Robot Bans, Zuck Op-Ed, eBay Settles | Joe Weisenthal, Jameson Detweiler, Stanley Tang, Amjad Masad, Adam Cohen

28:22Amjad Masad:your in your industry it was the impact of e-commerce bites blogs showing up in your quarterly reports like was it actually ebay pleaded guilty in 2023 in a criminal case over harassment and paid a three million dollar penalty following criminal charges in 2027 employees of the companies were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one to five years it's absolutely brutal according to court documents ebay executives grew increasingly upset by the steiner's critical coverage of the company in early 2019 leading then executive devon wenning to test to text another executive that it was time to crush the steiners and take her down referring to uh ina that summer harassment against the steiners escalated from threatening messages to delivering items to their home which also included a book about surviving spousal bereavement So that's like sort of a death threat, I guess.

29:16Yeah.

29:17Amjad Masad:Right? What's... Also sending adult magazines to neighbors' homes in the husband's name. So just like completely trying to destroy this couple's life and marriage. eBay employees also traveled to Massachusetts to vandalize the Steiner's home and stalk them around their hometown. All the employees involved in the harassment were fired in September 2019, eBay said. The lawsuit was actually started in 2021. Under the settlement, so we have a good ending here. I think it's a fair ending. Under the settlement, the couple will receive$48 million in compensation from eBay and former employees. eBay will also pay$6 million to charitable organizations.

30:06and Wennig will pay$1 million to a free speech charity in Ina Steiner's name.

30:13Amjad Masad:This is the ultimate Streisand effect. I never would have heard about e-commerce bites or their criticism of eBay if they hadn't done all this. What a mess. E-commerce bites. I'm looking up exactly what they said because eBay is, in my opinion, just the most said it and forget it company that's just had the same service for 20 years, basically. But now we're going to get to the bottom of it. Ina Steiner published the news that this settled on her blog. So e-commerce bites has been giving sellers a voice since 1999. So I do think that it appears just from looking at it very briefly that e-commerce bites clearly is an important voice in the eBay seller world.

30:59But still, absolutely insane way to go about doing business. And I'm glad that eBay cleaned up their act in 2019.

31:09Amjad Masad:In 2019, Ecommerce Bytes posted an article said, did you know that eBay built a lavish New York City pub style lounge? Because they had constructed an elaborate replica of a Manhattan pub at an eBay campus. And the framing was basically this appears to be a no expense spared executive amenity. Maybe they were going to do a podcast. You never know. Anyway, we have Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg. Odd Lots. You know him. You love him. He's back on the show. Welcome to the TV. How are you doing? Joe. It's been too long. I miss you guys. I miss you too. Okay, so I have a question for you. You've had a podcast for a long time.

31:47Have you ever gotten like a negative review or a negative comment? Ever? No, never. Never. Now, be honest. Be honest. Maybe you've gotten one. Have you ever thought about sending them a box of live cockroaches, maybe vandalizers?

32:00Amjad Masad:There are actively people mad at Joe right now on Twitter about his latest take. Hopefully she's not watching right now, but my co-host Tracy would. If one of us would do it. First of all, she is the one who reads the comments. I don't think she would. But I think if you were to float this idea, she might at least spare a few mental cycles. Maybe she's like, I've thought about doing that. I ran it down, but I know the whole backstory with eBay. I try to be the voice of peace. It's a cautionary tale. You guys don't want to have to down the line pay a$50,$60 million settlement for sending a horse head to a former listener for leaving a bad review.

32:38That is not on the roadmap.

32:40Amjad Masad:No, not at all. I'm trying to think if I can. I don't know if you caught the story right before this, but basically eBay had to pay a couple$56 million because a bunch of executives were harassing this couple for just criticizing the company. in 2019. So no one is even really thinking about eBay in 2019. It's just not. It's a big company. It's a company that a lot of people have used and a lot of people love. But no one's really, it's not really that top of mind. And seven executives are becoming criminals. I will die for this company. You know, in 2018, they might have said, oh, that would never be me.

33:25Maybe who among us, if you're late at night, you start going down a path, you have to exhibit really good cognitive hygiene because who among us knows the path to psychosis online? Many such cases, and maybe we all need a little bit of humility about what the set of conditions that could put us in that path. Sometimes one prompt is all it takes to lose someone. I took a week of vacation last week and I was like, oh, I'm not going to post anything for a week. And I did. I actually did. But I felt it all like bubbling out like Friday evening when I sort of mentally it's like, oh, vacation's over.

34:05It's the weekend now. And I was like, it's just like all like uncontrollably. So it's like we all have to be mindful and self-aware about what we're capable of because maybe you don't really know like when it comes to internet vendettas, what could happen.

34:19Amjad Masad:Do you think social media is addictive? because i can't it's so hard to tell when your job is social media like i am the screen time i have three hours of live stream time every day yeah but it's like how i buy food so it's like am i addicted to my job like i don't know well i've thought about the funny you mentioned food because this is how i justify it right i've probably said before this is how i justify always being it's like oh it's very important for me to know what people are talking about is how i hone them my skills. But it is like, you know, it's funny. I was thinking like food specifically, because with other addictions, you just go cold turkey, right?

34:56You're just like, I'm not, you know, and with food, you can't. So you have to like, it's really hard to like, so even with me and social media, it's like, it's hard for me. Like cold turkey is not that hard. I'll just take a week off. Posting all that time is not that hard. The middle ground is when it gets really hard because there's just so many things to respond to. So many things waiting for my take. So many questions that only I need to come. Also, yeah, there's takes that will never exist. There's, there's takes that will never exist, right? The takes that have been lost to history when you were on vacation and we'll never get those.

