OpenAI DevDay | Sam Altman, Alexander Embiricos, Andrew Ambrosino, Peter Steinberger, Tibo Sottiaux, Kath Korevec, Casey Neistat

26:34If you want to delegate it, go use a dot. And this dot, it has your back, it figures out how to help you. It just helps you get so much more value out of this. So for me, I've been looking forward to this for years. Does it feel like... Sorry to jump in, but it's the same dynamic of like if you had a bunch of, if you basically had a bunch of people on your team that would just sort of flag information but then not take any action, they're like, hey, this thing, it's happening. You're like, okay, why don't you do something about it? I like that. But I would actually say Codex is actually more like a principal engineer, but who doesn't like initially, unless you tell them exactly to do it, doesn't read linear or doesn't check slack.

27:11So the super smart principal engineer, but you have to make sure you give it the right instructions. Whereas DOT, it's like you have that principal engineer because your DOT has its own computer, can do anything that you can do on a computer in the cloud. It can also connect to your computer. So if you have a really awesome local codec setup, it can actually go use that. Except that it has its own identity in Slack. And so it's available wherever you talk. And I don't know if you guys have seen this, or for anyone listening, the way that dots show up in Slack isn't just like a random name like Wisp.

27:40We tried that. We had agents with random names. And no one knew what was going on. It was a bit confusing. But they show up with your username. So I'm AE. It's like AE-dot in Slack. And so you have all these people and their delegates just doing stuff together. you know, principal engineer level capability, or if you're not an engineer, just like, you know, maximum capability. Yeah, I mean, the demo that I saw just randomly through a friend was like we were looking for Sam Altman's headshot, and we were able to delegate that to a dot that was able to go find like a file in a file system that's easy, but just that little retrieval would be a couple clicks on a web browser, and now it's just a command.

28:15Not even a couple clicks. It's like searching around. Sometimes it's like, yeah, digging through stuff. And so, yeah, it feels like we're hitting this inflection point of leaving just the developer workflows and getting into everyone's workflows. Totally. And you always had the prosumer of the enterprise who was like, oh, yeah, they're a sales rep, but they also use Codex. And now it's like there is a product that's approachable for everyone. It feels like there's the expansion of territory that's happening within businesses. And then there's also like different types of businesses that are able to actually get a great value.

28:48Started with software development firms and software companies. Are video game developers the next leg up? Like who are you seeing here at Dev Day that you're like, oh, I haven't actually talked to that many of your, that many folks in your industry. And maybe the progress in Astra is flowing through. I mean, that's what my experience was. I was modeling stuff in Blender. I haven't touched 3D rendering for a long time, and I'm building video games and stuff. And I saw that, okay, this is, we've crossed this, the spike of intelligence has spiked beyond what's relevant in this particular category.

29:27And I'm wondering where else you're seeing it, or what's been the most visceral to you? So I agree that like, I think for video games, like with the stuff we've been seeing people make with Astra, absolutely awesome. And so therefore, because Dots run on Astra, we've just seen people having Dots, It's just like, autonomously building, like really fun games and stuff. So that's awesome and I agree with that. But actually I think the audience that I'm the most excited for to like, get even more capability is maybe like solopreneurs or like small business owners. Actually, because you know, that's where you're doing absolutely everything that your business needs.

29:58And so you're just like swamped with all the stuff incoming. And that's where having a dot that just like has your back and is like managing all this stuff for you. Doing the work that maybe you could have done before with Astro, but it was just like a lot of work to figure out that that work even needed doing is helpful. So I've heard, obviously, a lot of great anecdotes from engineers, like people waking up in the morning to kudos from their team because their team was collaborating with the dot and it helped them out. It's like, good job for having a dot that did this, which is so fun. But we also have a lot of great anecdotes from people in completely other areas, like running the launch, dots going around realizing that, oh, this thing about the product changed, so we need to go update the blog, or your travel plans for this conference have changed, so let me just organize things for you.

30:41Walk me through the specialist dots. Is that more of a mental framing for the user to let them know that this capability is there? Is there actual the harness matters narrative where you do want to go to that particular dot? Because I can imagine as a solo entrepreneur, it's just valuable to say, okay, I at least have like one arrow in the quiver for legal, one arrow in the quiver for finance, et cetera. But also these models are pretty general and the G and AGI sort of leads you to throw, you know, Codex, Astra, Ultra at every problem. So how do you think about coaching people through that dynamic?

31:25Yeah. I mean, so there's two things going on here. So we've got dots and we've got specialist dots. And the reason we're leading with dots first is like just very very related to our mission, right? Sure. The benefits of AGI to all humanity. And when I think about product, I want that to be palpable. Like I want every person to have direct access to something that is empowering them, extending them, helping them move faster. And so those are dots. And those dots, each person has one, you'll have more in the future, and it works extending you, so using your connectors, for instance. So that's great.

31:52But when you think about how you scale the amount to which this capability is deployed within enterprise, there's actually a shift that we're starting to see happening that these are a part of, right? One of those shifts is like moving from local work on someone's computer to moving work in the cloud, right? And so specialist DOTS have their own computer, just like DOTS. The other shift is actually moving away from working with like an individual's identity to moving with an IT managed, centrally governed, well controlled identity. And we actually had an announcement going out today about how we're working with Microsoft on that as well.

32:21And so if you are a team or an organization and you have a specific type of like functional work that you would like to like accelerate the whole team with, that's where you deploy a specialist dot. So it could be something like procurement or accounting. Those are some of the early places we've seen a lot of success. But ultimately, broadly, we see that it'll be useful in many more functions and departments. Personally, I feel like, I don't know, maybe I'm just like too much of a normie, but I feel like this is the frame of mind that I want to be in. Obviously, there's like the merge where the AI becomes you, and if I want to send you a message, it comes from me, but the AI is like puppeteering me.

32:57And I actually prefer the idea of like, I have an assistant and they are their own entity and they have their own phone number and email eventually and I can share information with them and they are on my team, but I am still me. And I think that that is something that I would bet on that being relatable to a lot. Totally. We'll see. I don't know. I actually made some pretty funny mistakes as we were building this product that we had to pull back. Yeah, yeah. And so, okay, I totally agree with what you said and then I'll tell you about the mistake I made. Someone asked your dad, what is he writing about me from a performance reporter?

33:28Well, no, that actually, there's a lot of layers of defense that's not going to make that information. But no, it's more like what we've realized is that, again, there's this kind of like this bifurcation, right? Like I want my dots to augment me, and so maybe I want to collaborate on an email, and then I'm good. I just did that from within the ChatGPT app, and then I hit send, right? And that should just look like me, but, you know, I approve that email to be sent. And I made a mistake about that, what I'll tell you about. And then on the other hand, you know, we had for a while all these agents just sort of acting sort of as us, sending messages as us, like sent by ChatGPT thing internally.

33:58And it was like fine, but it kind of like started to get noisy. And so that's when we kind of iterated our way towards, no, we're going to have like a strongly separate identity. They're going to look different. We've got these characters. We're going to have like a name that like clearly is like owner dash bot.

34:10Peter Steinberger:Yeah. Right. And that just like clarified everything that was going on in communication. Totally. So it's awesome. And I love the idea of like, look, sometimes the amount of back and forth and compute that's going to be dedicated to some negotiation. if we're trying to find even just a time to get lunch, our dots might be going back for a long time, but it's not going to ever be like, you opened your messages to me, and it's a flood of messages because they were going back and forth. It happened below the fold, and then you can abstract that away as much as you need to. Agreed. Very cool. I'm going to set up a dot where every time I get a startup pitch deck that's just clearly AI-generated, it'll generate a playable video game.

34:54and I can just go through the deck in the form of like, you know. It's really possible. Yeah, but that's totally a thing you could do. No, I know. I'm joking, but it's actually. So here's an interesting thing about space, right, and sites, which is like a lot of the tools that we use to do work today are optimized for human authoring. Okay, so what I mean by that is like, you know, like think documents, right? Like you go into a document and it's like you can type into it, right? And the way that your document can look is like pretty simple. It's like text, right? And like, yeah, various document editors have like fancy ways for you to go in and move the images around and stuff, but it all generally kind of sucks because the tool is well-designed for humans.

35:29I think those tools are good, even though they're a little inflexible. But now that we have dots and we're collaborating with them, we have AI, HTML authoring is basically free. And so I love how space incorporates HTML visualization. So you could just be like, hey, build me this artifact that I can click around or literally put a game in the doc or whatever, in the page, and it's super interactive. And I think this is sort of the paradigm shift that we're starting to do. How do you think about the road to, and the benefits of actual direct integrations? Because at the end of the day, if I have some service that I want to interact with, there are APIs, there's ways, there's computer use at this point.

36:07Everything is somewhat connected. What's the benefit of actually directly engaging with OpenAI, doing a proper connection? What are the benefits? What are the costs? Well, I mean, there's a few layers here. I think it starts with, yeah, now that our agents can use the same tools that we use, i.e. computers, then there's kind of this baseline, right? Like your agent, if you want it to and allow it to, it can go to anything. And I do want to emphasize that like dots have many layers of like safety protections, and one of them is custom rules, right? So if you're a company and you want to limit what exactly dots can do with various tools, like there's a very easy affordance for you to go in and do that.

36:43But okay, so that's your baseline, right? The next layer that I think we could talk about is like connectors. and mostly it's just like it makes things faster, it lets your product be a little bit more opinionated, just improves the experience for everyone. The other sort of form of integration that I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at but that I'm really excited about is plugin extensions. So, you know, we've long had this idea that like you, or there's actually a fun debate in this industry, right? Which is like, to what extent should UI be generated just in time for the user? And we're doing a lot of interesting work here and there's like some cool stuff coming out soon around that.

37:16But my opinion is that for UI that I'm going to click around in, I generally want it to be somewhat predictable so I know where the button is. I can achieve mastery over this tool. But we don't want to be the only people deciding that. We want other people to be able to build their own UIs for our users. And so something super cool is that now if you're a ChatGPT user, you can install a plugin that is a plugin extension that actually renders custom UI, custom pages just in the ChatGPT app. So if you're a developer listening to this, you have the ability to go reach your customers directly. And the meetings plugin that we just launched today is an example of this.

