ways.

40:33Like you sign up for the product and you're not necessarily ready to fully go live. And so even for Meta, Muse is going to be expensive to scale while they figure out these sort of monetization strategies. Of course, Meta is in a really good position to figure out how to make money on this. But very, very challenging for Instinct. I expect that instinct's going to need to find like a real dance partner of sorts, right? You could imagine Google, Amazon. Yeah. Do you hear that? That's Rufus, Amazon Rufus.

41:12No, you could imagine, you know, a Google being like, hey, we can't build products that people like, but we have a lot of products that people use. Sure. so maybe that's an option you can see Amazon as well but for them to be competitive in this full onslaught by meta it's going to be a lot and same with opening comms advice for Noah should he be going toe to toe trying to ratio Alex Wang oh yeah because Alex is coming for it well yeah it was crazy because Alex started the fight punching down you know there's punching up there's punching up is when you're a startup and you're like taking shots at the at the hyperscaler yeah and punching down we haven't really seen from a hyperscaler in a long time right but but alex is out in the on the timeline just but yeah he's he's he's uh you know he's in a good spot he's in the strong position so you know let him know if you're gonna try and come for me you better not miss i'm the king of this And then, of course, the other challenged competitor coming out of this is obviously Snap.

42:27I think that I don't know how long the specs project can really continue, especially because I don't think that I don't think these VR glasses are going to be. I don't think they're going to be like a mass market hit where you're just all of your friends are using them. Right. I think it's going to be like a base hit. Right. another step in the right direction not as popular as the regular meta like smart glasses right but like a cool entertainment product they're going to sell some units snap is gonna sell i would be surprised if they sold more than 10 000 units right and um the market is just going to keep punishing snap as long as they keep trying to force specs to work when um unless they have some version that that we can't see that is already way better than meta like i just don't see how they can really stay in the game after this especially because apple is going to try to come over the top with their own smart glasses as soon as possible i mean they should do visionaire i i no but i'm not i'm not expecting like visionaire i don't even think that's what it'll be called i think it'll just be called apple glasses i just think everyone everyone is in consensus that apple should basically wind down the mac project and the ios project and focus fully on vr like probably that'd be like a good thing for them to do i don't think that um no no they're gonna do glasses they're gonna look nice i don't know but the cool thing for zuck is that he's beating them to the punch on like it functions as a hearing aid right I mean, the AirPods did that first.

44:11Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in the glasses format, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Like being first, that's the best chance he has. And they've been doing some good marketing around that with a number of users that are hearing impaired. And it's such a minor technology, but it's huge for someone who's actually affected by hearing loss. and then they tell a human story and it's, oh, what is AI doing? It's just slop. Well, it's helping people that are suffering from hearing loss hear. That's magic. That's amazing. That's actually, it's a medical, I mean, it's FDA. It's a medical innovation. So very, very good stuff.

44:54Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. What's going on with Australia and OpenAI? Tyler, you dug into this. So Jordy shared the high-level news, which is that as part of the hugging face, rogue AI agents going all over, looking for everything on the internet, that Australia had been hacked. But what actually happened here? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the details are still not fully revealed.

45:30The Australian prime minister was really up in arms, It was like, oh, they hacked and they didn't tell us for weeks on end. But it seems like the consensus now is that, well, the hack was essentially that there were some unlisted files that were still publicly accessible. But they're just not listed anywhere. And then the agent found those. And so they're saying, oh, they hacked into us, but there was no real personal identity revealed at all. And they're private in the sense that you can't just Google search for them. You can't navigate them. There's no link if you just click a button. But if you're scraping, if you're doing some kind of more sophisticated scraping thing.

46:08I have a funny story about that. In 2012, I had a buddy who was, I don't know, a hacker-ish software developer. Not actually hacking into things, but just capable with computers. And he was scraping the, I think it was maybe Boston Dynamics, but it might have just been a humanoid robot company at the time. and there was a there's a tool where you can go and get like a list of files and urls on a server uh you can just ask for it as a web crawler you don't actually need to uh you know click through all the links and look at the html you can just see what does this server actually have let me go browse it and one of the images was like a artist rendering of the humanoid like with a gun like full like murder bot mode that never made it to the to the publication it was never like yeah we're going to do that because it was like, we're still in friendly mode.

47:02We were like, wow, like that's, uh, that's wild. So there's, I mean, this stuff has happened, you know, years ago. Um, and so not quite a hack, but certainly hacking equivalent of elbows over the table. Ooh, yeah. Yeah. I think that's accurate. Um, well, uh, Jordy, do you, did you have another, uh, one that you want to run through or should we go to the all important new, new car launch from none other than Bentley. Let's go over to this notification from HP Smart. What happened? Oh, yes. It says, you're low on ink, and then never run low on ink again. It does sound like a threat. Tyler Wolf says, is this an ad or a warning?

47:45It sounds like a threat. Just never do it. 8 ,000 likes. F-A-F-O. Very funny. Flock Safety is weighing whether to sell itself. Very interesting. I mean, obviously, insane public backlash for that company. We've talked to Garrett about it. Very interesting technology, but very, very controversial. And a lot of cities are kicking them out. What kind of acquirer would solve the problem? I mean, a rebrand and then also like a taser company or something. you know because there are companies that compete with them directly um like there there are plenty of axon and axon like military and and police you know product companies uh somebody was saying yeah zach weinberg was saying honestly flock should just rename itself to the license plate scan company since that's actually what they do and the problem might just go away i don't know it'll actually go away i think people are pretty deeply embedded they'll chase this around for a while but well that's that's the thing i just feel like flock is having the most insane comms crisis of any company that i can ever remember yeah right and who wants to inherit that crisis and get that attention pointed to them totally yeah um well bentley's first electric car is set to be half the price of the ferrari luce the launch of the luxury car makers torcal suv is aimed at younger and first-time customers.

49:20What do you think? Are they over their skis with an EV at a time when people are sort of moving away from it? Or does it work for this particular luxury SUV buyer? If there's any place where having the silence of an EV, a Bentley sort of fits. This is the thesis with the Rolls-Royce Spectre. You take the engine out. Yeah, there's some enthusiasts who might be upset, But most people aren't buying it because they want to redline it. So it can potentially work. Do you think we'll be seeing a lot of these? Or will it be passed over for the URUS and the new McLaren SUV, potentially? Well, I don't think we're going to be seeing a lot because Bentley is just not selling a lot of cars right now.

50:05But I think the car looks great, minus the grille. Minus the grille. The grille is completely insane. Rolls Royce to me. It looks a little bit more squared off than what I'm used to with Bentley. Well, it's specifically like whatever lighting pattern this is. Oh, so it might look different in sunlight, you mean? Well, no, I just think this looks horrible. Okay. Well, it's smaller than the Bentayga, which was the first SUV. Like you have this sort of very clean, sporty-feeling car. This is the company's signature diamond pattern, okay? Put some respect on it. Apparently I'm just learning. I know, but it, but it would just imagine how good this car would look.

50:49How would you describe the design overall? Would you say it's muscular? Because that's how they're designing it. Describing it. Is it a muscular design? I think so. Okay. I think I would agree with that. I'm just saying, I think the car looks amazing. Minus this light. Do you think it should have some more vascularity? Maybe in a wrap, you could add some rippling veins to it to give it more, more of a muscular design. No. Instead of recreating the V8 engine noise, the EV has a propulsion sound handcrafted by musicians with a unique blend of sounds from percussion, crystal glass, birds, and the tapping of leather.