35:29I do feel like, yeah, I do feel like one benefit

35:32Amjad Masad:that you have and I have felt is when you have multiple, uh, maybe dopamine reward paths, but like outputs, it is nice to be able to retreat because you can do a podcast. You can also write And so if you only have one of those, then you can sort of get lost in the sauce of like, oh, it's been rough since I had a great guest or it's been rough since I had a great viral banger post. But if you can sort of move around and be like, OK, I'm going to take a break from the knife fight at the dive bar and put my thoughts together and do an essay. No, I agree. This is very important to have multiple outlets for man's desire to post and put things out into the world.

36:17The deepest desire in the hierarchy is to be someone we are listened to, right? You can see it in all of the billionaires who cannot resist the impulse to get online and start posting. It's clear that money, yes, it's all great. Power is great. But what they really crave is to just be heard by someone out in the world. And so they start posting.

36:37Amjad Masad:The death of Twitter acts fully over now, given that Jensen Wong joined, Mark Zuckerberg had to join. Like it truly pulled everyone over, kicking and screaming. Because I imagine Mark Zuckerberg would prefer to promote his Wall Street Journal op-eds just on his own platforms. But that's not where that community is. So you got to go. No, it's true like with AI especially, specifically, which is that it's X, right? Like every time someone leaves one of the big companies, they have to post a big thread or a really long tweet or whatever, and it's only X. I mean they could post it on Instagram. They could post it on LinkedIn.

37:18They could post it. They don't though. I mean they might. I don't know. But they posted – that is where the news happens. And you can feel like I think, you know, the thing that was really striking last week with the the discourse, as one says, about the open letter, et cetera, it germinated on Twitter specifically. Why did the White House, why did this, why was this suddenly in that week a thing that the White House in some way needed to talk about Chinese open models? It was because of how much it was bubbling on social media, on Twitter specifically. I actually think the entire thing more or less originated from one tweet that said that Kimmy3 was really good at front-end design work.

38:00Yeah, the arena. That was it. It was that one post because if you look around, like that actually – that crystallized it in everyone's mind. It's like, oh, here it is. It may be as good as the most advanced frontier models. No, there was one category of one overall thing, and that was the thing everyone locked into. And from there, and I believe that that was the moment straight through to, okay, now the White House and all these companies need to make comments about open models can be traced to that specific all online, all on Twitter from that.

38:31Amjad Masad:Front end built this country. If we don't have front end, we don't have anything. This country needs front end development specifically. No, no. I mean, I agree with you. When I was looking at the benchmarks, I was like, the one that I'm actually interested in is the cybersecurity benchmarks. because that's where we could actually have this meaningful discussion of, okay, you just actually democratized hacking into things. This is going to get kind of crazy. And you're going to have like script kitties out there that are, you know, just hacking into the random flower shop on the corner and just making it a nightmare for them.

39:03Amjad Masad:And we couldn't really get there. I don't know. That hasn't been fully benchmarked. We got you posted this, but someone was sharing this morning. They're trying to figure out how much you need to spend to have your own setup at home to be able to buy Kimmy efficiently. was like$100 ,000, right? Just to get to the point where you'd be able to... Yeah. And it's a lot of energy. ...in a sovereign way. You know, a sovereign hacker would need to have 100 grand, which hopefully prevents like the script kitties. It might be the new Lambo though, you know? You get the influencer, the LARPer, they got the NBL72 in the corner.

39:37Amjad Masad:You're like, yeah, what's up? I got the sovereign AI going. I don't know. How else did you process the open letter? Were you surprised by the order that companies signed? Ben Thompson had this interesting take that it's two of the last companies to sign. I don't think Apple's signed yet. You'd think that they'd benefit from open source since they haven't been playing that game. Amazon was also a little bit late. But Amazon and Apple both have physical products like warehouses and they sell physical things. And so they're maybe a little bit less nervous about AI disruption because they have a physical aspect.

40:12Amjad Masad:I don't know what you thought about the sequence of events. Yeah, I mean, I think there was like two things that really struck out to me, which is that the first wave of signatories were either companies that are behind the frontier or NVIDIA, which does not want to be left with only one or two clients. Like this is the thing. So they're like, oh, let's start with NVIDIA. I think the nightmare scenario for NVIDIA, or at least a nightmare scenario for NVIDIA, is that it basically has one or two labs break so far from the pack that it's just almost monopsony conditions. And then those clients can either say – And just to add to that, both the two frontrunners are already making their own chips.

41:02They're already working with multiple chip companies. So they're already actively trying to reduce their dependence on a key supplier. So first they might have better pricing. They're like, no, we're just not going to pay that margin that you expect. Or they're already both diversifying, et cetera. So that is the first thing. And then the other thing that seems very obvious to me is that all the first round of signatories was objectively falling behind the frontier. And so when you're in software categories, you have either companies that are trying to build a model and they're behind. So Microsoft, at least we're talking LLM, is clearly behind.

41:44Meta, clearly behind, right? And then you have the company, I don't know, the Service Nows of the world, who will look like they could be in a position where they might have to pay a tax to the most advanced models. And so like – and then you get the late signatories like Open and AI or an Alphabet, et cetera, that are close but probably not at Fable 5, like Max, like look at the whole thing. And then they're the last ones to join. And so like I guess I had – it's like look, I love all that stuff about – I love freedom. Like I love freedom and I love tinkering. I love tinkering and I want to like do all that stuff, et cetera.