37:46It's like a fully arm's length plugin integration. Yeah. Then what I, so I feel the same way about on the fly UI generation, custom UI. I am excited about that. At the same time, I can sit here and talk to somebody who's extremely bullish on voice interfaces. And they think that like everything should be vended over a conversational voice interface. And I feel like OpenAI has kept enough irons in the fire across all these different paradigms. Is there a tension there? Is that deliberate? Is there an idea that to reach everyone to hit a 1.2 billion mal or wow, like you don't want to actually go all in and narrow?

38:24You need to meet people where they are across multiple modalities? Yeah, I would say so. Like this is something Thibaut said earlier today. It's like at some point it's about the active intelligence and the interface stops mattering. And, you know, my like slight way of reframing that would be like it's like the interface should just be whatever you want. Yeah. Right. So like I'm a product manager, so I spend a lot of my day in Slack. And so I mostly talk to my daughter in Slack. Oh, sure. Right. Yeah. But then when I'm commuting. Yeah. Like I was coming in today, I knew I was going to have a bunch of conversations.

38:48I was just talking to my daughter like about the day and what I had to be prepared for. It was like grilling me on some hard questions. Yeah. You know, Holly earlier, the demo, the keynote today was talking about how like actually the anecdote was kind of me. Like I saw her in this phone booth all the time and I was going to give her some feedback. I'm like, why are you in so many meetings? Like shouldn't we be like not in meetings? Yeah. And then she's like, no, I'm talking to my daughter and I realized this. And I'm like, wow, this is crazy. We've like unearthed a completely new power. But going back to your thing about irons in the fire, I think that some of these things are kind of emergent.

39:16Like I really love talking to my DOT over voice. But the way that that happened is the voice team that was working on DOTS did an amazing job, but it was kind of like we combined these two capabilities. And because both irons were very hot, they combined really well. But if you had started from scratch, I don't think we would have gotten to such a great outcome. Yeah, yeah. I've noticed that I don't think people here have this problem, but as I was thinking about, you remember this viral video, this guy Jim from Charleston AI. Did you see this? Oh, you might have to refresh my memory. Basically, he has a retail store in Charleston.

39:55Physical store that you walk in. You can walk in and he'll teach you how to use codecs and JGBT work. Yeah. And I've just noticed this thing where normal people outside of the tech industry don't just know that you can ask the AI, can you do this thing? And it's like, it feels like as, there's 20 new launches today and it feels like the biggest bottleneck is like effective product marketing to the sort of long tail of users on how to use these different tools. Because when somebody asks me, hey, can I do this thing with ChatGPT? I say, well, have you asked ChatGPT that? Like it'll sort of explain the general capability set and then maybe like even prompt you on how to prompt it, et cetera.

40:33but it feels like outside of San Francisco, that's like the biggest bottleneck to like adoption and diffusion is just people not realizing that the best teacher for the thing is not even necessarily a YouTube video about it. It's like being able to go back and forth. Well, I mean, two things on that. First, thanks for having me on the show. You know, this is hard. The second point, though, I think is at least when I hear that, you know, I think this is actually a product problem as well. Yeah. Like if the product, I mean, it's so powerful, right? These open-ended sort of chat interfaces, you can ask whatever you want, But it's hard to realize that you can try that.

41:05Like, I find that very understandable. And so that's part of why I'm so excited about DOTS in this era of active intelligence is that, well, maybe I don't have to realize that I can ask for help for finding the headshot, you know? It'll just notice that someone was urgently asking me for the headshot, and so it might just go ahead and proactively research, like, where is the headshot? And they come to me like, hey, someone asked you for the headshot, I happen to know where the headshot is already, do you want me to send it? And so I think we're about to achieve this step function change in how much value people are getting from existing models.

41:37God has built on GPT-6 Astra, and yet it's going to unlock so much value for people. Yeah, I know. It's an exciting time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Have a great rest of your Dev Day, and we will move on to our next guest. Andrew Ambrosino is coming on from OpenAI. We will bring him on, have him throw on this headset, and introduce himself, because I believe this is your first time on the show, correct? This is my first time. Welcome. Welcome. Good to meet you guys. Thank you so much for hopping on. Give us a little tour of your day-to-day, your role. Introduce yourself for everyone.

42:11So since the original Codex app, I've led that team who runs desktop from the Codex app to now. And I've also picked up leading the space team from the space product. You needed some more on your plate. Yeah. It wasn't enough, man. Yeah. Desktop was solved. Give us an overview of your experience with the merge, putting everything together. There's been so many hard decisions, so many Band-Aids to rip off, I feel like. What's it actually been like? What's gone well? What do you wish you could redo? This is my merge shirt. Okay. Maybe introduce the idea of the merge because there is that Sam Altman blog post from a decade ago about the merge, and that's a different thing.

42:46That's a different thing. Well, there's been a series of merges. Okay. Should we merge them all together? We should merge the merges. Okay. We split. We merged. Do that eventually. No, I mean, we had this great app with Codex. And we had ChatGPT that served a billion users. And we needed to find a way to join these two worlds and bring the agentic side of Codex and this app into ChatGPT with ChatWork. Of course, when we launched it originally, there were still a lot of things that didn't match up. And so we've been working on merging those. We had two great merges today that are a little bit under the radar, actually.

43:20One of them is that we completely rewrote ChatGPT.com in the last five weeks to be the Codex app. Wait, your pinned tweet? Yes. It says, I'm going dark for six weeks or something like that, right? That's what this was? Yeah. Okay, now we know. So now we've got the same Codex desktop experience you're used to, the ChatGPT desktop experience is now ChatGPT.com. Okay, got it. And then the second merge that we've done is now by default, ChatGPT work on the desktop. Yes. Works on the cloud. Okay. And still has access to your local machine. Got it. So you've got these threads everywhere. Yes. Codex Cloud we launched today.

43:56What that means is by default you will be able to do something that needs a file system, that needs some local-ish compute, even though it's in the cloud. You won't have that tension between like, am I just in a ChatGPT thread that's sort of short-lived versus I got to go to my computer. Now, by default, you have more cloud access. Yes. One of the things that we really like about all of our new products today, whether that's the Dots, the Codex Cloud, ChatGPT work, All of this stuff is running in the cloud and has access to your local machine if it needs it. So if you've got files on your local machine, if you're logged into all your browsers on your local machine, the whole system, we are working on this merge.

44:35And we are next working on the toggle merges. So question for you. How do you balance trusting your own instinct around product decisions? Because obviously you would never make a big product decision that you thought was going to lead to a worse experience with real-time user feedback around how things were. Because people, we were just talking with Andrew, people build up a habit around different flows and different ways that the product can be oriented. And then they sort of build an attachment to it. And so even if it needs to change, it can be jarring. But you guys are sort of drinking from the fire hose of user feedback every single day.

45:16And whether you're going offline for five or six weeks or whatever you did, I'm sure you're getting tags and comments and messages constantly being like, do this, do that, do this, do that? Lots of tags, yeah. I think when it comes down to it, we want to put these capabilities into people's hands. And so it becomes obvious that even if for whatever reason we can't make it, you know, we can't bring chat and work together quite yet, what we knew was that what we were getting out of Codex had to be brought to everybody. And now we feel similarly with space, with dots, all of this stuff. We try to put the capabilities into people's hands.

45:52We dog food it extensively internally, so we've got thousands of people who rely on the stuff to do every part of their job. So we get good feedback loop there. But it's all a work in progress. The stuff is moving incredibly quickly, as you know. Lots of tags on X all the time, and we love that. Can you walk me through how there's this culture of, like, side project? what was it, side quest was the buzzword. Sometimes they get killed off. No more side quest. No more side quest, but sometimes they get brought back. Like all the computer use stuff that's going on, huge leap forward out of nowhere, but you go back two years ago, I remember Operator.

46:32That was like, was it a side quest? Or was it really important work to do because it set you up for this moment? And I'm wondering if there's prehistory for any of the new products today, like Space or anything else that you've touched on where you've like, Oh, yeah, actually we revisited some work we did previously in a product. It wasn't quite there. The model got better. We were ready to launch. I think most of the stuff that we released today is like a take five. Yeah. Even just of things that we did internally. Yeah. There were so many variations of dots that we saw internally played around with.

47:06Some were local, some were cloud. There were so many variations of the stuff that we used. Space has gone through a number of iterations. We had part of chat called Canvas that we had up for a while. That's right. We've had a lot of internal knowledge-based products. So we've gone through the revs on that. Codex Cloud is obviously a full 2.0. The original Codex was cloud. Then we got into a local agent era. And now we're back putting the full local agent on cloud environments. So I think everything that you see today is one of those operator stories or that operator to Atlas to Codex, right? Yeah.

47:39Sometimes I think that the models are changing so fast that it's hard to get the product timing on these things exactly right to the model when the model is best at it. So sometimes we're slightly too early, slightly right. But I think the stuff that we have out today feels magical. Yeah. So tell us more about space. What is the vision, especially for where that product goes, how it fits into just a typical person's workflow in the modern air? Yeah, we find ourselves bouncing around between applications all day. Of course. We're in the Codex desktop app, ChatGPT desktop app, all sorts of documents.

48:20We're sharing things across Slack. And so we wanted to make something that felt very agent-native and felt like a way to collaborate with other teammates, their dots as well, right? Something that you can kind of curate this set of teamwork that you're tagging each other in. you're able to use it in a way that feels like an extension of ChatGPT. And so this is really the entry of Codex and ChatGPT into a multiplayer, more collaborative era. And we're going to do a lot more here. How do you think about actually the balance between how heavy your hand is on the instantiation of UI on the fly? I noticed this weird thing just happened randomly and just, I believe, default ChatGPT, I was asking, like is it a particularly hot summer and it pulled historical weather data from my local weather station and it created this chart and when i would scroll over it it had haptic feedback where the phone would vibrate and i was like is that someone at open ai like being like we should put haptics in this thing or did the model do that and then if i love that am i able to sort of productize that within my organization to be like, the way we do charts at this company, there's haptic feedback.