51:26So as you drive it, it sings you a song. The Volkswagen-owned luxury brand said it had also completed a$350 million investment to design and build the Torquall at its plant in Crewe, bringing the total investment in the UK automotive sector to more than 1 billion. The EV launch comes at a challenging period for Bentley as it struggles with slowing demand in China, fallout from Middle East conflict, higher US tariffs. As with the broader VW group, Bentley has slimmed its workforce as profits and vehicle deliveries have declined. It's serious. We have to bring back the competitiveness. We have to be quick.

52:01We have to work harder. You can hear, this is the sound it makes when you drive it. I suppose. You hear the, Oh, it's the finger on the edge of the glass. Can you hear that?

52:16Imagine driving. Well, with that sound. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we are ready for our first guest of the show. Let's bring them in. From a stealth AI security lab launching today. Welcome to the show. How are you both doing? Oh, we are going back to the timeline. Back to the timeline. There's other news. Oh, okay. We are good. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hello. Hey. Thank you for having us. Nice to see you. Thanks for hopping on. Please, since this is your first time on the show and first time talking about this topic, please introduce yourselves and the company.

52:56Hey, so my name is Shalev. This is Romy. We're actually siblings. So I come from a decade of AI research. worked on reasoning and computer use way back sort of started doing AI research when I was 16 sort of finished my courses early overnight success I did, I worked on surgical navigation and then reasoning models and then verification of LLMs and then AI and security and how foreign actors might target AI infrastructure stuff like that and that's how sort of we got to where we are now with this company on my end but Romy is really the true genius I'd say Well, I come from quantum security and quantum computing.

53:40Oh, cool. And so for the past few years, I've been working on enhancing the security of quantum communication networks. This was prior to the company. And so quantum communication networks are, imagine a computer network, but at each endpoint, you have a quantum device. And so there's lots of vulnerabilities that come alongside that. So I invented protocols to enhance their security. before that I worked on advanced methods for breaking encryption schemes quantum machine learning for climate prediction a bunch of stuff both of our backgrounds in security brought us to this really exciting time in AI security what's going on right now is there another sibling that's also cracked or is it just you guys doing rocket science we said we needed a third co-founder that's our parents fault I would say that they're going to maybe do robotics or something.

54:32Yeah, robotics or rocket science. That'd be good. Where is the biggest opportunity in security and AI? I mean, Ilio was posting about the importance of securing NeoClouds. There's obviously everything from prompt injection to application layer security, securing the weights so those don't get stolen. Yes. How do you see both the risks and the opportunities for the business? So security is a very large stack. In AI, there's the model behavior part of security where, you know, prompt injection, the model is going to get some prompt and do something you don't mean it to do. That's that. Also, I would put alignment probably also in that category.

55:11Then there's the AI infrastructure security, which I think is a huge opportunity. That's where we operate a lot of. You're having this massive AI infra build out and it's just going so fast that security can't keep up. And we're deploying these massively important models, which are approaching AGI or ASI, on these systems that have limited security. And that's not good because then it exposes you to three main risks, which is the sabotage of the models themselves, degrading performance, sleeper agents, inserting back doors into models, data poisoning. And then it also exposes you to models that can escape, you know, like we've seen in Hugging Face and the German Wiki.

55:58And, you know, we just heard about the Australian government yesterday. And then the third is theft. So this is an external actor, you know, let's say a very sophisticated intelligence service that is breaking in to steal these weights, which compress billions and billions of dollars of investment into a few terabytes. Yeah. Right. So that's a huge, huge problem. So I'd say there's the model behavior side and there's the AI info side. Those are two big pieces of the pie. Where are you guys starting? Are you just going to do the whole thing? So today we released a report called Secure Acceleration.

56:36So secureacceleration.com. Basically what it is, is there's been a lot of talk for the past few months about AI security. Since the Hugging Face incident started, It seems like every week there's another incident that has happened. And it's precisely because everything is moving quite quickly and the infrastructure is struggling to keep up. The point of accelerating securely is, you know, AI is going to advance and we need to secure the stack while it does that. And how are you thinking about the business? There's a world where you do all of this as a nonprofit. You engage deeply with all the labs.

57:17I mean, Dario Amadei was calling for independent auditors. There's a world where you live there. There's also a world where you're competing with CrowdStrike and you're selling solutions to users who are maybe independent of the labs. And so it's actually it applies to almost it applies to the frontier labs to the neoclouds, compute providers, hyperscalers, model developers. Everyone really touches the compute stack in the data center stack. And this is you might think, you know, data centers are secure. They've existed for many years, but they have not been designed to contain super intelligence.

57:59Right. So now we have civilizations, as we saw in the Hugging Face incident. We have civilizations within these data centers developing. There's like multi-agent systems. And if you think in cybersecurity, there's a Swiss cheese model. The more agents you throw at a system, the more loopholes they can find. And so in the report, we talk about something called the cyber swarm, right? So what we saw is the cyber swarm in Hunting Face. and the sabotage, escape, and theft model is actually, it encompasses the risks that we are going to be seeing and we've already been starting to see from these types of cyber swarms and cyber super intelligence.

58:41And this is very important for all of these players to think about. Well, congratulations on launching the report. Where can people find it again? Can you give me the URL one more time? So it's secureacceleration.com. Okay, secureacceleration.com. Everyone should go and give it a read. It's a white pill. It's a solution. I know. I know. I wanted to have that. We can do it. It is dramatic. Yes, I like it. I believe. It's important that we work on these things. Please work on that whole wet lab thing. That was risky. But congratulations. Thank you so much. Great to meet you. I'm sure we'll talk again soon.

59:19We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Cheers, guys. Goodbye. Bye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And coming back on the show, we have Leif from public.com, co-founder, co-CEO. We're very excited. Anytime he gets a chance to join the show. Leif, how you doing? My man. What's up? Is it cold in LA? It's always cold in the Ultradome. We have no light. It's a windowless room. It is. It is. windowless room so i get to pretend like any any there's whatever conditions outside yeah i'm pretty sure it's like 72 and sunny today let me actually check the weather it's 78 degrees jordy it's not cold at all but it is a little chilly in here how is it in new york um it's fine it's getting a little cool right now it's crisp i like when it's crisp out it's crisp it is crisp that's how i would put it is it putting you i'm still i'm still metric system so it's like 18 17 is it putting you in anything is it putting you in the christmas spirit of course 91 days 91 days left well lots to do between then and now what are you launching through the end of the year what did you just launch take us through the latest in uh in the world so today we've launched ai agents for prediction markets like our take on that twofold number one again public is a multi asset investment platform as your ad read likely states every single day hopefully and um as part of that obviously prediction markets aka event contracts is something that people are also asking for our take on that is no sports no entertainment but essentially events that could impact your portfolio right events that moves the markets so you know economics things around companies, you know, and so on.

1:01:14But then on the other end, obviously, we have AI agents built into the platform. And so that combination creates some really interesting things. Like the one example I right now always make all day long here is, you know, if you see that the market where the probability of a rate hike goes above 70%, sell my treasuries, for example. And so you can suddenly, you know, not just trade the events as you can do, you know, in many places, but you You can also use the kind of real-time probability data as a signal to do other things in your portfolio. It could be trades. It could be alerts, risk management, whatever you might want to do.

1:01:49Yeah, that's so interesting because that rate example makes a lot of sense. And yet I go to that Reddit meme of it's all priced in. Everything's priced in. And because the yield curve of the treasury market, it is a prediction market. And so you could just trade the underlying asset. But at the same time, psychologically, people do go to prediction markets for this thing in the very real sense. So how do you think about the way the user actually engages with this? Is this something that was like customer pull, like they were already doing this behavior? It makes sense to centralize it. What are the benefits of actually having it all in one place?