42:24But what I think, like, what really, like, motivates these companies is, like, you know, I don't put a ton of stock on, oh, it's really important to diffuse AI into our main street businesses and hospitals and hackers. Sure, great. I love that stuff. Lovely. But I think there is – I think the thing that would really – we're really not psychologically or sort of as an economy really equipped to think about what if one or two of these companies just runs away with it? What if Anthropic just runs away with it? What if we're sort of like, oh, yeah, everyone is sort of in the game? And I think for most of us – I'm not 100 percent sure of this because I'm not the most sophisticated person, technical person at all.

43:08But I have a feeling like most of us can't really get a good intuitive feel for like what is the difference between a GPT 5.6, a Fable 5, or even the most advanced Gemini model or a Kamei or a Deep Seek 4 or whatever. Like we're probably like not really able to personally grasp what the difference is at the extremes. But like what if we – what if in a year from now there's one company or two that are just so like clearly like there is no longer any debate. These other ones just are not in the game. That's a very weird – I would say very deeply uncomfortable situation we would find ourselves in.

43:46I think none of us would like that. I think most of us feel comfortable in a world in which you have a handful of companies roughly jostling around the, quote, frontier. It's like, OK, this is like comfortable for us. But if we weren't in that situation, like I think we would be rightfully all of us would be quite anxious. So was Lena Kahn right? Well, so this is the thing. I think that like and I think like the Mark Zuckerberg op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, I think, further hammers this point. And actually there is a sense in which I find the Mark Zuckerberg op-ed to be a little bit maybe more interesting than the open letter because the open letter is sort of this plausible deniability.

44:28liability where it's just we're advocating for a principle here and that principle is open right the zuckerberg op-ed and it's also like and it's and it's more there uh it's it's just again i think part of what you appreciated is like using the open letter format to just advocate for your own commercial interests it's like almost like stolen valor you know sure but like so like the the open letter like the zuckerberg op-ed in the wall street journal i thought actually took it a bit further. He's like, we cannot have super intelligence controlled by one company. So that was not merely saying, let's let the market decide.

45:04Let's keep like light touch regulation. He was like, no, this would be existentially bad. I think most people would actually agree with if one company were to be the monopoly provider of quote, super intelligence, unquote. So then you think, okay. Which is funny, too, because he's like – It's very funny. Well, he's probably top three largest customers of Anthropic, right? Right. So he's the one fueling all of this, and then two months later, he's like, okay, actually – To me, that is a very telling fact when you think about who are the largest customers. the competitors. So it's like that marginal difference.

45:50Like I said, like most of us probably can't really tell a big difference between like advanced models. But when you have like a really big, very high skilled, very like sophisticated model maker, and they're a huge customer of a major competitor that's better than them, like people are going to the frontier. And this is something that like surprised me. Like I thought maybe like there would be a bit more of a market for like sub frontier intelligence or like quote cheaper intelligence but look how fast um anthropic turned out uh opus 5 and i you know i haven't really used it that much but it could be like that in a market where there's if there is one winner that winner could emerge all up and down the price curve and so you have like your gemini flash level frontier yeah so yeah i mean that's That's what Sam was on Invest Like the Best yesterday, and he's talking about how you, as a company that sells intelligence, you want to have the best model at every point of the cost curve.

46:54Like it's actually going to be important to hit all of those different moments. Yeah, and it seems like – and look, things change by the week. So I'll come back on in a week and I'll say something else. But it seems like a while, like I started, you know, like I was just sort of poking around. I was like, oh, Gemini Flash. This is really fun for like high batch, low intelligence things, right? Like you could do 30 ,000 queries in two hours and it cost you 20 bucks or something. That's amazing. Could be pretty good for my life as a golden retriever. High batch, low intelligence. Yeah, that's right.

47:29Doing a lot of stuff. But probably or it seems at least plausible that the company that is has the most advanced model will probably also win for the sort of like low or could at least be in a good position to also win the high batch, low intelligence. Yeah, but I would say there has been a lot of pushback around the RSI narrative in the last 24, 48 hours because Opus 5 is actually not getting great reviews from the community. I think initially they felt like people thought it was like a great in-between between like a fable and a 5-6 soul. And then now I've seen a lot more negativity towards it.

48:12This to me, again, goes back to our original point of sort of like the incredible importance of Twitter in all of these discussions. Because if you think about like each time a model comes out, OK, there's the benchmarks. But then it's like you'll just see like someone will be like some tweet when GLM 5.2 came out that he's like some guy was like, I've been using GLM 5.2 for the last eight hours. I've never seen an open model like this. Got like 2 ,000 retweets. It's like eight hours? What are you doing? You're like, what are we doing here? It's like, oh, like I got a sort of weird vibe from Opus 5 or all these things.

48:50It's like, I don't know. I actually think this is probably a good reason for all of us to maybe log off a little bit more and to actually just read through benchmark reports rather than like one tweet. I've never seen a lot of new front-end dev like this.

49:05Amjad Masad:On the flip side of the benchmarks, it actually makes me more strong on Mark Zuckerberg's ability to produce a thoughtful opinion because he has spent a billion dollars on frontier intelligence in a month deployed across 10 ,000 people and can look at how the needle moved across different models and actually look at the efficiency. Like the ROI is at the end of the day, what matters in a business context. Yes, the like the vibe check matters. Yes, the benchmarks matter. But at the end of the day, in terms of moving the needle from 10 billion to 100 billion in revenue to a trillion dollars in revenue, a lot of that's going to be driven by our companies actually like getting the bill and being like, yep, I'm happy to pay because it was worth it.