49:36Like, how does this flow from what you get for free versus what you put your finger on the scale with versus what an individual user might want as a pattern? That's kind of what I'm... This is what I am very passionate about, this subject. And I think, you know, a few months ago with Codex, we brought this visualized skill that kind of makes you eye on the fly. It can either be a full game, right? In space you can make a chess game and play it with other people if they have access to the page. Sure. That's kind of crazy. Finally. Finally. The people are asking for it. It's like we're split on this decision.

50:11Let's play chess for it. I think the one that you were describing. Let me know when I can 1v1 someone in Rust. Yes. MW2. Out the box. Well, and the DOT computer actually has a few games preloaded onto it. Oh, okay. Which is kind of fun. The DOT can play Solitaire. You can watch it. Sure. And I just set it off just to play if I just want it to entertain itself and play in the background. I can do that too, even if I'm not there. I've had Codex play Slay the Spire from start to finish. I think the one that you're talking about with the weather, that one is an extra challenge. Because you can't have your instant chat model writing a full web app every time.

50:49And so this is one that we've worked on a lot. The research is finally kind of there to make it feel excellent. Yeah, yeah. But then of course, like, like eventually that gets flowed back to the models, the models get faster. I mean, we saw the, what is it, eight times faster is ultra fast. How do you think that that will change workflows for enterprises? Like, I mean, I think there's like a little bit of a groan at the pricing, but Tyler was just like, time is money. I want to hit this all day long. How do you think people are responding to the speed trade-offs? Is that like a new core skill for people in understanding how to size workloads and actually get the work done?

51:32Allocate resources. Allocate resources. Or is this something that it should be abstracted? It is quickly being abstracted. I like to say time is money saved both. Okay, there we go. Fantastic. Off the cuff. It's a great line. No, I think, you know, ultra-fast has been one of those things that for us, like, you just, you can't go back, right? There's, it's, you know, it's not exactly the same as intelligence doing something that quickly, but it sure feels like it. You know, especially when we do these dynamic UI things, right? You're, you know, you're working on a page with your dot, you tag it in and you say, hey, can you drop interactive chart of our DAO usage, or DAO growth over time, right?

52:12And it just, it's there, right? Yeah. It's like you're doing a whiteboard session, but you can do it with all the live data from your business. Right. And it goes off and it does the research in your data sources. It writes the little app for you. And then you can just say, hey, share this with my team. That feels so good with Ultrafast. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. What else are you working on specifically to onboarding? We were just talking about the boom of solopreneurs. like who is the core demo that you find the earliest adopter? What industries are on the cusp of getting online? We were just talking about the 3D modeling capabilities.

52:58Feels like what we saw in Vibe-coded SaaS products coming to the video game world, but what are you seeing on the horizon in terms of companies and developers here today that might stick out to you as somebody who wasn't here a couple years ago but is now? It's hard to say. I feel like it's just really taken off. I don't know if you've seen the chart from OpenAI internally, too, which is just basically engineering was here, research was here, and every other one is quickly following in sync. I think there's just some of the things that you do together, like pulling data, researching things in Slack, planning events together, I mean, this entire Dev Day is planned using coding agents.

53:43Yeah, of course. They don't look like coding agents anymore, but under the hood they are. So I think we're seeing really just a lot of everything. Yeah. How many weeks will you be out of a lock-in until the next six-week lock-ins? Are you going right back into it? That's a great question. Just repin the tweet? I think tomorrow. Okay, tomorrow. I think tomorrow I'm going to do another lock-in for six weeks, and we'll see what's at the end of that. Well, that's fantastic. I can't wait. Anything else, Jordy? No, this is great. Thank you so much. Thank you both. This is fantastic. Walking around right now.

54:12Yeah, it really is. Good luck out there. All right, thanks, guys. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Up next, we have Peter Steinberger returning to TBPN, founder of OpenClaw. Welcome back to the show. It's been too long. Last time we talked. I don't think really much has happened since then either. Other way. Flip it around. There you go. There you go. We're live. Yeah. How's life?

54:41Peter Steinberger:Have you ever been on a roller coaster that just doesn't stop? I feel like at some point I see the ups and downs. I'm like, yay. And it's still exciting. Is the roller coaster more wild online with the Chattering class or internally with what you're working on? I think I built up a little bit of a shell. Yeah, that's good. He does always too much chat online and some of it is amazing, some of it is just like, oh, you know so little. Yeah, totally. But I cannot stay away from it. It's just too addictive. Yeah. So let's go. It's definitely a new skill set. Yeah. Like having a… Surviving online? Yeah.

55:30Peter Steinberger:I'm sure you don't know nothing about that. Yeah, it's the same thing. No, but it's actually insane how angry people get and how emotional people get about software and just various software products, right? And you've been on the receiving end of, again, that full roller coaster, right? Where it's pretty surreal. The last time you were on the show was just like you were calling in from, I think, were you still calling in from Europe maybe? But then I think you almost immediately flew over here and you've probably been here ever since. I took a little bit. I had some London detours. We have a cool office there from OpenAI.

56:08Peter Steinberger:And now I'm here in this crazy AI town. Yeah. I'd like to go back because I think there's so much of your previous work that leads into the announcements today, the moment in AI broadly, personal agents obviously. But can you just retell us the story of where did the idea for OpenClaw come from? Like what was the initial spark? Like what cut you started there? My spark is annoyance. Annoyance. Yeah. Like I do stuff from, you talk about emotions. I also have emotions. It doesn't mean my computer doesn't work as fast as well as I would. I get annoying. Yeah. But now in this day and age, it's like you don't have, you can use the annoyance.

56:48Peter Steinberger:Yeah. And just like, let's fix it. Yeah. And then the fact that I couldn't really just talk to my computer. Yeah. That annoyed me. Yeah. Like this is so, this all feels so crufty. isn't there a better way? And then I just explored those better ways. And I keep exploring those better ways. You know, I talked about it inside, like my whole thesis is that whatever workflow we think we have right now, it's already outdated. We cannot catch up with the models. Just think about like how much new things you can do because now Luna is like too cheap to meter. Now you have ultra fast, it's like, wait, so I don't have to do 50 terminal windows because I can actually stay in focus?

57:29Peter Steinberger:Oh, it completely changes things again. And it's like, we can't keep up building. Yeah. What do you think, as you look back on the boom of OpenClaw, what do you think the key ingredients were? Was it the connectors? Was it the connections? Was it being able to communicate to your computer from anywhere? I think I just showed people a different way how to use AI. And so many were stuck in this world, oh, it can summarize my email. No, can I install stuff on your computer? or like buy things for you or like do whatever you want that you can do in your computer if you just only give it the right tools yeah and i i packaged it in a way that was weird and interesting and and also felt a little bit different you know instead of like giving you a wall of text it felt a little bit more like lobsterish humanish but like like like it was interesting yeah it showed people a new way and it had some unique ideas like what about if your AI could actually just be proactive.

58:34Peter Steinberger:Even though like some of it was like token burning, but some of it was genuinely cool and surprised people. So I think this day and age it's all about ideas and imagination. It was such an amazing moment because it felt like the sort of hacker culture that this entire town was built on, like, exploded again in this awesome way. People were getting back into hardware. The main thing is, like, you know, you kicked off an entirely new paradigm. You set, like, the whole industry on fire in many ways. Everyone started using it, seeing it, and then immediately thinking, how do we make this, like, commercially viable to be able to scale from hackers that are buying Mac minis into something that everyday people can use.

59:21And I feel like in some ways it's surprising that it, given how good the models are, that it took another six months to actually get to this moment right now where there's more excitement than ever around personal agents. Like in some ways, like you saw the roller coaster, right? You saw this curve of excitement and then, hey, this maybe isn't ready for like a billion people to use. And then now we're back to the point of like, okay.

59:42Peter Steinberger:Isn't that the classical Gartner hype cycle? Yeah. And I honestly, I wish it would have been less hype. Sure. It was kind of like this roller coaster where like, yeah, and then like, holy fuck, you know? So I definitely had like a massive hype cycle with like inflated things what Open Club would do for you. Oh, yeah. Completely decide of what it could actually do. Yeah. And then you had all these insane stories. And then, of course, people tried it. Like, no, it doesn't quite work like this. Yeah. because there are still limitations. Models were not as good. The software was not as good. Of course, everything is still hard.

1:00:28Peter Steinberger:Everything is still hard. And people were expecting this perfect magical thing that one guy slopped in the basement. The ultimate slop grenade. No, it was really a slop grenade for you. You threw it over to San Francisco. Well, you were one of the first people to come out and just be like, yeah, it's so vibe-coded. And you were unabashed about it, and it's like that comes with a lot of pluses and a lot of minuses, but like here is the thing, and you know, it's free. Like you can go and make your own decisions. You can go rewrite the whole thing yourself one line at a time if you want. And people did many, many, many times.

1:01:03Yeah, yeah, exactly. How do you think the, like OpenAI and ChatGPT is an interesting position because you have ChatGPT threads, you have ChatGPT work in the cloud, Codex, cloud, codex on your desktop. There's a few different ways to interact with this. And I'm wondering if you have a vision for what the next year looks like with how much people are getting into devices, their own hardware versus things like the cloud just eating more and more things. We went through the boom of the open web. Then everything went to social networks and Instagram profiles. And I'm wondering if you think there's like a pendulum that's swinging or if you have any sort of mental model for Where the early adopter or the early consumer will be in a year?

1:01:49Peter Steinberger:I mean the current situation was like chat and work. Yeah, of course it's a compromise Yeah, it is and I learned just the hard way it is very hard to like Take people from where they are introduce them into something new sure It's not annoying these people or like confusing these people. So sometimes you have to make compromises. Is this going to be the final form? Hell no. Like there's people working on something that's way cleaner.

1:02:21Peter Steinberger:What I don't really know yet is if we will be in a future that is mostly your agent or if it's going to be a whole army. I'm seeing both approaches. I'm more in the first team, but I can also totally see the second team. And then how all these are like how your personal and your team agents interact. There's still a lot of questions that I don't think the industry has fully figured out. Yeah, I always comp it back to how human organizations have worked, right? So you have a big company with thousands of people. You might task one person, hey, we have this general goal. You figure out how to exactly define it and what it should look like.

1:02:59But then hundreds of people might work on it. But then you don't have hundreds of people report back, all back.