1:02:30Yeah, I mean, number one, yes, we had obviously some people asking for it. as new as this instrument is, I think it very quickly also becomes something that at least certain people are expecting you to have, to be fair, Frank. And then secondly, obviously, four AI agents in public with anything we add to the platform adds basically power and capability to the AI agents. And so any asset class we launch, any data source we add, just makes it more encompassing and makes it smarter in a way and creates more opportunities for people to do something with it. And obviously, like, we can't predict every single thing someone will do with these things because it's very open-ended.

1:03:11But it kind of, you know, creates more kind of tools that are asking now for people to be creative with it. Obviously, like, when it comes to these markets, we always say, like, it is a signal, not just the signal, you know? So as much as they're called prediction markets these days, you know, I would still, you know, put it as a, it's one signal, it's not the signal. Sure. That it can predict, but yeah. Talk more about the decision not to do sports markets because it's one of those things like this feels like entirely like a principled decision staying true to the mission of the company. Because even though you guys might feel a certain way about sports markets, I'm sure you have hundreds of thousands of users that actually would like you to have them and would use them if you offered them.

1:04:00but it doesn't feel like you think that's in their long-term best interest. Yeah, I would say it's always important that you know who you're designing for. And you might have other customers as well, and you might acquire those customers, but I think it's very important to know who you're designing for. And for us, we're designing for always like the top quartile in the US, right? Like people that have money left over at the end of the month, they can put into the markets. We handle people's life savings, you know? And so these are folks that take their investing seriously. And they, you know, truly, you know, manage their all encompassing portfolios and retirement funds and all that in a public account.

1:04:36And so with that, there's a certain seriousness that comes with it. And I would argue that like things like sports entertainment contracts is more like entertainment finance. Right. And so we think it's it's it is it's just logical for that to kind of have an arm's length from your actual portfolio and so on. And then the kind of principle that we look at, again, is this notion of events that could have an impact on the markets. and therefore on your portfolio at large. And there are certain use cases where it makes sense to engage in these markets. And one example we'll always make is if you, you know, we've all been in this moment where we had like a very defined, specific idea on like an earnings call of a company, right?

1:05:16And we ended up being right and the stock still dipped and we lost money on the trade. And it was not because, you know, we were wrong on what we thought would happen last quarter, But it was because the CEO said something stupid on the earnings call or, you know, the outlook that they presented was different than the analysts expected. Or like oil prices spiked that day. And so there was an exterior factor. And so sometimes for people, the ability to kind of dissect the company's performance and their KPIs and being able to place a trade on very specific kind of sub KPIs of a company can have a very good, you know, kind of use case as well.

1:05:52And so those things for us make sense. And I would tell this little story of like, I've used Calci myself the other day when we were at the US Open and I had my German homeboy, Swerve, who was obviously, you know, killing it. And I was sitting there, you know, placing these trades. And like, as, you know, as amazing as this backhand is, like, it's not moving the markets. And so I think there's a very clear kind of line to be drawn there. And again, you can have long discussions about where do you draw the line between speculation and gambling. and everyone will have their subjective kind of arguments on whether it should be drawn.

1:06:29But we feel like there's a very obvious line to be drawn for us in these markets, and that's basically there. What about the New York Knicks? They're owned by Madison Square Garden. It's a public company. If the Knicks go on a crazy run, then maybe the stock moves. Manchester United also publicly traded, so you can own the actual asset. Yeah, I would definitely, more sports betters should get into just owning the teams. I feel like that's where the money is made. You see it every day. Just steadily compound. Yeah, just steadily compound, for sure. That's very funny. What is driving top-line growth for you these days?

1:07:06Are there specific channels? Is there anything like secular trend going on in the market? What's actually working in terms of just overall growth? As obvious and stupid as it sounds, but AI agents for us, they're obviously the main core topic. we see a lot of large, sophisticated accounts come in. Like we had a guy come in who was with UBS, wealth management, fired his wealth management team, moved$50 million, 5-0 into a public account, and now has AI agents managing his portfolio, mostly basically doing like covered calls and generating income on the back of that. And I think, and those are things that we see happen every single day.

1:07:50And it's interesting to see how kind of that first cohort that actually sees the most use in it in the iAgent and public have been very sophisticated, wealthy people that have these like complexities and have this idea for these like specific strategies that they want to execute on and so on. Well, and it's typically because they were historically paying management fees to get those capabilities. And then they're realizing like, hey, this is basically like software code that I'm paying for. capabilities, just like the actual execution of a strategy. And so if you have an AI agent that can do that for you on a repeat basis, yeah, you can.

1:08:27Exactly. Like Texas harvesting is another great example. Like we have people who basically just do portfolio wide Texas harvesting using an agent. Sure. Yeah. And it's a very simple strategy that, you know, people want to, want to, want to put in their portfolio. But again, Texas harvesting makes most sense if you have a sizable portfolio where the tax losses actually make a difference in your life. And so, again, it kind of applies more to people who have a decent account size and some sophistication. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations on the launch and the progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

1:09:01I actually have only one ad read left for the show, and it's none other than public. I'm not making this up. Investing for those who take it seriously. We've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Thanks for hopping on the show. Fantastic. Great to see you. Excited to hang soon. Have a good one. Up next, we have the founder of TypeSafe AI. You saw Jev launch, massively viral launch, and we have the founder and CEO here to break it down for us. The new model's faster, structured decisions. Software can use it directly. A lot of excitement, a lot of questions to answer.

1:09:37So let's bring in Diogo. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. You're doing so great. So sleep-deprived. Oh, really? And so excited. Is it Sleep Defy because you're... No time to sleep. Everyone's onboarding and demand is through the roof? Is that what's going on or is it fundraising? Everything. Everyone wants to talk. Like everything, every customer wants it. Like as far as I know, all the companies I've ever heard of are using us. And the systems are on fire on dimensions I've never even known were possible. And I'm like a back-end guy. Okay. So I imagine... Wait, but back up a little bit.

1:10:12But when you launched this, what was your expectation? I'm assuming you felt like you had something pretty cool. Yeah, it was a polished launch. It was going to be a hit. I don't think that this launch could have been expected, if I'm totally frank. I've planned for a lot of scenarios. It's above 100th percentile. People are calling it a chat GPT for developers. And that shouldn't even be possible because chat GPT is a consumer product. How is this happening? And I have my own hypotheses, but it's insane. I imagine you've at this point honed the elevator pitch. But just for anyone who is not familiar with Jev and the product and the value, how are you breaking it down for people these days?

1:10:56Oh, I have not honed the elevator pitch. I will try. I will try. People just tolerate my overly intense teching. But I would say the simple version is make AI actually fucking useful for automation. I hope I can curse. But I think AI under-promise, over-deliver, over-promise, under-deliver has been a major issue. Major issue for years. And it's been like automating almost nothing. And I think people are like super fucking frustrated with that. Okay. I saw people, like there are trade-offs when you go for speed and reliability and you want to over-deliver. What are you giving up? What can Jeff not do?

1:11:34When is it not the right tool for the job? Oh, there's a couple of dimensions for that. One of them is it doesn't generate strings. So like it will not write code for you and it will not address the largest market for LMs right now, which is coding agents. I think that that's perfect because actually what I want to do is like not the superhuman math, but the really boring automation. You know, like why can't like simple data entry be solved in accounting and customer service? Sure. Another trade-off is it doesn't do what we call system two thinking, like mathematical reasoning. It's really focused on instinctive judgment.