49:54So this is something I noticed a while ago, which is that you read through a lot of these popular benchmarks that come out. And the thing that has surprised me is that up until recently, most of them actually don't talk about the dollar cost of completing a task. So it'll be like, can the model solve these 100 problems in engineering or whatever? It's like, oh, this one got 85 and this one got 75. Right. But we're really like going to need is to see like, what was the OK, how many dollars do I have to spend to get 90 percent of these questions solved? And we're just starting to see that. I have a theory, but I don't really know if it's right, that probably a lot of these benchmark organizations start from like a safetyist mindset.

50:41Right. Like they're worried about like, oh, like bio bioengineering. Can you do it binary? Can you do it at any cost, right? Because you don't really care about your token cost if you're like trying to exert a lot of damage. You just do it. So I think that for like the bigger questions, like hopefully we'll see more like what was the dollar cost of achieving X at this model? And then maybe we'll like really, those are the, I think for our conversations, those would be a lot more interesting than some of the sort of legacy benchmarks.

51:12Amjad Masad:How much do you think the open source, it feels like we're in this moment of this catch-up. There was the last six months, pre-GLM 5.2, it felt like open source was sort of falling behind as the Frontier Labs released more models and more crazy demos. And there were more stories about mythos and solving math problems and all these crazy conjectures and stuff. The labs were sort of trading back and forth with new capability, new capability, new benchmark, crazy thing. And open source was kind of quiet. And then we got GLM 5.2, Kimmy K3. And all of a sudden it was like, oh, okay. Like the open source market is catching up for sure.

51:49Amjad Masad:Still on the same trajectory. Maybe still behind, but like, you know, like on track. How much is that moving the market, do you think? How much are we in a replay of the Deep Seek moment, the Jevons paradox debate? Because it feels like there's this sell-off. But I don't know. Like it feels weird to me that people would be processing it the exact same and making the same mistake. that they made. So is this time different? Or how are people talking about it in New York? Yeah, as people who just care about the lines going up, it is, I think like, no, for real though, I mean, I do think like, it's plausible that this, on some level, this is just another quote, deep seek moment in the sense like, you get a little bit freaked out.

52:33I agree with you. Like, it's weird to think that like, you would do that same playbook twice. I think like another factor is just generally setting aside, like maybe the Kimmy and GLM stuff is a little bit, maybe it's a little overrated in terms of a story. I think people are looking at a situation in which they just do not foresee the end of these free cashflow losses, right? There's just like, we're nowhere close. It's like, okay, when can you, when is the off ramp for this spending? That story isn't totally satisfying because if that were – if it were just about, oh, they're spending a gazillion dollars on capital expenditures, you would expect the Korean chip stocks to do well.

53:18I mean the Korean chip stocks have been absolutely getting crushed over the last three weeks. So like there's something more to the story here. Like I don't – like it could just be that a lot of manic – it could be two separate things. It could be there were a bunch of manic traders in Korea who were buying these double and triple X leveraged ETFs that just trade SK Hynix. And then that had to eventually flush out because there's so much volatility baked into that that you get a little selling and it ripples. And then in the US, it could be that investors are looking at it like, I do not have any confidence that I could name the date in which the alphabets of this world will return to positive free cash flow.

54:02There is no reason to think that that off-ramp is coming when they can say like, oh, we're good. We have enough compute. So maybe there's a couple of things going on that I think are perhaps a little bit separate from the pure like, oh, we're freaked out about margin compression from Chinese open models.

54:18Amjad Masad:Yeah. It's very odd because the industry revenues are going up. And the revenues are very, very diffuse. Everything from an ad-supported use to a$10 subscription to a$200 subscription to a hyperscaler spending a billion dollars in a month on tokens. The demand is there in that it is this economy. It's not this total circular. There's just one. It's like NFTs or something like that. It's not some dislocation. But I agree with you that as you play out the CapEx requirements, we've now drawn down all the hyperscaler cash flow. We're issuing more debt and equity. And at a certain point, you're like, okay, if there's another 10x increase, if there's another 100x increase, there's sort of not enough money in the world for this.

55:03Amjad Masad:And so you almost need a pause on CapEx more than you need a pause on the capability development. Because I do think that if you just spent the CapEx that you're spending now, paused, and then just did the diffusion work to get these models into all the different businesses and use cases, the economic upside and the ROI would be there. but not when you're going to spend 10 times next on CapEx. Yeah, I think my framework is like you have the whole world betting on a meaningful capability, like continued capability increases, which I think is like okay to lean on because we've just been seeing that quarter over quarter.

55:44It is real. And then you also have some like hoarding, which is like not only are the capabilities going to get much more, much better. I'm also going to basically figure out a model that's going to be so good. It's going to just like Hoover up a bunch of like new demand and I'll be able to ramp revenue and justify all of this capex. And if I, but if I can't do that, someone else will, I'll be able to, I'll be able to offload it. right but the concerning thing right the concerning thing right now is like the the incremental big buyers of compute you effectively have a two players there and and then at the same time you have the whole industry being like well like praying for like an oligopoly as opposed to a duopoly or a monopoly right yeah like very interesting to scenario to have the biggest companies in the world so scared of a monopoly that they're effectively praying for an oligopoly is like is my it's really yeah it's really wild and you know uh i don't know if you guys saw today the recent blog post from uh dorkish dorkish had a great thing about like expectations that compute could get a lot more expensive yeah which you know we've one of the sort of uh stylized facts in the last few years has, of course, been the extraordinary drop in token prices, right?