1:03:05Peter Steinberger:Kind of replicate those hierarchies. And then maybe your agent, oh, this is something really complicated. Let me spawn an agent that manages this. And then it manages this little subagent. Ah, there's so many ideas. There's like, I am playing with a lot of them. You know, what really excites me these days is how do we build software in the future and how do we work better with agents? So like, what I just had so much fun with the last few months is moving all of my team to one place. And everybody was freaking out. What do you mean? You're like, you're like, you're so embarrassed on like how everyone is talking to their agents.

1:03:39Peter Steinberger:It felt so private. Oh, interesting. And they're like, I got pushback. And then we did it anyhow, and then everybody felt embarrassed for a day, and now everybody's learning so much. It's like, because we all have a mental model on how we use agents, and it is very different because that was not something we shared. Are you sharing your codex sessions? I'm sure you have some really interesting questions. Yeah. I've actually wanted that back in the deep research era. I would see Tyler Cowen talk about how he was getting a bunch of value for economic research and I was like, I would love for him just to be able to click on it, share the prompt and the result because I might never think to ask that question.

1:04:21And we've never really developed a pattern around, oh yeah, it's totally normal to just go on Twitter and share a link to a ChatGPT transcript. Occasionally you'll see what the Grok response is. They like to take credit. Yeah, they like to take credit for it. It's like, it's good content. You did the research, It did the research. You thought of the question. Where are you going through, you know, the first kind of era with Open Claw and then now this personal agent boom, where are you actually, where have you seen a bunch of agent, like personal agent activity, and you're actually like, I don't think that that will be a paradigm.

1:04:56So, for example, like shopping is a good example. Like a lot of shopping with agents right now is like walking up to the front of a store and asking a person outside of the store like hey i think i want to get this thing and then they can you give me some information on it and then maybe they go in and they come back and it's this sort of like strange dynamic where you maybe at some points it just makes sense to go into the store and see all the information as a um and and so there's like every single one of these you know big debate around restaurant reservations in the last you know 48 hours as well right and so it's like where are these areas where you're you've seen some activity and you're like, it doesn't even make sense to really focus on that from a product standpoint.

1:05:36Peter Steinberger:There's so many companies that want to own the experience. And I don't want to talk to your agent. I want my agent to be able to use your system in the way it thinks it's best. But then they push their own agent and they block my agent and I just go somewhere else. I, well, ultimately we don't see how that will play out, but let me use my agent. I like my agent. Make your service good so my agent can use it. Now we have like the agent wars I feel. Yeah. Like there's big companies that block their website. Agent wars. Yeah. Fucking agent wars. And they're true. Here's an example. So shopping, going back to shopping, there's all these, let's say, like companies that make sneakers, right, that are super desirable and there's more demand than supply.

1:06:23Well, they've had bots trying to block other bots forever. And now people are just going and they want a generic pair of sneakers. and they're getting blocked. And even an agent that is sufficiently aligned to the user is going to, you can just set it, hey, when this thing drops, go and make sure that we're the first person to buy it. And yet that's the thing that the companies have been trying to block for...

1:06:47Peter Steinberger:Well, if you cling on to your old ways without re-syncing how else we could do it, maybe you have to re-sync some system. Maybe the who clicks fast enough is no longer the right way. I don't know. I bought the Steam Machine and there was just a window of a week where you could register and then date the lottery. It doesn't matter if my agent clicks in 0.1 seconds or as a human click in one hour, everyone gets the same chance. There's a lot of ways where we just need to rethink how we did things in the past because it no longer makes sense. Instead, you want to block my agent? Oh, then I buy something else.

1:07:21Yeah. How do you think about agents going outbound, becoming more proactive. Everything from OpenClaw to ChatGPT has been very user-prompted. I come to ChatGPT, I ask a question. Otherwise, it doesn't do anything. It just sits there. But it feels like we're about to enter a more proactive. I'm already seeing it in ChatGPT. It'll recommend some prompts. And you can imagine the future where I'm more in the response category.

1:07:49Peter Steinberger:I want an agent that's always thinking. It should be thinking about this interview right now. Yeah. And then maybe I have like a hidden screen. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe we'll meet proxy. Yeah. You're the meat proxy. It is also really hard to do. Yeah. It's a design problem, right? Yeah. Not just, it's also a hardware problem. Sure. Like, give us more chips. Yeah. Incredible amount of experience. Now you want to want. Looking at everything on your calendar and saying, you have an interview. So I went and did a deep research. Here's what John likes to talk about. Here's what Jordy talks about.

1:08:20And they did all of this and they put it together. put it in a video, in an audio, and they gave it to you in every single way. It's a game.

1:08:25Peter Steinberger:I want Astro 6 Ultra Fast thinking about my day. And not just looping. If everyone would do that, it would just not work today. This is the country of geniuses in a Roomba. So to decide where to go next. Down the stairs. Yep, exactly. It's deploying an incredible amount of super intelligence to solve the most mundane things. But it does feel like that is maybe the natural flow, which is in the shopping analogy. like the credit card permeated shopping. And it took a pretty complicated dance of, are you writing a check? Who are you? Write the check. Pay with cash. I give you the change, et cetera, to just tap the card.

1:09:04And there's another world where the inventory and sizing is checked behind the scenes all through my agent talking to your agent. And I think any worldview that assumes that only one side of the interaction will be agent mediated is mistaken. I think that if there might be a world where in the future our agents have talked to each other for the equivalent of a million years to prep us, but I don't think there's any world where my agent is spamming you with tons and tons of emails and you're flooded and you don't have any defenses.

1:09:37Peter Steinberger:The agent war. You're going to fight AI versus AI. Exactly. The agent war will happen below the fold and we will both be blissfully ignorant of the trench warfare that's going on. I mean, if anything, it's keep being interesting. Yes. Like nothing slowing down. Yes. I kind of dig that we finally arrived in this world where so many people cannot try agents. Yeah. But also, you know, there's too many people that just, we build all these super intelligent things, but we're not really good at explaining people what they can actually do. No, totally. There's still a lot of work to do. Yeah. What are you tinkering with these days?

1:10:15I feel like a lot of people are getting the hardware bug, the robotics bug, the video game bug, 3D rendering. I went back into Blender for the first time in years. Are there any new, like, I mean, I imagine everything blends together, but are there any areas that have interested you because of the model advances? You're like, oh, I want to go check that out, build a robotic arm that paints or build a video game or something like that.

1:10:45Peter Steinberger:Robotics is definitely something I bought some stuff and I'll play more. But I'm really still very interested in, as the models get better, how much more can we move up the stack? Okay. So you said before about this, like, agents building hierarchies. Yeah. Like, how can I build this? I want to build an agent that creates those hierarchies almost on demand. Sure. Like if I tell the agent, hey, rewrite Postgres in Rust. I don't know. Okay. You figure out it's like, oh, is Peter okay? But maybe also, okay, he's serious. How can we plan this? What structure does it need to be created? And also over what timeline?

1:11:28Because maybe you want Postgres rewritten in Rust. Now. Maybe you want it now. Now. But maybe you want it in a couple of months. And so it's like, okay, we're going to throw this on the back burner, cook on it for a while. I mean, I've noticed this where there's certain things where I'm like, oh, this is actually something I'd like to play with tomorrow. I'll set a goal and run it overnight. And if it's rendering something and it's sitting there, it's fine. And then other times it's fast mode. Let's get it done.

1:11:55Peter Steinberger:I was very unapologetic on trusting the models. Yeah. And where people, to the point where people were mocking me, oh, this will never work. It's slop. Look where it got me. Yeah. And yes, it's slow, but also yes, we're going to make it better, and the models will keep improving. And then slowly, people are waking up, and we move from this world where, of course, you look at everything in the line of code, like, yeah, we scroll through it. And it's not stopping. It's not stopping. And there's so much of how we do all those things around this that need re-syncing. And I just find that super interesting.

1:12:32How do you think about your personal workflow? Sam earlier was saying historically you would want to think of 30 ideas and maybe whittle it down to one and just work on that for a few months. It feels like the success of OpenClaw came because you shipped 30 things in 60 days. But are you still trying to do that internally where you're just building, again, silly little kind of projects just to see what's possible to almost generate more robust ideas that you can then invest more time in?

1:13:04Peter Steinberger:These days I kind of get annoyed if I can't change software with a prompt. I get so used to having all the tools myself that now I'm kind of annoyed at the operating system. You know, because it's the last frontier. That's why I started shifting more towards, hey, Linux is not actually cool. Yes. Because, yeah, there's a lot of problems, but I like problems. Yeah. And it's all text-based problems. And my agent just goes down and reads the kernel and repiles the kernel. And now my webcam works. And then that gets me excited. Like, oh wow, I can now literally own this deck and there's nothing we cannot fix anymore.

1:13:39Peter Steinberger:Like everything's fixable. Everything is still hard, but nothing's impossible. Yeah, I could run my own OS. Maybe it's still hard, but let's see. With enough tokens and advances, that ridiculous thing will not be that ridiculous anymore in the future. Well, yeah, it's interesting too because the agent actually becomes the operating system in many ways. I grew up using Mac computers and never had a Windows PC at home, ever, in my whole life. Wow, loser. Jealous. Very blessed. But I got a sim racing rig, right? And so I have a PC for the first time. I'm like, I don't know how to do anything on this thing.

1:14:19But you just set up codecs with computer use, and you just talk to it, and you tell it what you want to do. It just doesn't.

1:14:25Peter Steinberger:I built a little ESP device, and it has display issues. So I glued my webcam to the display and the codex ripped overnight and fixed the display driver. That's so crazy. All I need to do is think about ways how your agent can do the best work. That's so fascinating. Close the loop. And the problem was I also told her to fix audio and then I was waking up, hello ESP. Oh, it's testing it. Hello ESP the whole night. That's so funny. Because it took so long for it to figure out that the volume was down on the other thing. Well, I eventually learned. That's so funny. That's so funny. Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing.

1:14:58You said you put the team together, but that was digitally, correct? You said the whole team is now sharing what they're prompting their agents, but physically, what's your day-to-day look like? How much time are you in San Francisco? I'm here.