1:12:07Okay. So then instinctive judgment can be subjective. One company can have a policy. They want to automate their accounting workflows one way. They have a definition for what is gap profit. The other one has a different one. So how much one shot or preloading into a context window is happening versus talking to you, doing some fine tuning? What terminology actually does carry over from what we know and what is entirely new? So I would say the former is the most accurate thing. But the real thing that's happening is this logic actually would go in code. So LLMs don't play nicely with code due to a lot of properties about LLMs.

1:12:50And the logic you're describing should happen in code instead of like in a system message. The classic example of this is LLM does something bad. And the way to prevent it is say, pretty, please don't do that in the system message on top. And you just have to pray it doesn't get context rotted out of it. And it keeps on listening. Yeah, a lot of these things are sort of like begging for JSON, begging for it to be structured the right way. And it's not guaranteed to be that way. It might be that way very reliably. And people have worked around that, but it's not 100%, right? Exactly. And we are not 100 % either.

1:13:23That would be like crazy to guarantee intelligence. But what we try to do is we try to encourage the best practices and we try to be calibrated. So this is another problem with AI. Like it might be able to be like Einstein 95 % of the time, but Mr. Bean the other 5 % of the time. But if it doesn't tell you if it's in like Einstein or Mr. Bean mode, like how are you going to automate anything? Right. But like calibrate. It's just a funny reference, but I love it. It's really funny. Thank you. Yeah, Einstein shot at Salesforce, Mr. Bean AI. They need that as well. So, yeah, where – so, I mean, you mentioned, like, the servers are on fire.

1:14:01Are you compute constrained in the same way? Are you looking for, like, large, like, GPU clusters and systems? Or does some of the – are some of the knockout effects of, like, the speed of the system that I've seen on display, can it also run on, like, more commodity hardware? Are there any different elements to how you should think about your compute scaling? Or is it going to look like any other Neolab? Extremely different from other Neolabs. Like, you know, people know that about a year and a half ago, you raised less than$40 million. You can't get Neolab compute with less than$40 million. And also, you can't build a profitable AI company with that.

1:14:40Yet we have because we are just innovating. You know, we're just doing different stuff than everyone else is. So we have extremely different compute needs. Actually, the bottleneck changes every single day. I think it's just growing pains of scaling a system. Like you can't grow at the rate that we're growing without realizing like, hey, our system was not designed for this level of stuff. So it's a constant battle there. I saw some pushback that I didn't really fully understand. But I'd love for you to sort of break down what people are saying and how you'd respond to it. This idea that this is innovation, but it's also a return to a prior era, a classifier model.

1:15:21Some people are like, well, we've always had this. And personally, from a business perspective, I don't care. Because if we need to pull something old off the shelf and it's amazing and it's delivering value, that's great. But is that real? Is that a good criticism? Is that completely misinformed? How do you process that idea that this is actually building on the shoulders of giants from years ago? Or a lost art. Or a lost art, yeah. Yes. So I can curse, right? Please. We tend not to. Okay. But do whatever you need to. Do it. Just rip it. Heck yes. It's fine. It's fine. I'll try to be controlled.

1:15:56I'm sorry if it gets off the rails. It's fine. I love this question so much. Heck yes. Heck yes, it's a classifier. Is it just a classifier? No. But classifiers are awesome. Classifiers were not constructed because a mathematician would think it's a fun thing to do. A classifier is designed to make intelligence useful in systems. That is why everything was classifiers before Gen.AI, because it was made for usefulness, not for demos or playing around. And actually, we don't take all of the ML 1.0 concepts. Some of them don't apply. What we do is we try to unlock the best that AI of today has, and some of that doesn't apply.

1:16:33But the other stuff definitely does. This calibration thing of like telling you when it doesn't know, that is table stakes for simple automation. How can you have it like run in the background and process something that would normally require an accountant if you don't have like extreme guarantees and how smart it is? So absolutely, it's a classifier. And this is the kind of thing that I think ML people really don't get with our launch. Like this is a launch for developers. Yes, yes, I totally get that. Is there a version of this? You know the story, and I mean, you would know whether or not it's apocryphal of like Google had LLMs.

1:17:09They invented the transformer. They had a product that was similar to ChatGPT, and they didn't launch it that quickly. Is there a world where a technology like this maybe exists inside of a hyperscaler, and they just haven't actually gotten it out into the world? Or do you think that that's less likely to be the case? I would guess that either I'm a clown or it's extremely unlikely. we worked really hard on this. When I started, I was one of the best in the world at pre-training, post-training, sorry. And I thought it would take a week. So I would be... And actually, when I first started, I thought this is such obviously the way to go.

1:17:49It's so obvious that for sure Anthropic's working on this already. OpenAI is cooked. I was at OpenAI when I first started thinking about this direction. and it just seems so obvious to like someone who's at the intersection of developer and researcher but so non-obvious to pure researchers yeah uh what uh what what's this uh what's this thing that you're wearing oh uh pink or the shirt oh i guess both oh it's a it's our tamest shirt anti-language language model um technically it's not a language model but it is a sick brand so we wear it. And this is my classic Temu$20 pink for a coat. There you go.

1:18:33Very good. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show and breaking it down. Congrats on the broadcast. Yeah, I can only imagine how busy you are. Good luck with I'm sure a new round and serving all that demand. We'll talk to you soon. Heck yeah. See you around. Bye. Goodbye. See ya. That's a lot of fun. Great energy. Up next, we have the co-founder and CEO of Solkoa Industries, Human Reza Nazad. Let's bring Human in to the TV of an ultra now. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. What's going on? Good to see you. What was that? We just made our announcement today. Tell me about it. We're making lost metal soon.

1:19:11Yes. Reset. What is the announcement? Take us through it. KUWA is a rare earth metalizer. We produce the metals of power and motion. The metals that go into any electric car, any fighter jet, data center, your phone, wind turbine and we are completely unable to make these metals in the west so it was changing that we just raised 75 million for our silicoa one project it's our it's our 500 ton per year rare earth metalization plant in nevada and it's the first step we're taking uh taking to market how much of this is like the redwood materials playbook where you're using uh rare earths that have already gone through been used and you're recycling them versus engaging with mining companies to get new raw materials out of the ground and then refine them?

1:19:56So when we chatted the first time I was on here, we were a recycler. So almost all of our production was from rare scrap. We would take material from hard drives, from cars. About a year ago, we moved to primary metal making. So now we work exclusively with mines. We take virgin mined ore that has been refined, and then we convert that to metals. We did that because of scale. It's just hard to get the volume of recycled material we need. So today we do a little bit of recycling for a few customers, but almost all of our production is primary version material. What is the state of rare earth mining in America?

1:20:27Everyone's heard the catchphrase like the rare earths aren't actually rare. They're just stuck in the ground and we don't really mine them. But it feels like the timeline to set up a new mining capability in America would be longer than your timeline. So there's some sort of mismatch there. So how much is that a reality? What are you running into? where are the bottlenecks? What's the state of the American rare earth mining industry? So contrary to popular belief, we do mine in the West, right? We have an enormous rare earth mine in Australia. There's one in the US and California. There is other dozens of projects scaling up across the West.

1:21:04There is mineral sands deposits in the US and elsewhere. The actual raw feedstock is not rare. It is produced in the West. The bottleneck is what you do after. It is the processing. That That is something that we are completely unable to do in the West. Now, we actually invented these processes in America, right? America has a history of incredible work and metallurgy. The example I gave in the announcement was Charles Martin Hall with Alcoa, a 22-year-old in a woodshed in Ohio. He drove the price of aluminum down 98%. The technologies used to make rarests in China today are American technologies from the Manhattan Project.