57:10Like, if you go back to, like, GPT-3 token prices, they're down, like, 99.9%. But, like, you know, so we think, okay, there is some iron law that token prices will get cheaper over time. But maybe not. I mean, we thought there was an iron law that memory prices would drop over time, right? Or that any sort of hardware would drop over time. And the story of the last two years is that turns out that is capable of reversing. So it's not impossible to imagine that compute prices – I think it's not impossible to imagine that compute prices get more expensive and get significantly more expensive. And then, of course, he posited the possibility maybe there is no – almost no thing that we do economically currently with AI is economical where compute prices go, which is hard to imagine.

58:00And then the thing that I take away from it is, But that doesn't mean you can stop spending on it because you have to worry about hardening yourself for cybersecurity. Because it's like, all right, you know what? There's like this is not economical for me anymore. I want to tap out of the whole AI risk. Well, then your competitor develops a stronger model and then you're done. You're really done. So like this is the scary thing, which is – and I think even just in the sort of like hyperscalers is like what if like free – the situation is you're bleeding free cash flow. but you also don't have the option of saying we want to opt out of the game.

58:35Amjad Masad:Yeah. Which I think is a source of anxiety for investors. It is. It is like it's so weird that we went back and forth on like the doom narrative. And no matter where you sat on that, it was either like perfect utopia, everything's amazing, or like Terminators kill everyone. And in fact, like we are very much in this messy middle of like a lot of annoying things. Like the cybersecurity equilibrium is, I mean, maybe there's like this doom scenario, but most likely it's just like costs go up for everyone loosely because you have to harden yourself more against AI. And it's like, yeah, it's great to pick bugs, but there's going to be more bugs introduced.

59:11Amjad Masad:And it's just like, it's just annoying. It's annoying. And there's a lot of scenarios where it's like, okay, there's more cost on AI slop and then you have to detect the slop and then you're annoyed. And we have a friend on our team who always laments when like AI does some amazing like math thing. He's like, no one cares. Like this is why you need to return to like, you know, the curing cancer, the doing something useful, actually helping you with some problem that people do experience. But a lot of times it's just these abstract things. Going back to the Zuck op-ed, he's in the position where he doesn't do a bunch of podcasts about AI and AI doom in like 2019 when no one cared about AI.

59:54Whereas a lot of the other key players were doing podcasts and they were talking about the risks and all these things. So he can kind of come out and just say like, look, it's going to be awesome. We just got to make sure there's fair competition. But the pushback there is that like the average he's not the best messenger for this because the average person believes that social media, while it is great in some ways, has damaged birth, you know, hurt birth rates. Right. Like damaged team, team mental health. Right. Is is just like draining the attention. Right. All these things. So like he's maybe the best messenger that we got, but he's not the best.

1:00:32Well, so this is the issue that I arise when I think about this is that like, OK, you have two executives. One is like it's all going to be OK. And one of them, it's we're going to have doom, right? And then it's like, well, which one of them has been paying attention to taking seriously AI for the last 10 years? And which one of them three years ago is talking about the metaverse? Well, it's like I'm going to trust the one who has been taking AI seriously for the last 10 years. And then unfortunately, that happens to be the doom guy. Or that seems how it is that unfortunately that like if you just go by these heuristics we have of like, well, who was like – there have been people who are like very right about AI who are very nervous.

1:01:14And this is like what makes me – I don't have any ability to adjudicate these questions. Like I'm just like – we're just reading stuff on the internet. But unfortunately, a lot of the people, a lot of the doomed people have had much better intuitions about just the broader trajectory of the technology than the people who are very optimistic, who three years ago or four years ago were talking about NFTs. Well, yeah, and there's some line, I think it's from Demis, where he's saying like he met with Zuck when they were selling DeepMind. Yeah, it's a great part. Zuck viewed the metaverse or VR as equally interesting to AI, and that was part of what made him decide to not go to meta.

1:01:56Amjad Masad:Has Dennis never watched a movie in VR? It's electric. It's the best experience. I still haven't done it yet. You got it. It's amazing. Apple Vision Pro. It's fantastic. But there was a doom narrative around crypto and there was a doom narrative around metaverse. The crypto one was that every criminal is going to be able to transact anonymously and there's going to be a huge increase in drug use. Well, the doom scenario was actually that the dollar would just completely collapse. That too. But that was something that people were cheering on. They were excited about that. And then with the metaverse, it was like wireheading.

1:02:30Amjad Masad:So everyone's going to be in the metaverse and we're going to lose any and all interaction in the real world. and of course Mark Zuckerberg never addressed that he was never on podcast being like yes it is there is a risk that it goes into the matrix and we're all in these virtual worlds and like I'm not going to do that uh Apple sort of like forced his hand with that with the crazy AR and like the screen on the outside and Apple's messaging was like we don't want to be an isolating device we want to be a mixed reality device and and they were sort of being like the anti-doom but Zuck never really went full like Doomer or even addressed it.

1:03:06Amjad Masad:And then of course we just like sort of got the good ending because it just like kind of flatlined and never really went anywhere. I don't know. I don't even know if that's the good ending. It's like the middle of the ending. No, no, totally. And it's interesting because when you read like that Zuckerberg op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, it reads like, you know, so you mentioned like everyone is super cynical about social media, right? You mentioned the birth rate. So everyone's got so like, so it just feels so like kind of gross. about the whole thing now. But, you know, in like 2010, 2011, people were like, we're really excited.