1:15:15Peter Steinberger:I'm here. I basically have two teams. I do a lot of work on the foundation side. We push it forward, and then there's a lot of things inside OpenEAR where we tried new ideas. There's a lot of, hey, we tried this, how can we make this into something that's a 1P product. So there's some cross-pollination. I take some ideas back as well because I like to play with them. Sometimes we disagree on ideas. Not everything works in that scale to that scale. It's a very different way how you need to build things. But it's kind of cool. So yeah, I have a lot of jobs. I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

1:15:56Thank you. What a year. Thanks for having me. See you next year, hopefully. Hopefully sooner than that. We'd love to chat with you again. Up next, we have Tebow, the CEO of the Reset Company of California. Yes, the master of resets coming on the show. Tebow, here we go. Taking a photo. Can we hand over to them? I don't think so. Tebow, thank you so much for coming on the show. How are you doing? Man of the hour. What's happening? We're going to have you throw that headset on. The microphone goes on the left. I think you got it right. There we go. I wish you brought the button. Oh, he already pushed it today.

1:16:32It's been used. It was a one-time use. Yes, but the physical button is a great manifestation of all the hard work. How is Dev Day going? What are your reactions? The vibes are awesome in person. Yeah. Yeah, I feel everyone I talk to here seems super excited. Maybe not about the things that I thought they would be most excited about, mostly ecosystem and, you know, us opening up, like, sign-in with ChattrPT. Yeah. That was the thing that stood up. You know, we had it on a screen, and I stood up and just... You actually did. Like, you know, I'm watching my team play, you know. But to me, that was a standout thing, because even having Peter on just now, like, Peter didn't have the ability to offer massive amounts of compute to the world.

1:17:19And so he made a bunch of product decisions because of that, right? You know, local approach, things like that. And now if you're a developer and you have product experiences that you want to deliver to customers, you can do that in a way that will be much, much more cost efficient. Yeah. So maybe reset on that experience. Explain what actually was announced today, and then we'll go into the discussion. Sure. But just briefly on that Peter part, I think the great thing is you can now focus on building great product. Yeah. Instead of like focusing on how do I make the token economics make sense.

1:17:53Sure. Yeah, a lot of things were announced. Maybe even like too many things. No, that was my, I mean, I always default when I'm talking to 70-some portfolio companies. When they're like, we're going to launch this fundraise and this thing all on the same day. I'm like, just break it up, launch it, spread it out over two weeks. But in some ways, seeing this live, I was like, okay, it actually makes sense. It's fun to have this moment where all these things, and it creates this pressure around the team to deliver. So the thing I'm most excited about, because it has changed the way I work so much, and I can't wait to see what people do with it, is obviously dots, where I think this is just a new way of packaging a lot of the things that we were seeing working before, like very long-running agentic tasks.

1:18:43The configuration that we have, the agent never stops. occasionally it sleeps yeah but it's always online always doing proactive research thinking about your goals thinking about your preferences and then you just steer it live just you know you would give feedback to anyone else you just give your dog a little bit of feedback it learns and so the more you interact with it and the more you teach it about your preferences the better a job it does and at some point you know a couple days in you're like wow you know just like i can't really quite imagine doing work without this thing yeah so it becomes like super delightful but it's that you need to invest a little bit of time in.

1:19:15Do you think developers are already, do you think developers are more in a mindset to adopt DOTS or more excited about sort of diffusing AI throughout their organizations to parts of the organization that may have not be, like not, they haven't onboarded workflows onto Codex necessarily because it's been like intimidating. Is that part of the next leg up here? yeah i think democratizing and they're figuring out like what is the natural way to interact with these things um you know if you're like oh yeah you know like fire up codex in the terminal it's like yeah you know it's capable of editing documents and it's capable of creating slides and yeah there were some incredible marketers and finance people that were doing that but there is value to wrapping things up nicely right yeah and then also making sure that it's It's safe and it's secure right out of the box.

1:20:09That configuration is really minimal. It does something useful within the first five minutes. And you don't have to be super technical, but you just kind of still feel the power of it. And that's what we're doing with Dots. And then in the future, we'll ship a lot of the same technology and the capabilities right in ChatGPT as well. For our 1.2 billion users. but really it's about getting to the essence of how much can you simplify, really. Yeah. Talk about the current state of the difference between the model and the harness. It feels like this year we went through the whole narrative of the harness really matters, and I'm interested in the lessons from both the harness matters and specifically Codex as a harness in dots.

1:20:56how much translated, how much similar lineage is there, or is it possible we're even in a different regime, and I'm using the wrong metaphor? It's like this interesting tension between the model and the harness, and you always build the harness a little bit ahead of the capabilities of the model in order to make up for it. And then the next generation of models kind of catch us up to that, and then you have to delete part of your harness because it's actually holding it back. and so it's very playful and dynamic. It's a dance. Yeah, it's a dance, right? It's this beautiful dance of the model of the harness.

1:21:34The Codex harness is used to power dots, so like the same open source harness that we have, and then we also use it to power the agents API that we have, which is like managed agents. And a lot of effort is going into this harness to just make it very efficient, safe, secure, And so I would say like right now, that's most of the benefits that you get from this harness. Like it's really a hardened thing. Yeah. And then on the complexity of the tools, it's like, you know, we're like just really, just really minimizing that because the current generation of models is just like so, so good. And is that how I should think about the specialist dots as, as sort of fine-tuned harnesses for certain workflows?

1:22:17What is the mental model to sort of deploy those specialist dots across an organization? We have a lot of specialist dots at OpenAI. And the difference is that you use the existing systems within your company in order to provision the identity and then the access and the machine. So we have them running on Mac minis. So we provision them exactly like employees. We meant a new little identity. And then it's got this IAM and the roles. And so we have a very good security story there. and then we give them a very premium machine as well because the model is incredibly capable under the hood. Dots are beyond PhD level, right?

1:22:57And if you look at Astra, it's just incredibly capable at computer use. So your dot can just use a computer just like you would. And so by giving them premium hardware as well, it just even increases their capabilities further. And so we have these set up. And inside of OpenAI, they do all sorts of things, including procurement, for example. Sure, yeah. On computer use, can you help me understand the levers that are being pulled to speed up computer use? I noticed a jump between 5.5 and Astra, but I wasn't exactly sure whether the speed up was coming from like fast mode or the actual model or the harness.

1:23:38Like, what are the levers? Like, what scaling law are we following to when I, I mean, I was demoing it with a video game like Slant of Spire, just because it's visual and I can watch it work and I know how fast I can click. And I'm interested to know, when actually, we keep joking about it like playing Call of Duty. And we're like, well, it's clearly not there yet, but are we, is it a 10X speed increase every year? Like, how do you even, like what are the levers that go into it? Are you going to accidentally create an aimbot for every single video game ever created? Maybe, but how much of that is happening in the harness and the model both?

1:24:09Like, how do you even think about understanding the progress in computer use speed? I do think we have seen a 10x for one year speed up. And it's not that we made the model sample faster. Obviously fast and ultra fast plays a role if you want to go even faster. But that is not what we improved in terms of computer use. It's both the harness and the model. So when you think about the model, it's like how much does it need to think before it can take the next action reliably? That's one element that we really improved. The other one is that we take safety super seriously. So we don't just click around and let the primary agent do things.

1:24:48Like we have a second agent, which we call auto review, or internally we call it Guardian, which watches over this primary agent is like actually, oh, wait a second. You're entering, you know, this sensitive information on this website. Like this domain is not quite right. You know, you should stop that action. And so it intervenes there. So we also made this auto review model faster. And then the harness, because we had Astra, Tejal talked about this. like we were able to kind of use Astra at scale in order to improve the performance of the harness, do more things in parallel, you know, remove little stalls, and then just really innovate there as well.

1:25:22And it's like, it's all open source, so you know, you can go and dig and figure out, you know, exactly which techniques we used. And then combined all of this together, you know, then we got this 10x speed up. Yeah. Next year is the 10 year anniversary of the first OpenAI Dota competition. I think it was one on one, and then they did the Dota 5 a couple years later. And my big question and prediction is like, will a stock OpenAI model with computer use be able to beat that original model? Of course. And it's going to be close because it's got to be actions per minute. It's not just the reasoning.

1:25:58I think if you were able to pause the game and cook on a really advanced model, you'd be able to get there. But the computer use is like the final thing, and I think that's going to be pretty magical. Yeah, if you look at ultrafast today on Astra, it's 300 tokens per second. Okay, so. Maybe I'm going to go demo it today. It's not quite that one token is one action. Yeah. It's more going to be like you need 20 tokens to make one action, right? Yeah. You're going to have 30 actions per second, which is a decent amount. And then it's all like how smart is the model? Can it actually reason about long-term strategy?

1:26:38and movement and all the past actions. And what we're seeing is that currently we announced as well decisions API. We further tuned the constraints so that you can make decisions extremely fast. So you can make one decision roughly every 200 milliseconds. So speed is just like we're just progressing way faster than even I had anticipated six months ago. And I think we'll see definitely real-time actions we did next year and beating that original model. Yeah, I mean, I love those announcements. They're always really interesting. So many different models and speeds and cost trade-offs and Pareto charts and all sorts of stuff.

1:27:21At the same time, how much do you want users to actually understand that, internalize that, become experts there versus just wait a little bit and it'll be entirely delegated to the harness or to the company even or the product. I'm just wondering how long we stay in this regime of understanding the model picker because there's some real value that comes from being able to think, okay, we need this chart, but we need it right now. So I'm gonna, but that could just be in the prompt, like go to your dot and say, hey, I need a best estimate of revenue for my business right now. Or, hey, look, I need you to go reconcile the books.

1:28:05So get it to me by Monday. Yes. The way that you think about it feels exactly right. Humans don't have a knob. So you just tell it in natural language. You're like, I need this right now, or I need this tomorrow. Or you have$100 in order to achieve this goal. I'm throwing a big party. I want to spend$50. It's like, good luck. But the model should just adapt, and the system should adapt, and configure exactly how many resources it should use in order to achieve your goal. and that's what we're working towards. With dots, in a way, we already simplified things massively. There's no model picker.