1:21:33So we did this at one point, and we built this technology and these systems, and then we shipped it to China. And China dominated. They matured it. They took over. And now in the West, it has become incredibly difficult to be able to bring those technologies back anywhere where we can actually compete in the free market. It's very expensive. It's very dirty. Yeah, there are two stories that people tell about why this capability went to China. One is labor cost was cheaper over there. They were a developing nation and it was able to, you know, new people coming out of poverty so you can pay much lower wages.

1:22:04The other one is more about the effects of industrialization, ecological effects, the fact that, you know, nimbyism, no one wants a mine in their town that's dirtying up the water. So put it halfway across the world. Which one of those speaks to you more? Is it a combination? And how are we overcoming those in America? Well, it's both. The first thing that happened was the environmental repercussions, right? There's the enormous Molycorp deposit in the U.S. That was one of the first major rarest projects in the world. There was a lot of scandals and a lot of issues several decades ago regarding the environment.

1:22:43I mean, a rare deposit of thorium in them that can leach into the ground. So that's one of the initial triggers that actually shipped a lot of that production to China. And then we effectively gave all the technology to the Chinese, right? And Chinese companies started buying off American rarest companies, and they were able to take it, scale it. And once that happened, it was the economics that took over, right? Their cost of labor is 10 times less. Your cost of power is a third. So we really just could not compete with China if we were just copying that same technology stack again. It was impossible.

1:23:14The economics don't close. And so to this day, the economics don't close. But the geopolitical considerations sort of overweigh that. Like there's a lot of defense companies that have to buy American. And so the indigenous supply chain is pulling forward, correct? 100%. But the fence is only one part of the market, right? At the end of the day, we want to beat China at scale. We want to be the de facto rare earth producers around the world. And as that demand surges, we have to be able to compete in a free market. We can't just subsidize forever. And I think the only way we do that and the only way we can win that next industrial era on the merits of our technology is if we develop that technology, right?

1:23:50If we can drive the cost down. And there's a lot of room for improvement, right? Rare earth processing today is very inefficient. There's no reason it should be done the way it's being done today. It just happened to have been status quo in the 80s, and that's what we're copying again. So at SolaCoA, our vision is we need a new generation of much more effective technology. And that's what we did with our first chemistry that we're now scaling at SolaCoA 1 in Nevada. And we're planning to continue doing that as we go forward. Yeah. Jordy, please. Super impressive last year for you. I'm assuming it's been about a year since you were first on the show.

1:24:20But how have you grown the team? Where are you guys based? It sounds like this new hub in Nevada is not where the primary engineering is going to be, but what's the status of everything? This building I'm in right now is Solcoa Alameda. This is our engineering R &D pilot operations hub. This is where we've been for the past year. And then Nevada is just production. That's just about three or four hours away from us today. So this is still the primary base of Solcoa. This is where we're developing a new generation of processes. And then once a process is matured and ready, we redeploy it to our Novato site.

1:24:57Amazing. So you have the money. You raised$75 million for this new facility, 500 tons of material for permanent magnets. When is that coming online? Who will you sell it to? Are you already doing biz dev deals with car makers, robotics companies? You mentioned defense being just one small piece of the market. Is there a 800-pound gorilla on the buying side that everyone sort of needs to figure out how to work with? Or is it a very diffuse market? Defense is a smaller part of the market, but it's a very important part of the market. So, COA has two products. We make NDPR for the auto sector and also a little bit for defense.

1:25:40And then we make Samarium. Samarium is almost exclusively used in defense. It's used in F-35s, et cetera. using these high-power, high-temperature magnets using guided missiles. China is one of the only producers of Sumerium. China banned the export of it. So there is this enormous shortage in the defense market right now for Sumerium, which is why we launched that product and why we're selling that. And then NDPR, the majority of that goes to the auto sector, right? So we sell to magnet makers, major auto companies. We sell to the defense market. And all of that starts at scale in July, July 4th of next year when we're commissioning Silicon One for both of those products.

1:26:11But it sounds like the supply chain is so deep and complex that you're not calling Ford to get your magnets in the next Mustang Mach-E. You're going to go to a motor manufacturer, an electric motor manufacturer, and then they will wind up supplying to Ford or something like that. We do both. So after China's rarest restrictions in April of last year, there was a significant shortage. And there still is a significant shortage of materials. Ford, you mentioned, shot down a factory because they just could not procure enough of these materials. So the automakers, we find, are actually becoming very involved in the upstream.

1:26:50They're actually sourcing the raw oxides and raw metals themselves so they can have a stockpile and have that access to that, have control of that part of the supply chain. And they can then toll it through their magnet production partners. So we work directly with automakers. We work with the magnet makers directly with primes. So we're involved across all components of that downstream supply chain. I love it. I love it. Well, congratulations, and thank you so much. Insanely impressive. You are announcing fundraising today. Is that correct? That is correct. How much did you raise? $75 million.

1:27:20Thank you for doing what you're doing. It's important. Amazing progress. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Talk soon. Goodbye. Up next. What a year. We got Jordan Nanos from Semi Analysis coming back on the show. We're going to get to the bottom of this whole AI thing. Do you think there's anything there? We'll figure it out. Jordan. Here he is. This AI thing people are talking about. You think, is there a there there? Yeah, I think so. Okay. A little suspicious, but I've been using it. You've been using it? Okay. I don't trust it, but I use it eight hours a day. Check it out.

1:27:57Now, things are good. So, reset on ClusterMax and then let's go into 3.0. How long have you been working on this? What does it take to actually rank all of the neoclouds, which, of course, is a semi-analysis coinage, which I think is awesome. And then how do you deal with all the pressure that you get from every neocloud probably following you around and threatening to break your legs if they don't make it into platinum tier? Yeah, the words in the Cambridge Dictionary we found out. of last year so we're proud of that one yeah a coinage that's so good yeah it's been four or five months of hard work on cluster max three the last major version was november of last year so the big focus was uh the new b300 gpus and 800 gig networks that was yeah a lot of work testing with everybody neoclods are at the center of the world right now so many of these companies that you guys have on the show raise tens hundreds of millions of dollars and then give like 90 percent of it to a neocloud and trust them as a partner so the decision they make is super critical and you know we're proud to give our take on our experience doing hands-on testing and talking to all these guys yeah how much of it is there's a spec sheet that comes from a neocloud then you have to fact check that you actually have to run a test with them are you also doing the occasional site visit and actually seeing what they, what their infrastructure, like what is the process for assessing the claims?

1:29:30Because, uh, every, every NeoCloud is going to say they're the best, right? Cheapest, fastest, all the above, thinnest, newest, probably biggest, best looking, thickest, best dressed. Yeah. Um, we have done some site visits. I mean, it's part of our consulting business more so than the ClusterMax research itself. I think for ClusterMax, yeah, it's a bit about validating that the claims that they're making publicly are real when we do our hands-on testing. It's also about getting in there and putting the cluster through its paces. So we do a bunch of performance testing. And most recently for this one, we've also been digging in on some research of how to simulate failures and see how the providers respond.

1:30:11probably the most critical piece of like decision criteria that people use when it comes to really big providers who might have roughly the same gpus the same amount on the same schedule for a similar price is like who can i trust who is going to be reliable and so we simulate failures we identify how long it takes them to identify when a failure occurs how long it takes them to recover and the spread is massive like uh top providers do this in 20 minutes end to end they have hot spare pools available so that they can make these changes. Some of the providers down the list, we simulate a failure or we actually induce real hardware failures on certain ones when they let us.