1:03:38It's like, we're going to connect. It's going to be great for democracy. Citizens are going to like, be able to like collaborate and stuff like that. And so when I read the Zuck op-ed, I was like, this is a kind of optimism that I haven't read from anyone in over 10 years about where like digital technology is going. Unfortunately, people like, you know, very few people are as optimistic about social media as they were in, say, the beginning of the 2010s. But it did harken back to that, this is going to be very democratizing, etc. And I hope it is. Well, I expect, like, personally... And social media, I do think, has made my life better.

1:04:23Like, if you net it out, it's like, you know, I work in media. But even if I didn't, you know, pre-being in this kind of business, met a lot of people, I learned a bunch of stuff that I otherwise wouldn't. I think it's had a net positive impact on my life. I think that AI, hopefully, one of the good scenarios is that it is the same way, right? Where like net-net makes everyone's lives a bit better even though it has these things that are – that are quite bad, right? I think we should be open-minded to that possibility. I mean look, we get things – everyone is dooming so hard these days and you just go down the list.

1:05:02We could easily rattle off ten very – three or four big things right now. But usually we're wrong. We're pretty bad about predicting the future. And so we should be open-minded, I think, towards right-tail scenarios where things go well because I don't think I put a lot of stock or I don't think there's any good reason to put a lot of stock on what the Twitter conventional wisdom is or the editorial board of any publication, what they're all anxious about right now. Like, you know, like, I don't know what that great outcome looks like per se. You know, look, we could get great technological breakthroughs.

1:05:42I'll say one thing, which is that, like, in the circles of people I talk to, everyone is, like, reading more philosophy these days probably because of AI. It's pretty good. Like, I'm pretty happy. Like, that's a pretty cool thing that, like, people are sort of like a reignition of a certain curiosity about things that I think was sort of dormant for a while. Some of us are making music for the first time in years. Making music. Yeah, making music. No, like we should pay attention to like the – I actually do think we should pay attention to the good things that are – because it's so easy to get caught and focused on a negative narrative.

1:06:19In the meanwhile, like various like positive things are happening. I, you know, changed a flight recently, and it was much easier because I used Chad Chippetito to, like, walk me through the process of, like, turning.

1:06:32Amjad Masad:There you go. That's a mirror of violation. Of, you know, to a round-trip flight to a three-legged flight, which I was very anxious about. It's easy. So, like, you should pay attention, I think, to things in our, like, day-to-day light that we can say, you know what? AI is sort of making this better even if like it doesn't feel like the whole – even if we're like anxious about where it's all going. Last question. You have a podcast. We have a podcast. That's right. There's a lot of new podcasts. Would you support an open letter that we're writing? We would like you to sign in to ban new podcasts.

1:07:08Amjad Masad:It would require factual approval. Well, it actually wouldn't ban, but it would be a multi-year sort of approval process, bunch of safety checks. Yeah. Yeah. Sort of like a new government agency to issue RSS feeds. Yeah. This is really important. It is. I'm so glad you brought this up. Because someone could just launch an RSS feed that, you know, ends the entire world. Who knows? We don't know. It can't happen. Or removes viewers and listeners from ModLots and TVP. And we cannot let that happen. Whoa. That's ridiculous. Are you saying that I would do this for my own financial gain? This is crazy.

1:07:43Amjad Masad:I can't believe you would even go there. That's wild. I would never think that way. I'm purely thinking altruistically. Okay, Joe? Let's leave it there. America needs to win on podcasts. We do. And this is very important. We actually are objectively winning. We are winning on entertainment. You just talked about it. We have been winning on entertainment and have no... No, there's no competitors yet. Yes. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I'm signing the letter. I love it. I love it. We'll circulate. Great to see you, Joe. Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. Take care.

1:08:12Amjad Masad:Bye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And we are very fortunate that we have our next guest, Jameson Detweiler, here with us in the TBP on Ultradone. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Please introduce yourself and the company. Yeah, I am Jameson Detweiler. I am the co-founder and CEO of Chip. And we are building what we like to think of as the ideal second card today. But as everything becomes autonomous, the ideal primarily owned vehicle of the future. Okay. Can we get the chip that I specced out on the big board?

1:08:50Yeah, we want to see. Because it is a special, special car, and I think it would provide some important context.

1:08:56Amjad Masad:So quick facts, it's an electric low-speed life utility vehicle. How do you rate my spec? I love this. I love the spaceship there and everything. The spaceship. You've got to go with the party in the front package. Surf rack. Yes. And the TV on the front. Yep. This is pretty good. If you could get TVPN on there, it would kind of complete it. But good start. Good start for me. Before we get too much into Chip, what were you doing before this? What led you to creating the vehicles of the future? Yeah. Before this, I was at Tierra Mobility, which was Bird and Lime's largest competitor in Europe, backed by Softback and Mubadala.

1:09:36They own spin scooters in the U.S. wound up there by selling my HD mapping business, Phantasmo, to them. So basically creating a digital twin of the world, and we built a computer-powered GPS. And it turns out scooters don't know where they are very well because of GPS. And so Bird, JumpaDoo, Bird, and Tear were our biggest customers and scaled up. And then also started building kind of driver assistance systems for scooters as well. So, yeah, been in the mobility space for a while. Interesting. I can imagine driver assistance would be great for scooters. I don't know how far along it's gotten just because driving around LA, some people on scooters do things that are maybe not illegal, but definitely wrong.