1:28:40Your dot is just there. It's available 24-7. You can text it. It modulates its effort depending on the ask. And it might not be perfect. It's also why we're announcing it at Dev Day. We want to build it with the community and we're learning with the pro users. But eventually, it will be so good that you will kind of be shocked that we had a model picker ever. How are you allocating your time because i imagine you're sleeping like four hours a night but the other 20 hours in a month yeah the other uh yeah whatever the other 20 hours a day how much time are you spending on like recruiting and like who are you actually looking for there you you the team is firing on all cylinders you want to make sure when you're adding people they're they're they're you know speeding up the team versus slowing you down but recruiting versus everything else on your plate yeah i spent a decent amount of recruiting but i try to do more than one thing at once right So, for example, I might talk to an exciting candidate and have a really fun conversation about an idea that I think either the team is already pursuing or something new and speculative that we're thinking about.

1:29:46And it's like I'm kind of trying to see what this other person is also, how they would kind of handle it if they were on the team. And so it's not that I'm actually kind of wasting my time in an interview and doing anything boring there. like actively thinking about the work and already simulating them being part of the team yeah which then also is interesting to myself like you know as it sort of evolves my thinking um sometimes in you know quite novel ways so i would say like interacting with other people and like you know i'm always looking for great new candidates to join the team i would say is like you know 20 of my time how do you think about uh the the longer term ramifications of of memory and going deeper with a particular agent and system because there's this interesting thing where right now OpenAI has business relationships and there are some companies that have gone all in.

1:30:40And at the same time, there are individuals who have gone all in on Codex and have complex workflows and there's more memory there. But there is a world that I could imagine where if somebody shows up on my team and they're doing their work and I notice that they're searching the internet using Bing, I'm probably not going to say, hey, look, this is a Google organization. But I would say, okay, we use Gmail, not Outlook. You're on this particular email system. And there's some sort of interaction there that feels like, are we going to be more in the regime of you have your agent, your tooling, and I'm hiring you to work with me, and you bring all of whatever tools you use?

1:31:21Or is there going to be a regime where, hey, you're joining a particular shop, like a Rails shop, you're writing Rails, you're writing Ruby, or this is a Python shop, so I need to get up to speed on that? Have you thought about where this goes in the longer term? Yeah. It also, again, it feels like the way that you're thinking about it feels very natural. So just like humans, you don't want to just re-explain the same thing over and over again. and if you're a real shop, you hired a person and you're like, hey, you understand we're a real shop. Here's the documentation. Learn how we do things over here and then try your best to do it.

1:31:57If you don't get it quite right, I'll provide you feedback. And so this is very much the same that we're thinking about it for DOTS and agents in general. Space is like a shared memory system that you maintain across the organization. You have your own notes, but you also have collective notes. And so, for example, you could just write in there like, hey, you know, we're a rail shop. Yeah. Here are the things that you need to know about. And then, you know, the first thing that it does just like just goes and read about it. And then memory system is something that we have quite perfected and are continuing to innovate on.

1:32:28Like with the ability to stay, you know, I have coherent memory over very, very long periods of time. So you don't want to give feedback a day and then learn that, you know, two weeks later, it's just like, you know, kind of like completely forgotten about it. and it's just like, you know, painting the house blue again. Like, I really don't like that color. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a fascinating interaction of all these things. But thank you so much for coming and breaking it down. Yeah, I wish we had more time. I think that the intensity around your X account is something that, like, I think very, very, very few people at companies at any point in modern history have had to deal with.

1:33:09Like I actually, but as I've, as we've gone through this year, just like seeing how much, just how much attention is focused on the next thing that you post and then what you have to go through to actually balance all of that feedback in real time and understand where am I right? Where were we off? And then adapt. It's, uh, it's been incredible to watch. So, uh, good luck out there. Congratulations. That's good. We'll see. Maybe the dots been running the account. And that's the big reveal. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So up next, we have Kath Korvach coming on to the show. Kath, welcome to TBPN.

1:33:45Thank you so much for taking the time. Yeah. It's a little windy. A little windy. Do whatever you need to to get adjusted. Take a seat. Great to have you. Great to have you. Thank you for having me. Big day. Yes. I didn't expect a hug from the man. Oh, yeah? Yeah. That's great. For those who don't know you, please introduce yourself. Tell us a little about your role at OpenAI. Yeah. I'm Kath. I'm a product manager. I work on GPT sites, ChatGPT sites. Yeah. Yeah. What has the traction been with sites? Oh, it's been huge. Yeah. So let's see. I don't know what I'm approved to say, but I think I can say.

1:34:20I think I have a doc here. I want the number. Whatever went out. 10 million sites. 10 million. Okay. Graded in under three months since launch. Yeah. So we launched three months ago. I'm responsible for like 45 of those. I make them for everything. I love them. Oh, amazing. It's like my favorite product. I love sites. Okay, cool. The wildest use case is like looking at, John was like looking at a bunch of different products online and just instantly building this wild, you know, this was like a couple months ago. Yeah, it was specifically, I would take, I was looking for a house. I would take a Zillow listing, send the link to Codex and say, go and download all the photos, restyle them with images, and then put it together in a site where you can swipe left to right to see if this house went through a remodel, would it look better?

1:35:07And then styling it in a way that, based on your preference. So we would know, okay, this house is, this style of architecture from this year, this would be a faithful evolution of this. It wouldn't just change the architectural style. And then I'd made so many sites that I told it to make a meta site to put all them together. Of course we did. like an atlas of all these things. I've got a prompt to do this. Oh, yeah. And I mean, I have a couple, but I'll send it to you. Yeah, yeah. And like how to organize it all and everything. Yeah, no, it's amazing. Because that's like, that's when you know you've like hit the limit.

1:35:39Yeah, yeah. That's when you actually have to organize this. So did you tell it what your preferences were? Or did you give it like? Yeah, yeah. Specifically, John has like very specific tastes. So if he was going to go through a remodel, he wants it to look a specific ways. Yeah. The image model takes that into account and nails it within the context of that space. But it was so helpful because a lot of times you'll see a house that went through a remodel and it prices higher. And then a house that's pre-remodel, it's lower price. And you're like, okay, well, if you equalize these. And Zillow has a feature for this that lets you sort of like redecorate a little bit on some houses that list, but not all of them.

1:36:15And so this was a nice way to just style. And then I could just pass it around to like family members and show them. It was a big experience. So did it show you, there's more real estate questions than it is in high school. Yeah, please. Okay. Let's go real estate. We got a whole mansion section. We can talk cars if you want. We can do whatever you want. This is the show. We don't only talk about AI. But I'm curious if it could do something, and maybe you weren't asking it to do this. Yeah. But you know when you go through a remodel, your home value either goes up or goes down based on what you're doing.

1:36:42So if you're like, I'm going to add a white kitchen or something. Or if you add a pool, your home value goes down when you think, oh, pool is fancy. So it did all of that. It did it? Okay, cool. price per square footage for remodel homes in the particular neighborhood, block by block, finding comps, building all the comp sheets, and then figuring out, okay, what is the realistic building cost for specific things, creating itemized lists of how much you'd spend on architect versus raw materials. And then would you have the correct gap to support that based on like a 10 year holding period basically.

1:37:13So it did all of that. Truly, truly personal super intelligence because five years ago, the amount of experts and like, okay, I don't have time to build a website so i need someone else to like build this thing and i need i need to be able to like compare contract yeah it would be yeah and my and my end conclusion was just like it's just going to speed up the economy because more people will be doing like the remodels more people will be buying stuff because they'll have more confidence in these things uh it was yeah it was a delightful experience this is why we built sites yes okay so it we built it for work related stuff for sure but also people use it for personal use cases.

1:37:49I do. I just built a site. I don't want to have to go. I like tinkering with hardware. Sure. I want to have, like, do you guys know the Skylight? It's like a family. Oh, yeah. Organizer. Yeah. Calendar. Yeah. I don't want to go and buy it. I'm sure it's, like, a fantastic product. Sure. But I don't want to buy it. I don't want to build it myself. Okay. You mean the picture frames that cycle through images? No. It specifically links to Calendar. Oh, okay. Yeah. But they have their own software and everything that's, like, specific for families. Yep. So I don't want to do that. So I'm building one with Cheshit Beauty Sites.

1:38:18Oh, and then Sites is the background, basically. And we just launched plugins in Sites today. And so I can, like, hook it up to my calendar. And then I can have that. And then with a prompt, you can iterate on it. Yeah, exactly. Say, okay, I want to change this. It's the color. We're going with this theme. It's Christmas. Make it a Christmas theme. Yeah, exactly. And I can, like, hook it up to my kids' calendar. Yeah. School. Yeah. Do all that stuff. I think it's really good for, yeah, on the fly UI. Like, I was discussing potential guests for throughout the rest of the year. Had basically deep research.

1:38:43pull a bunch of potential people that are one step away from guests we've had on the show. But instead of just giving me a big, long list, I was like, just build me a website where I can thumbs up, thumbs down, share with the team. Very easy. How does that interface with space? How do you see these products linked? Is there going to be another merge? Everything's merging all the time. Oh, there's always a merge. There's always a merge. Merge and then an unmerge. And then toggles everywhere. This is the life. So sites are in space. Okay. And that's very intentional. Sites are a very, they're a very collaborative place.

1:39:11Yeah. And you can add editors to your site. You can add co-editors, co-authors, et cetera. And it's a very rich environment to work in. You can build a site. You can share it with somebody else. We have a lot of people at OpenAI who are doing like, we have our IT team is using this to manage where everybody is in the world. And they're sharing those sites with other people around the world who are boots on the ground managing security. And so they want to see, okay, who's flying in today? Is there an event happening? How was the weather? Is there a weather event happening? Like all of that stuff.

1:39:43Yeah. And so they'll add co-editors, co-authors, everything to their site to manage it. Inside Spaces, what's cool is that you have all of your artifacts right there available for everybody. So you'll see us kind of like cross-referencing stuff, making stuff inside space more and more interchangeable. And so you'll be able to like inside pages, be able to reference sites and vice versa. and slides are launching soon. A lot of people are making slides with sites. You'll be able to put those into spaces really easily. What's the timeline for this to be available to anyone? If you go far enough in the future, can somebody on a free ChatGPT plan create a website?