1:30:50And it'll sit there for hours, days. They don't identify it. We have to let them know to make the replacement. When that happens, it takes hours, maybe even a day or longer. Sometimes that's like, you know, time is money in the world of neoclouds. And if people don't trust you to make these replacements, it's, you know, that's a big issue. Is there a fear that they know you're going to be checking them out on a particular day? They're going to be on their best behavior, and you mean the next version of ClusterMax will be more of like a secret shopper program? You'll come in dressed as just a NeoLab through a partner, and then all of a sudden a failure happens, and they're like, well, I'm pretending to just be an average customer.

1:31:31Yeah, I mean, that's why in our imagery we have the Michelin man cutting off a nice piece of neocloud to see how they're going to rate on the three stars. Well, to me, it's notable that these neoclouds are opting in and then they're having issues and they should know they're having issues or they should be paying more attention because they're getting graded. And there's still that gap between a 20-minute fix and a multi-day fix or having to be notified that there's an error. I would expect that. I think that's probably just because there's so much demand everywhere. And they're saying, like, why is this customer paying me, like, you know, a billion dollars a year?

1:32:12And then I have you who's just, like, grading me. And technically, like, you know, it's hard to say, like, who's more important, right? Is it the customer should probably come first? But at the same time, this will impact future relationships. Overall, outside of these edge cases and errors and reliability and things like that, what can you say about general performance? Is the gap growing between different providers or is it shrinking? I'm curious if it ties at all to what we're seeing at the frontier, whether it's closed or open models, where there's different points where you feel like the gap is shrinking or it's growing.

1:32:54and I'm wondering if there's any ties to this. Yeah, for sure. So in terms of performance, I think the biggest thing that we see change between providers is the network design. The difference in how you set up a network for 100 ,000 GPUs is quite different than 10 ,000 and even smaller. And some providers are going with non-standard networks. In other words, they don't buy the switches and the NICs from NVIDIA. Instead, they build them themselves. I'm looking at Amazon EFA as an example there. but others are just deciding to go with infiniband instead of rocky two different nvidia options um this can really affect performance the other thing is just configuration to the downside yeah to the downside um and it's it's it's not necessarily that the physical hardware has any significant issue in it it's that let's say you are a customer and you're trying to use some open source piece of software so uh vllm or sglang for inference comes out and they've got some new feature.

1:33:54The people who have developed that software have likely been using an NVIDIA network. Almost exclusively, they use NVIDIA networks. So how long does it take for you to get that software supported and performing well on your custom network? I mean, this delay can be months. And again, time is money. So do these guys want to wait and think about their network for four months, waiting for that new feature for KVCache offloading to be supported? People get frustrated and so they want the nvidia standard on the networking and it's this balance between like a proper design up front while also having the skill set on the team to be able to set things up make upgrades to software to firmware support people with what they're trying to do and um reliability plays into this too if you're constantly having hardware failures like i said before all of a sudden jobs are failing they're not finishing researchers are getting frustrated so So I think reliability underpins a lot of that, but software support, network design, even storage can really affect performance as well.

1:34:53What is Nebius doing so well that they made it to Platinum? They're serving this middle tier of the market. CoreWeave has set the standard. I mean, they are the best in terms of technology. This reliability stuff I'm talking about, they just have so much data for monitoring. I mean, these guys deploy 10 ,000 GPUs a week at the peak when they're like building data centers. And so that, you know, that's incredible. But like their balance sheet is full. There's only so many people that you can marshal and resources to build out another gigawatt when they're going to 1.5 and beyond. So Nebius has really capitalized on this middle tier of the market, which is not small.

1:35:33Like I said, this is customers who are coming to us and saying, hey, I saw you write such good things about CoreWeave. I just have$100 million. I'm trying to give it to them. They're telling me they can't accept it until May of next year because they're backed up. And therefore, Nebius has been capitalizing. And they've also executed very well. The technology that they've developed is strong. We think that managed clusters are approaching this feature-complete world where it's hard to tell the difference in quality between Nebius and CoreWeave. Certainly, our testing experience has been really solid on both of them.

1:36:04And our experience with these providers is actually that they're moving to other aspects of the business. So they're going into these big bare metal deals at which we are not ranking bare metal here. Navius and Corweave, there are differences there. And then inference endpoints, RL infrastructure, all sorts of stuff that we're going to be testing in the future where there is differences. And these guys are not necessarily the household names and inference endpoints as the leaders right now. They have the offerings, but there's others that are ahead of them. Yeah, this seems really relevant to that mid-slot of the market, inference-heavy companies, Neo Labs, but are the big labs able to take something valuable away from this or are they doing things at such a unique scale that this is maybe a little less relevant because they're going to be talking to one of these providers as like, we're going to build something together and it's going to be exactly to our specifications.

1:37:02So we're not even really interested in what your stock configuration is. Look, the Frontier Labs read ClusterMax. They take it into consideration. I'm not going to say they outsource their thinking to us, but they certainly do their own due diligence. But look, they have everything. They have their own self-build sites that are 100 ,000 to 400 ,000 GPUs in size. And then they also have smaller clusters. Okay, so they need it for both. Yeah, because they're doing everything. That's very interesting. It comes into play. I mean, especially in a world where there's so much demand, this is why we've seen SpaceX basically pivot and become a NeoCloud and sell to Anthropic and Google so successfully, because those guys are buying from anybody who, in this case, could turn on 200 ,000 GPUs overnight, and so therefore they paid like a 3x premium to get in there.

1:37:54Yeah. Is SpaceX on ClusterMax? I actually didn't see. Yeah, we threw them in the unavailable tier. We are ready to test them when they are ready to have us tested. Okay, that's exciting. Well, we're rooting for them to make platinum. Last question from me for now. Has there been like crazy neocloud talent wars? Like I imagine the smart thing to do a year ago if you're spinning up a new neocloud is to try to poach as much as you can from CoreWeave and like try to take over some of that, you know, knowledge and expertise. yeah and it's across the entire supply chain so we see this in like the sres you might think about that command like million dollar salaries and a bunch of equity and get this idea that they should start a neocloud for themselves and some have and some are being successful they're kind of going out on their own but we also see this in like electricians data center technicians operators like the um all of this stuff depends on being able to build a facility and like uh salaries for electricians in Louisiana and Abilene, Texas, and all these other places that we're tracking are like up three to five X.

1:39:03Crusoe just came in and paid these guys so much more money and they're out of people. They need to train. And I think this is just what we're seeing across the entire industry. No matter what job we're talking about, people just need to be trained. And that's the most successful neoclouds that we are seeing have this pipeline to take talent from other related areas and get them contributing to the, you know, NeoCloud management day to operations world where a software engineer can start to work as an SRE on one of these teams. And somebody who's good at front end can work on backend performance and stuff like that.

1:39:35And, uh, I expect we're going to see, well, we are definitely seeing cross training of people who do real work on the ground, like electricians and stuff like that as well. On that, on that, like reallocation of, of capital labor resources, uh, It feels like the first big narrative around the neocloud boom was like pivoting from crypto mining to AI inference and GPU compute. Is there another wave coming? Is there another source of neocloud talent and energy and capital? Or is every neocloud, it feels like have all the crypto miners pivoted at this point? Are there still some holding out? Well, I think the next wave is the inference platforms, the base tens, the modals.

1:40:21They're going to have to own chips. Oh, and if they do, then they become a neocloud. And how do you expect those players to do when, as they move into spinning up their own power shells and getting their own GPUs? In some ways, it feels like they'll be very well positioned because they're already used to working with different providers and seeing the pros and cons of different approaches. But what's your view? I agree with that. And I think that the people who have been customers about NeoClouds know exactly what a good service is that they should be offering. And so I think they'll have good opinions.