1:10:20Yeah. I mean, we say driver assistance is like eight ass in cars, but really it's about restricting their behavior. So it's like, are you drunk? Are you on a sidewalk? Are you going the wrong way down a bike lane? And so you're putting that on there and just camera and compete at the edge running there. So it's building a lot of that kind of.

1:10:34Amjad Masad:Why is autonomy important for this vehicle? This feels like the last place I would want self-driving. I need self-driving in the morning commute. I'm tired. I'm going 40 miles or 20 miles and I just want to zone out and just get to where I'm going. But this looks fun to drive. This looks like you're driving it around a small community. It's not that much of a hassle to actually drive. Why is autonomy important? Yeah, I mean, for us, like where we're starting with the autonomy stack is actually kind of like the inverse of what you'd expect when you get from a Tesla anywhere else. Right. So like, yeah, we like to say chip is fun to drive, but parking never is.

1:11:10So this is not like FSD in a Tesla. In fact, like when we do bring autonomy eventually to the vehicle, we'll be, you know, unsupervised in the way that we do it. Got it. But what we're doing today is we can take a chip. You can pull up to, you know, a busy place in West Hollywood and skip the valet line, hop right out. Chip will go off, take care of himself, take care of the parking, show up when you tell him to come back, either from the calendar or as you speak to him or text you. Let you know when he's on the way back there and pick you up exactly where you want to be picked up. Unlike a Waymo, right, which will make you walk a long distance.

1:11:49And the way that we're able to achieve this, by the way, today is with direct remote control of humans because there's actually a data gap there.

1:11:56Amjad Masad:Okay. Yeah. Is there also an easier regulatory approval path? Because if it's only autonomous or remotely controlled while there's no humans in the car, it's safer? Does that make it easier to get to market faster? Yeah. So it's definitely an easier path. And for us, we think a very responsible path. Because when we run our – we're going to be running our pilot in Miami this winter. a great market for us where we're based. And our early customers are going to have effectively virtually unlimited access to it, and they'll hop out, and we'll take that vehicle. We'll drive it. In fact, we'll drive it at lower speeds on less busy roads, et cetera.

1:12:34And so it's just a way for us to validate and bring kind of that safety level up. And then eventually we'll drive with people, and we'll move from direct remote control to full autonomy here over time.

1:12:45Amjad Masad:That makes sense. Jordy, sorry. Yeah, that use case is cool. I think like think about like you have a driver surfboard off the beach. Yeah. Yeah. That, that, but like, yeah, there, there's something, one of the biggest benefits of like having a driver is just being able to be like, Oh, I need to run to the grocery store, pull up outside, go, go straight in. Even if the parking lot is like crazy or chaotic, you're just going in and coming out. You're not thinking about it. To me, that's the most underrated. The number of people that have drivers, but not, they don't order delivery groceries. It's like very small, but yes.

1:13:18No, no, I'm just saying to me that that's been, in my experience, one of the most underrated parts. And that's something that you expect the Tesla to be doing soon, but can even make sense in this form factor. When originally we saw the launch video and we were like, why would we need, why would I want autonomous driving for something that I'm just driving to the beach or whatever? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's so you can go to the beach for like, if you're living in Manhattan Beach where golf carts are really popular. You know, it's small, it's easy to park, but there's still no parking. So in that context, you can take your friends there, get dropped off, and you just go back to home and come back.

1:13:55And, you know, so like really what we're trying to do here is bring this like fun, robotic, you know, private driver to everybody. It's why it talks. And it can go pick up the groceries, right? It can go there and it can do curbside pickup and, you know, the frunk opens. And because the confused target employee comes out, the vehicle can talk and say, hey, put it in there. We're good to go. Oh, yeah. Do that. Exactly. What do you think, like, it feels like there's been an explosion of, like, just new vehicle startups. You have Slate. You have YouGuys. You have Amble. Like, clearly a bunch of smart people at the same time were like, why is there not this super specialized vehicle, right?

1:14:35Slate was, like, it's going after an everyday pickup truck. Amble's, you know, focused on resorts, right? You guys are focused on everyday consumers and like in these sort of like, my view, like coastal hubs, at least like at least that's where I see you guys getting a lot of traction. But like what is it snowballing now? Should we expect a lot more vehicles? Is there some like is it just the advancements of batteries and declining costs? Like what do you think is driving? Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting, like when consumer behavior changes in such a major way. Right. especially around cars and like you know in a lot of ways i think like the american love affair with the car is dying uh everything's too expensive uh and increasingly too like we're re-urbanizing and even in places like sorry i was gonna i was gonna hit the boob there we go yeah no no i i think you're i think you're right and the the the one some Even you can see manufacturers now, all the cars started looking the same 10 years ago.

1:15:44Less and less was like a, like nobody goes and they're like, oh, I need a new daily. I'm going to get a yellow car. Right. Whereas historically, like somebody would be like, I need a new car. I'm going to get like a yellow Volkswagen Beetle or something like that. And now it's all like converging around like the Model 3 format. Right. Or even John was complaining the other day because he's in the market for a Tesla, and he's like, I wish that they still made the S. That's the one I want.

1:16:11Amjad Masad:Or a convertible or a full-size SUV. It feels like there's a – it's almost like a barbell effect. In the heyday of the love affair with the American car, it was you got one car that was an expression of everything you needed. So maybe four doors, but also some power and a supercharged V8. But now the standard like pod that just takes you to work is so bland and standard that maybe there's room for a second car that is just completely on the other side of the barbell. Yeah. And I think for us, I mean, there's a lot of variables here to like how we think about this. And a large part of this is like how do you almost like ball out on a budget?