1:40:30Oh, yes. Yeah. So we are very, very interested in making it available to everybody. We have to figure out infrastructure, structure how to how to price it appropriately etc like we just launched three months ago so we're still kind of learning but we are also uh working with the consumer ad supported yeah ad supported oh there you go your site will have ads all over it banner ads for everything you do that's still free you know i'm big i want that case is e-com yeah okay so we could do you know sure sure sure there's a lot yeah that we could we could i want to go back to the angel fire world i don't know Remember that?

1:41:05But like it was free web hosting and you'd have these, these banner ads, crazy display ads all over that you couldn't remove. I'm hoping we can get away from the ad. Well, we'll have to disagree on that. We are huge fans of advertising. And so we'll, I love, I love it. It's like, it's like, people are like, oh, this, this meeting could have been an email and I'm going to be like, well, your text to me, John could have been a website. Yeah. Yeah. Basically there. We're basically there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the launch of the progress.

1:41:3710 million. 10 million. 10 billion soon. 10 billion. There's going to be more websites per person. So we'll take that headset off. We'll hand it to our next guest. Ben, thank you so much for hopping on. And I believe we're ready for our next guest. We have none other than Casey Neistat. Casey, welcome to the show. Good to see you. How you doing? Has that been on the table? This has been on the table the whole time. Yeah, Wynn's been trying to take it out. Yes. But it survives. Why don't you introduce this? What is this thing? Oh, you have one. Funny you should ask. Funny you should ask. No, so this is the first chromatic transparent, custom chromatic that we made at Modern Grove.

1:42:15I love this styling, yeah. For this event today. Okay, yeah. We made, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say the number, we made 8 ,000 of them. Wow. To make sure every attendee could leave with them. Fantastic. Leave with one. Yeah. I will say that breaking news. Yes. This was announced on stage by Sam like an hour and a half ago. There's one currently on eBay for$4 ,000. I was going to ask you. They got a trade in the aftermarket. Arbitrage. A lot of people are like, I'm going to wait to get home to flip this. No, not some enterprising attendee today who saw an opportunity and just got in there and seized it.

1:42:53Boom. But the specific integration, of course, codex, vibe coding, the idea that you can create a custom game that runs on here. Is that the idea? Yeah. You know, like what we do at Mod Retro, the reason why we're like focused on retro gaming is about like the love and the fun of the game and playing. Mine came with Tetris. It was fantastic. I rarely take Tetris out of mine. Yeah, exactly. It's my anti-tetris. Tetris cartridge stays in. It is catharsis for me. Yeah. I did buy a crazy cartridge that had, like, some modern technology. It had, like, 400 games on there. And that was really cool. But, you know.

1:43:28That sounds super unofficial. Yeah, it was. Naughty. But what this is and what it is today is. Naughty, naughty. I don't know if I get in trouble for buying it. I think the person should have sold it, maybe. We built a custom plug-in for Codex. Yeah. And it enables you to sort of vibe code games. Yes. What's special about it is that you're not constricted to playing that on an emulator on your laptop. You can flash it to this cartridge immediately. Yep. It's amazing. And I think the best way of framing it is like Torin, our CEO, and his five-year-old vibe-coded a game, and then he was able to flash it and hand the chromatic to his kiddo and have him playing it right away.

1:44:08Yeah, and it's something that leans into the constraints. I've seen a bunch of demos that are like, oh, this new model is so powerful. I just gave it one prompt and it made a triple-A Call of Duty GTA 6 video game. And I'm like, okay, let's calm down. You made a 30-second video of something that actually looks kind of janky and probably doesn't have anywhere near the breadth of GTA 6 just yet. We'll get there, but for now, this is the sweet spot. I know that you can actually deliver something that's fun and entertaining and full-featured and not buggy when you're constrained to this screen and just these buttons and you're not also also the exciting thing is having having a tam of one right like there's so many there's so many great ideas yeah and when i say that i'm not saying the product but i'm saying like there are great games where for a five-year-old yeah like he they will be the only person that that appreciates this game yes it's combining different parts of of their interests into something that would never have commercial appeal could never get shipped or made and now it can.

1:45:09And I think that's been sort of the story of every single category of AI use case where you can now make things that, like again, the example you were giving 10 minutes ago. It's like you would never spend the money or the time to make this comparison website only for yourself on the fly. And now you can. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I think constraints is a great characterization because I think it dovetails with what our mission is at Mod Retro, which is embracing those constraints, which amplifies the why part. We launched the M64, which was our Nintendo 64 console. We released that a month and a half ago.

1:45:45And doing incredibly well. So much of the feedback we see is from old people like me, 45, I was 15, when Nintendo 64 came out, introducing it to their kids. So you've got a dad or you've got a mom with their little ones, and it forces you, because of those constraints, to physically sit with my kids and play Mario Kart. And when I think of that versus like when we catch our daughter, she's not allowed to play Roblox, but we catch her in her bedroom, like hiding in the closet by herself with her iPad six inches from her place playing Roblox. Yeah. This just feels so antithetical to that because it is about like the social aspect.

1:46:20It's about the camaraderie. It's about the fun. Yeah. And I think like that's that's what today in this partnership was emblematic of. It's like you can create something that's fun. They can say check this out. Yeah. it's so funny that like i i think a lot of we're all parents here and i think all a lot of parents are going through this like i just want the same experience that i had for my kids and then there's literally a company that's like yeah you can do that yeah it's such a simple value it's it's it's a funny it's a funny like philosophical exploration because there's a part of it which is like is it just our old man nostalgia yeah and you know palmer our founder has like a really curt response to that which is no yeah it was just better yeah it was better than and i think about that because like you know we bought our daughter this summer a point and shoot camera sure and it was like the biggest fucking deal for her yeah and like she has a camera on her ipad but having a point and shoot camera this single purpose device meant so much to her yeah and i think that we're starting to see like technology start to go for full circle yeah like we have these stupid little black rectangles of doom that live in our pockets that you can do everything on yeah But there's something about whether it's like a wired headphone, a point-and-shoot camera, a device that you have to physically put a cartridge in to play a singular game.

1:47:36Yeah, I think it's about the relationship between the person and the technology. And I feel like we've gotten so far away from that with the rate of innovation getting away from us. Yeah, yeah. I didn't mean to go so deep. No, no, no. I think a lot about that. No, I mean, I've spent, I mean, every, I'll text John like twice a month, maybe every week, where I'm like, everything that's good hasn't changed in 60 years, right? And in many ways, like having like machine intelligence is the only thing really that I feel like has been super meaningful that's changed in that period. But when it comes to stuff specifically in the physical world, everything that's good has existed for a long time.

1:48:18Old restaurants, old hotels. Yeah, cars. Cars got worse, you know. A bunch of things. You know, homes got worse. All these different things. It's only paper rolls or paper towel holders. Is that your always example? Well, yeah, that's probably it. He wants a paper towel holder invented in the 1960s. Yeah, I've got one that has a Wi-Fi connection. Oh, okay. You're on the opposite end. It sends me alerts when I get low on toilet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but the cool thing is it feels like I really do think that all the hardware that we use is going to change dramatically in a way over the next 10 years that it didn't in the last 10 years.

1:48:56And part of why I think that is is because you have thousands of super smart people working on these new paradigms and form factors. But then you also have the software changing. and the first time we had Peter from OpenClaw on, and he was just saying he's now getting frustrated with the OS. It's not just the things that are happening as part of the, or on top of the operating system. He's like, he wants to go all the way because there's things that can just make more sense when you can generate an operating system almost on the fly. Yeah, I think it's holistic. I think there's room for everything.

1:49:28But I think what's been caught up in this, like, tidal wave of innovation that I felt has sort of hit, like a really aggressive inflection point in the last 10 to 15 years is that it sort of consumed everything. And I feel like we've kind of reached this plateau where we're able to pause and identify little areas where like, no, no, no, that doesn't need that kind of innovation. I think back to like, if you'll allow me to be romantic about it. Like I got, I think for my 10th birthday, I got one of those yellow Sony Walkmans. And I fucking treasured this thing. It meant the world to me. It was my most prized possession.

1:50:06I took showers as a kid, but I would take a bath just so I could listen to music in the bathtub because I had a Walkman that could get wet. And I think about that now, and it's like technically Spotify is better than having Led Zeppelin cassette in my yellow. It's better in every way technically. But Spotify will never mean to me what that device meant to me. Totally. And I think this romanticization of technology is something we've drifted away from. And the change in medium changed the message. You used to need to listen to a whole album. Yeah, for me it was the iPod shuffle. Which one? The little white one?

1:50:42The little square one? The clip one. To me, that was the pinnacle of technology as a kid because I had this thing that was like a quarter. You could throw it up and down. And yet it was so powerful because music is so emotional and it felt like it could take you on a whole journey, be as entertaining as watching a movie, just playing songs. And you never knew what song was coming next. Yeah, exactly. Part of the romance. It was like gambling with audio. Like, you know, slot machine every time you press skip. Yeah, and I think we're going to see, I feel it now, but this is my world that I live in.

1:51:17I think we're going to see this sort of looking back. Like, I run across the Brooklyn Bridge seven days a week, unless I wake up in San Francisco. Sure. And what's interesting that I've noticed in the last five years is it used to always be people's iPhones. And now the amount of people I see with these antiquated 10-year-old point-and-shoot cameras. And they do it, and it's sort of a flex. Yeah, of course. They're using this camera that is objectively a lower-quality camera that's what's on their phone. Yet it says something about them. Totally. In some ways, New York City is probably getting captured on film more now than when film cameras were the only way to actually take a photo.

1:51:55Yeah. Because historically it probably wasn't like thousands of people spread across the city at all times getting every single angle. And yet now that actually is what's happening. Just constant. Yeah, my favorite 35mm point and shoot was this Olympus. Okay. Okay, it was$150 when it came out in the aughts. Yeah. And they stopped making it, whatever, 15 years ago. Every time I'd break one, I'd just buy it off of eBay for$50. Sure. I noticed a couple years ago that they weren't$50 anymore. They're like$100. Oh, wow. Okay, then it was like$200. My wife asked me for one for her birthday, and I went to buy it.