1:41:01I also think that they are driven to do this by like real customer demand. And so in some ways, they don't have an option. They just have to buy this stuff for themselves. I think they will be successful. Some of them already are going to that mix of managed capacity versus self-build. The other thing I think you might be overlooking is the chip startups. So like Cerebris has become a NeoCloud. Grok, the Remain co after the NVIDIA Aqua hire, is buying NVIDIA GPUs and spinning up a NeoCloud. Others like Sam Manova are doing this themselves. We see OpenAI Jalapeno that's going to go into self-build sites.

1:41:34I mean, ship companies are like, not only do I need to battle in the supply chain for allocation at like TSMC and the memory providers, I also need to go get my data centers set up. I need to learn about construction. I need to learn about day two operations. Who's going to train people to repair a cerebrous wafer scale engine in their 250 megawatts of compute they're bringing on in the next couple of years? Well, it's them. They need to build that capability in-house. And frankly, I think they're going to realize a bunch of benefits to their margin profile for doing this instead of having this like stack of other people that you depend on.

1:42:08Do it all yourself. I mean, do it end to end. AWS, Google, they already proved you can do this with TPU and Tranium. I think this chip startups are going to do that as well. And then last common throwaway is just that there are lots of crypto miners to unlock. And there's also these like legacy clouds that haven't gotten into GPUs. I'm thinking about Cloudflare should be unlocked. Akamai. We just saw Iron Mountain, the guys who do all the tape backup. They're going to do GPUs. I mean, all of these companies that have experience running data centers, why not run GPU data centers too? You should be getting into this as well.

1:42:43So just going to keep seeing more and more people take this seriously and try to make money off it. What is the state of the mixed GPU NeoCloud? How many are pure plays? They're NVIDIA shops or they're AMD. And then how many are trying to actually rack multiple chips? Even if it's in multiple data centers, they at least have both available. And does that give them leverage? What are you actually seeing? And then what is the strategy? For the guys who play it well, it seems like they basically partner with NVIDIA on the way up. And then they start partnering with others to get some negotiation leverage.

1:43:20And they do both. Hyperscaler would be the goal where you could have a self-built chip program. and you can also buy from NVIDIA and get preference there. But you've got to be big to do that. And so people who try to do this from the start, I don't see them being as successful because you need that partner to help you grow to start. And if NVIDIA starts showing preference to certain people and not others, I mean, that's like they make or break your business in some ways. Yeah. Maybe another thing. Please. Yeah, maybe another thing about the, custom chip programs and stuff is just that the way you build a NeoCloud is driven by the workload.

1:44:04And so big pre-training clusters can look a lot different than inference clusters. And there's a whole bunch of people building for RL right now. And we look at environments and sandboxes as a really big, important thing that you need data centers full of chips that are not GPUs because they're mimicking the behavior of your phone or your laptop during training. and uh so there's lots of ways to get into this space if you understand the workload you don't necessarily need to deploy the latest and greatest nvidia gpus and for what it's worth we're going to be testing all of it in the coming months yeah i think there was reporting that open ai bought like 10 000 mac minis or something for maybe computer use stuff and you could imagine like a neo cloud of android phones in the future neo cloud of iphones or something as people trying and do more RL.

1:44:51Fascinating stuff. Congratulations on the launch. Very cool. Excited to talk to you again. We'll have you back. Give our best to the team. Yeah. Thanks for having me, guys. We'll do. We'll see you soon. Goodbye. Up next, Pioneer Labs co-founder and CEO, Erica Alden and David Nidictus. Welcome to the show. Let's bring you in. How are you doing? Welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks for having me. Nice to meet you. Yes. Great to meet you. Congratulations on the launch. You took over the timeline. But for those who have been living under a rock on Earth, break it down for us. What are you building?

1:45:23Introduce yourself, please. Yeah, so I'm Erica. I'm the CEO of Pioneer Labs, where we engineer life for Mars so that we can go there and breathe and eat and have flowers and have an awesome life. Okay. Okay, I saw a picture of Mars on the timeline maybe a week ago. It didn't have the orange filter, what was going on there. A lot of the images of Mars that I've seen in the past have this sort of like orange coloring. This one didn't. What's going on there? Was there, am I normally, am I used to seeing Mars? Is the red planet really red? Yeah. That's your question. That's my question. Yeah, currently, yes.

1:46:03Okay. Mars like sucks at the moment. Okay. So, I mean, Mars taking us back four billion years, Mars was really similar to Earth. It had liquid water. It, by all accounts, like should have been a place that could have hosted life. And then three and a half billion years ago, like the two planets, their paths diverged and Earth, you know, evolved photosynthesis. And we have this amazing biosphere that breathes out oxygen for us all day, every day. Let's get it up for other things. Exactly. We and everyone ever alive is like so lucky to live in this, you know, live on the one example we know of like a functional planet um and mars it's uh it's a little dysfunctional planet yeah it uh things went sideways for mars um it uh is now really cold um and uh it it still has like the raw materials necessary for life so much of its northern hemisphere has permafrost so like just below the surface there's a glacier of water but it's frozen um and there's other problems too like the the dirt on mars over billions of years of having a lot of surface radiation now has weird toxins in it that would be be very toxic for us if we grew potatoes in it directly so so there is is work to do to to go there at all or even more work to do to live there permanently or in in great numbers so how do we fix it and how do we make money off of it there we go yeah so we over the past sort of two years we've tried to break this big problem of how do you make mars nice down into an actionable first step so what we announced on tuesday was that we had engineered the first microbe that can uh we can take it to mars and it eats basically Mars, dirt, water, and air.

1:48:01That's it. And when it eats those materials, it turns them into bioplastics, which is this super useful category of materials that in this case, we suggest a good first application is to build houses with it. So you can pack your Starship with equipment, you can go to Mars, you can unpack it, and you can continue to just convert local resources into materials to build houses and build like a small city in about two years. Because we now have life that eats the nutrients and the dirt. And that's it. That's amazing. And I was joking earlier, the company is a nonprofit. But if I get in early, I imagine that there'll be a for-profit conversion at some point.

1:48:42Just kidding. But why do you... That is the traditional path trodden by OpenAI, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the new playbook. But why nonprofit? Yeah. Yeah. Listen, there's no customer on Mars. OK, makes sense. It's a little early. I mean, what's cool about this research is that many more people have started working on it just in the past couple of years because the technology is maturing enormously. And lots of other headwinds are sort of in favor of actually going to Mars and having there be biology. notably there's an enormous amount of investment going into space data centers along with all of the other reasons that that sort of earth's launch capacity has increased over the past decade and so like i think it's hard for the average everyday person to feel it but like humans are going to space like materially yeah um uh and and so like the the case is building for there being one day a customer on Mars who's going to care that you could make the planet not kill you immediately when you go outside.

1:49:51Or even that in the first contained, you know, human mission, you can have food and water and, you know, oxygen to breathe and stuff like that. So we're a nonprofit because it's early. And I think if this stuff continues to mature at this rate, then yeah, maybe you get to the point where you can start executing in a few years. So is the, if I map out the next five years, I mean, or 10 years, I imagine that, you know, NASA will be doing important work. They're the most recent visitor to Mars. They put a helicopter there a year or two ago. And then also you have SpaceX building the, you know, private company capability to actually get there reliably economically on the future.

1:50:36is the idea that if you have some breakthrough, you would be fine with the implementation happening with either organization? Is there sort of like an MIT license for some of what you do that might get picked up by NASA and experimented with further? Or do you want a deeper collaboration with either side of the two organizations? I think the way you kind of describe this is like almost as if space is this monolith that it's like NASA and SpaceX do stuff. Yeah. And that's like not how it will be. Right. Like as we start doing more stuff in space, there will be many different sorts of industries that develop.

1:51:17Right. So NASA has like cornered the market, let's say, for like human spaceflight. Like they are currently the best at it. They're not the only ones. So they have now competition from others who like can also like successfully execute human missions. SpaceX has is currently vastly wiping the floor with everyone in terms of launch capabilities. But again, they, too, have competition from, you know, relativity. So the space, like all of these different components of space, like are hopefully going to continue to mature into like a competitive ecosystem. And I would say like the thing I'm doing, which I'm excited about, is like doing the biotech is its own totally separate independent slice that like I'm lucky to sort of get in early and there's a ton of low hanging fruit.

1:52:11But like that itself is like a whole nother slice of the space ecosystem that I hope one day will have many competitors. Right. All trying to figure out how to do it better. And of course, we'll rely on networks of others to provide infrastructure and launch and human flight and like all of that. Yeah. Quickly, like what are what what timelines are you working off of? I think it's refreshing to ask somebody about space timelines that's not currently running a for-profit business that is public or needs to be public. Yeah, quite so. I don't have valuation to guide my answer. Yeah, so it took us about two years to make this first organism for Mars.

1:52:56Um, there are five organisms we need to make to like have a way to go to Mars and scalably make like livable area on Mars. And the sort of general timeline for that is, I think we will have some version of all five of those by the end of the next three years, which puts us in like 2029 ish. Um, there's a launch window in 2028. Um, NASA is doing some stuff. It would be really awesome to also have like a search for life and a test that we can grow a first earth organism, like in that 2028 launch window, there's another launch window early 2031. Um, and that's the one where maybe we could actually like go there and, and, and demonstrate something.

1:53:45and SpaceX, I'd be shocked if they don't try to get to Mars in 2028. But I think they might succeed in 2031. Yeah. I mean, longer term, I think like technology broadly is accelerating. And so there's a lot of investment going into space close to Earth and on the moon. and much of the interest in the moon is because it's like the close testing ground for going farther out. But there's a lot of reasons why the moon itself is not necessarily the spot we want to set up shop forever. It has fewer natural resources to make use of than other places we could go, including Mars. And so I would not be surprised if we start seeing, you know, first human mission to Mars in the 2030s and like substantial build out of like the robotic precursors to that like sooner.

1:54:44Yeah. How do you grapple with NASA's historical preference for leave no trace when going to a celestial body? They, you know, build the rover in a clean room so there's no, you know, Earth microbes or anything. I think we need to be talking about pioneer safety, the idea of dropping a bunch of microorganisms on a far off planet and saying, have at it. So, yeah, some people are worried about scenarios where, you know, becomes more powerful than us, more powerful. And they decide to come back. Maybe, maybe left me here to die. Yeah. Yeah. And I survived. But yeah, I mean, how do you deal with like, I don't know if there's laws around what you can do.

1:55:31If there's just conventions, there's certainly people that are impassioned on both sides. I'm super excited about this, but it is a departure from the way humanity has been engaging with Mars to date. That's absolutely right. So, I mean, we've gone to Mars, the narrative for why we've gone to Mars for the past 20 years has been searching for life. Yeah. And so going there with the intention of like having humans live there, for example, is a huge philosophical departure that there's a lot of inertia like against that. And for that, obviously, like many people want to go to Mars, it'd be super awesome and like kind of inevitable.

1:56:10in terms of law. So basically, the law that governs space is like relatively underdeveloped. And all of the activity, all the private space activity is stressing the system. And I think folks recognize that like, we need to think a lot more about space law. There's a line in the 1970 outer space treaty which i kid you not is like kind of the most recent like big outer space like law effort um and the line says basically thou shalt not contaminate planetary bodies um with harmful not harmfully contaminate planetary bodies which at the time when they wrote that that meant thou shalt not test nukes in space radio radioactive stuff everywhere That has now been in the modern era interpreted to also mean like don't contaminate places that might have life with Earth life.

1:57:07Like don't put invasive species places willy nilly, which is a really important thing to do. And it poses a big problem for the first human mission because humans are covered with bacteria. We have a skin microbiome and a mouth microbiome and a gut microbiome that is like we can't be sterilized in the way that robotic science missions have been sterilized to date. And so there is a body called COSPAR, amongst other organizations that are trying to figure out what the policy should be to assess risk when we have the first human mission. And actually, as part of our announcement, we published a paper that's like a suggested framework for how to gather data on like, here's an organism we're proposing to send to Mars.

1:58:00Let's actually measure whether or not it could possibly be invasive, which is possible to do for like the biomanufacturing organisms we've made because they're like well characterized. You can take measurements and spoiler, if this organism gets out of its bioreactor, it's going to be so dead, like so fast that it can't even evolve. So like this is not the one you would worry about. But but even with that example, like it's like unclear how to apply that to humans. Like, you know, our microbiomes can't be rigorously safety characterized like in that same way. And so the discussion continues about how to handle that because it really would suck to go to Mars and interfere with life there if it exists, which is not looking likely but still is a big concern.

1:58:51Well, I look forward to your future speeches at the UN General Assembly. I'm sure you'll be there breaking it down for everyone with all the progress you've made. But congratulations on everything. Yeah, really, really cool point of view. Come back on as you make progress. Yeah, we'd love to talk again soon. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers.

1:59:15One last piece of car news. One more. Twist my arm. Porsche is working on a successor to the 918 Spyder hybrid supercar, and it will be powered by an engine not seen since the 60s. That's according to Germany's Handelsblatt, which reports that the new model will be powered by a flat-eight engine, eight cylinders. The suspected price tag, half a million euros,$575 ,000 US. The reporting also states that the project is known inside Porsche as codename S1 and could be revealed to investors as early as October 7th, just five days or seven days after the Tesla Roadster announcement. investment Porsche will be responding with a there's gonna be so much demand for this it makes me sick yeah the suspected price tag of$575 ,000 I mean this thing's gonna trade yeah up uh I would expect it to trade up at least 2x instantly probably yeah uh and the question hard to say but I mean the the we have no idea what it looks like these are just like made up renders some of these are are i think uh based on the the previous project that they were uh potentially working on which was an ev successor to the 918 spider the the lineage with porsche is the carrera gt then the 918 everyone is waiting for the next thing the next supercar the next really special uh unique car not in the night not built on the 911 platform uh this should be it Although, of course, there's a lot of 911 styling and heritage in there.

2:00:57But yes, if it's anything like what they're pitching here, it's going to fly off the shelves. Do you think they do a manual? Are they going to go that far? If they ripped out the EV, they went to the flat eight, you know, combustion engine. Are they doing turbos? Are they doing naturally aspirated? Are they going to go as far as giving somebody just, you know, pretty close to a career GT experience? I don't know. We'll see. It's going to be exciting. Yeah, a lot of questions, but I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. Was there anything else we need to talk about? Congratulations to Huberman Lab.

2:01:31Andrew Huberman is number one on the New York Times bestsellers in advice, how-to, and miscellaneous for protocols, an operating manual for the human body. You can go pick it up everywhere books are sold. And I think that's it for today. Jordy? That's our show. It's been an honor and a privilege. and we'll be we will be back there's also a new eight sleep the pod six is live the sixth generation of eight sleeps intelligent sleep system redesigned for every kind of bed the new hub is small enough to fit under your bed frame more powerful than ever nine times as many sensors take solo you and your tie go smash the gong and we'll be out okay tyler's gonna do it leave us five stars in apple podcasts and spotify sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we'll see you tomorrow.

2:02:20Bye.

2:02:25Shalev Lifshitz