1:52:27It was$400. Get a corn on the market. And now they're almost unavailable. And I think it's akin to what we see with classic cars. People appreciate what these things were. I mean, that's what makes me so excited about Mod Retro. So you guys will make a point and shoot. Palmer's, yeah, Palmer's T is something. He can't say anything, but Palmer's T is like, I don't like connected TVs. I don't like music. And I don't like cameras. And I'm like, yes, the connected TV's got to go. I have this thing of like every – the frustration that I have with – hopefully this isn't just like my issue and I'm like not updating the software.

1:53:04Let us hear it. But the level to which like modern TVs, the software degrades to the point where you're like, okay, like I'm going to click. I'm going to click and I click too many times and now I've got to – Have you followed along with this LG controversy? Yeah. Okay. Break it down for those who haven't. Okay, the TLDR is the most modern LGT. They have the best panels. The best panels, yeah. OLED, it's amazing. The most expensive. A couple of hackers, they have a YouTube channel. I apologize, I don't remember the name. They deserve a plug. But they broke down all of the software, and they determined that the microphone that was intended for, like, change it to HBO is actually listening all the time.

1:53:45So much so that when it wasn't connected to the network, it would store the audio files locally and then when it reconnected it would upload it. I watched that and I was like fuck this is what Palmer's going on about with the desire to make a dumb TV and then I realized in my bedroom where I sleep with my wife most nights some nights I'm in the guest, you know marriage, we have that fucking LGTB. I know, I have one too so I unplug it from the wall now when I walk into the bedroom and it's just like this is. No but you remember how fast how snappy old TVs were? You press a button, it was just instant.

1:54:21How snappy? I'm 45. For me, it was a physical dial with a long wire. Immediate. We've got to go back to wired remotes. I'll be the first one to buy that. I remember some of my frustrations with one of the meta quests was that I found out that I had seven passwords because I had a keypad, a code, a meta password, an Instagram, a Facebook password, and an Oculus VR password. And I showed this whole process of what it takes to just take it and then play a game. And it was like 15 minutes. And then I just found a video of somebody turning it on in 64, and you just, bing, bing, and you're on. You just turn it on.

1:55:07And it's the same thing. And you're playing the game. Yeah, you're playing the game. It's ridiculous. Our Samsung TV in the guest room. Yes, yes. In the doghouse. In order for me to download Netflix, I have to sign into Samsung. I don't have a Samsung password. Why would I? And I don't want one. I just don't watch fucking Netflix on this thing. It is just so much. They ask so much of us. I know. And it's not better for the customer. No, it's terrible. I just want to suck that data from you to sell you more ads. It's terrible. It's terrible. Flipping over to the creator economy, the creator side of things.

1:55:40I have this idea that with the advances in vibe coding, there is an opportunity basically for someone to make a game every single day for Mod Retro or any platform web games. And that muscle of doing something small every day would compound. I don't know that they would become the next GTA VI, but they would become something. And I'm wondering how you think about creativity and daily rituals, new platforms in a time of rapidly decreasing cost to create whatever it is. Yeah, I have a super cynical perspective on it and a wildly optimistic. Okay. So the optimistic one is like, what is it, a million monkeys at a million typewriters and they'll eventually type out all of Shakespeare?

1:56:27Shakespeare, yeah. I think that's, there's a, math says that's going to happen. Yeah. In other words, vibe coding games or. So you were the monkey on YouTube that typed Shakespeare. Correct. Yeah. But I didn't have vibe coding. No. And I didn't have AI video. No. But you did have GoPros and Canon 5Ds and iMovie. And YouTube. You didn't need to shoot on film with an RE. It didn't matter. I just kept uploading. Yeah. And then, like, the line that I share that often shocks people is I was, I think, very successful on YouTube. Very successful. And after seven years of a very successful presence on YouTube, I had 280 ,000 subscribers.

1:57:09Okay. And then I started the daily vlog. Yeah. I started. I was the monkey that never left the town. The final monkey. And 18 months later, I had 10 million. Yeah. That's crazy. And I think if I had maintained that cadence, if the top of the funnel hadn't become more accessible, if the cameras hadn't gotten cheaper, if I hadn't gotten faster at editing because the technology enabled, that... And that inflection point would not have happened. So I am, yes, I am the original monkey at the typewriter. But I think now, especially with what AI is doing, it's something that is much more complete. And when people shit on AI video, and when I say people, I mean me.

1:57:43Yeah. I think it's going to get to a point where there's going to be something that's made on AI that's 100 % AI that's undeniably good. And it's just going to sort of force people to be like, oh, I hated it because it was made of AI. But it was a really good fucking movie. and eventually that negativity is going to start to wane. It will be sort of undeniable. Sure. There's some cynicism in there. I also think that that will enable, especially when it comes to things like gaming, creating software. It's just when you open the top of the funnel that wide, the amount of shit being made increases, but so does the amount of quality stuff being made.

1:58:19So I am highly optimistic that there are going to be these diamonds among a sea of lumps of coal that will have real impact. it'd be meaningful. I would also... Yeah, when I think back, I used to work on little iPhone games. And I remember when I was trying to just make Pong. I was just trying to make the most simple possible game. The amount of frustration where you go from... It's exhilarating because you're making progress and then you get stuck on something. And I was probably 11 or something at the time. Then you get stuck on something for two hours and it's pure pain. and you're like, how do I figure out how to get through?

1:58:58And then you get through. And part of that is extremely positive and worthwhile lessons around hitting blockers and pushing through. But the amazing thing with AI is just being able to bust through those much faster and compound those learnings and do an individual person doing 10 times as much in the same period of time. And it's hard not to be excited about that. It's like a monkey with 10 hands. That's the best analogy for AI. We have to keep this monkey analogy. Yes. Well, on the video side, the thing that I've been, I think naturally everyone went from like, oh, okay, I'm reading way more AI generated text.

1:59:36And that was over basically the last two years. And now it's getting harder and harder to tell. And we even know people that produce a lot of AI written content, but they've figured out ways to make it not, you know, pangrammable, at least obviously. Until you break your silence. I just noticed way more like AI video, which is like working for me on some niche, like where I'm like trying to learn specifically about a topic. But then, but I keep getting hung up on this idea of like, did the person that published that has, owns the account, did they actually review this video? Because I think that that's where the, like I'm looking.

2:00:19Yeah, yeah. Is there actual curation? curation is there someone saying because specifically i'm thinking of um there's there's an account on instagram that does like sim sim racing like okay tutorials lessons or whatever and so they're putting out like probably 20 videos a day on different topics and a lot of it feels like generally right but but the the where where it will break down is like if if you just if if the ai is effectively like reading an online forum and then just piping it into video and then that advice is like expired almost yeah you're describing the modern news cycle yeah like that is what you know instagram tiktok yeah and you know x news is it's it's a it's a variant of what you're describing fire hose so there's so much the the noise to signal ratio has just gotten so convoluted and difficult to navigate i don't know maybe like a more acute example of something like that is Like, my favorite genre on YouTube is short, esoteric World War II documentaries.

2:01:18Sure. There's a guy, my favorite YouTuber on the planet is Mark Felton. I love that guy. You know this guy. That's why I fall asleep to that kind of guy. Me too. Every day when I get my sandwich at lunch and I sit in my office by myself, I watch one of his stuff. Like a 50-year-old British historian. He is an objectively terrible filmmaker who makes the single best videos. It's just him narrating it over whatever images he could find. I watch that, and then I also watch these 100 % AI generated. They clearly have a human editorial oversight because they're factually correct. Very well done. And they have all of the YouTube AI notifications all over them.

2:01:55And it doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother me because it feels like I'm reading something with visuals that are simply there to support it. I'm very conscious that these are artificially generated images. is they're just meant to sort of visualize what something looked like that wasn't actually captured. And for me, like those are the fissures I'm seeing as someone who's like an anti, who's a purist when it comes to filmmaking, yet I'm willing to tolerate that. And I think that delta is going to... That's why I don't, I never, like AI content is already here. It's happening. There's going to be 10 ,000 times more of it in probably two years.

2:02:33But I haven't been, afraid because when I think about my favorite creators and where I'm actually spending attention today, it's like the guy that you're just talking about, Mark Felton. There's another guy named H.I. Sutton who's just obsessed with naval warfare and just nerds out about it. I'm a subscriber. I figured. But he'll just basically press record and he has a presentation slide that he's going through. He's narrating it. He's like, I don't use AI. I just sort of sit here and talk. And it's incredibly captivating and interesting because you're listening to somebody like the world expert on the topic who maybe uses AI to learn about some stuff now like off off air but then he's just narrating it as a human and there's just all I'm always going to have time in my day for the HI sentence of the world yeah look it's a it's a proliferation of of podcasts on YouTube yeah like if I'm watching something when I edit my own videos like I will debate a single frame a 24th of a second does this fuck up my timing sure yet then i'll click play and watch a three-hour podcast there's just some dude talking for three hours because i care about the subject matter and i think this is like the the extraordinary range in people's appetite for what they're willing to give their attention to and the idea that there isn't room in there for ai content i think is um is misguided at best last question what shirt are you wearing under that jacket.

2:03:59Well, I would like to, I do have a plug today. This isn't to sell anything because these aren't for sale, but there we go. Our former intern at Mod Retro, Jeremy, who's now, his title on his business card is Special Operations. I'm not sure we knew what else to give him as a title when we put him on payroll. He designed this latest Mod Retro merch. Yeah. So everyone watching can screenshot it. And as a fun game, try and identify each of these letters because they each come from a different piece of a game. Which one got us hung up this morning? I think the T we were going... I knew the T. I identified the M, the O, the D.

2:04:41I think I might have missed the E, the R. You knew the O, and I was off on the 64, but I was directionally correct. No spoilers, but plenty of teasers. Go figure it out. Compliments to Jeremy. Head over to Mod Retro. Get yourself a chromatic and start turn the t-shirt into a playable game yes yes i'd download it i'd flash it on my card well that's our show folks thank you for tuning into tbpn we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m pacific sharp back in the tbpn ultradome in hollywood and i see a wild i see a wild theo over here oh we gotta go see him you know uh he and elon and dario and sam agree on a lot of stuff they do They do.

2:05:27Well, we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers, folks. Fantastic.