1:16:54Like our cars are like our fashion and they reflect who we are. But today, if you want to buy a new car that's cool, that's out of reach for the majority of people. And so that's part of what we're trying to provide here and make it from design, but also add a lot of function that supports the lifestyles that we live today. Because we are living closer to home today. And so I think that's a large impact as well.

1:17:19Amjad Masad:Do you think this can slot in? $15 ,000 estimated MSRP for four seats, top speed, 25 miles an hour, 100 miles of range per charge. I'm going to test the top speed. I'll be the one to decide what the top speed of the chip is. I mean, that does feel like it would be if you are truly a budget conscious buyer who's looking for a commuter. $15 ,000, you'd go with like used Honda Civic instead of this. But is there something where the math actually does work out with more charging places where this does become a commuter? Because 25 miles an hour is just like too slow for anyone who's hopping on the freeway for a daily commute, right?

1:18:01Sure. But we're in L.A., right? We've driven this thing. That's so sad.

1:18:06Amjad Masad:But that is like the future. Like the traffic's so bad. Yeah, you really do go 25 miles an hour a lot. I think he's just saying like you can – like very easily in L.A. you can just stay off of freeways. Sure. And it's not even necessarily slower. Oh, no, that's right. Well, yeah, and that's the thing. It's like if you're, you know, it's 530 on a Wednesday, right, and you're coming from downtown back to Venice, you know, like you can be in a car like a 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds sitting on the 10, but you're still going to get there in the same amount of time. It's going to be a lot more fun getting there.

1:18:39You're like betting that there's going to be wall-to-wall traffic, and then you get your chip out on the freeway, and you're like, whoa, like a lot less traffic than I was expecting.

1:18:47Amjad Masad:I forgot it was the World Cup and there's no one on the road. But yeah, for us, it's like the ICP that we're really focused on is like, I built this for myself. I like to say that golf carts escaped golf communities during the pandemic. And the growth area has been like young families in Sunbelt regions. And so for me, I live in Miami. I live in Edgewater, basically downtown area. I'm not going to put my kids into a golf cart. It's not safe. But I like the idea. This is built to facilitate that. And so that's kind of where we're starting in terms of the function, the price point. Yeah, and the golf cart companies have been so asleep at the wheel.

1:19:22Like when it comes to customization, it's like, oh, you want to customize your cart? You want to order this cart? And it's like you have one thing that you can decide, and it's the color, and there's like six options, right? And you can't really change much of anything. And I went down. I was excited to see you guys come up and Amble and some of these other companies because I was like, I've just talked to all these legacy manufacturers, and they clearly don't care to try to innovate or try to allow this like specialization customization. And for a car like this, which is like this like weekend, you know, this like weekend vehicle, you want it to be like really expressive and fun because, you know, you're not thinking I'm going to just be like driving to the office and parking and coming back.

1:20:10It's like it is the place that you want to express yourself.

1:20:13Amjad Masad:Paul Graham had this back and forth with the creator of Friend, Avi Schiffman, who's working on an AI device. And the question was, how do you counter position against Apple? If you come up with a new electronic device, a consumer electronic device, Apple is going to do what they did to Pebble with the Apple Watch, where they launched something with the Apple design language. And Paul Graham's advice was do something so bold with your design and your aesthetic that Apple can't copy you. And this feels like a little bit of this. This feels like very antithetical to what other car companies are doing such that you could not be fast followed.

1:20:52Amjad Masad:Even if the technology is on the same supply chain loosely, this would be such a brand change for most car companies. They couldn't jump in. Is that conscious? Is that accidental? What's the thought behind all of the customization? I don't know. I think Ferrari might have knocked off with the Luce a little bit. They might have gotten a little inspired with the Luce. Been like, hey, chip looks pretty good. We should make it. No, it's... You're going to chop the top on that thing. Yeah, I mean, look, I think Apple tried. They missed. Oh, yeah, the car. Right? They missed. No, they're coming back, right?

1:21:28Amjad Masad:Aren't they announcing a... They're deploying Apple Maps into the 40. And then they're also launching a delivery for like a hyper car or like a Le Mans car. It doesn't count. Yeah. And you had that. And like, you know, Ford had a product in this category like 25 years ago. Really? Ford Think. There's one that like actually like is around Venice all the time still. And like, but, you know, these guys are like you look at all of these companies and like they're all tied to products, I think, that are huge money makers, but like create problems for innovation there. Right. For them. And so this is an area where it'll be very hard for them to come in and innovate and think about it.

1:22:05And you have to approach engineering differently. You have to approach sales differently and marketing. Frankly, in a lot of ways, I think of us more like a sneaker and culture company than I do about a car company in the way that we are selling, marketing, engaging our community, et cetera. And I think that's going to be really hard for anybody, certainly any of the incumbents to do today. For sure. Yeah. Should we go check it out?

1:22:27Amjad Masad:Yeah, we've got to go check it out. Tyler, what was that car that I was showing you earlier today? The 1991. We've got to pull that up at some point. But I want your reaction to that car because it's a fantastic one. But let's go take a look at the actual vehicle. You brought it here today. Let's go see. Let's do it. Do we have everything set up? Are we good to go? You got the camera? Okay, we're going to switch over so we can go take a tour of a real chip motor. And you got me on the laugh. Thank you for coming along with us, Jordy. Want to hop up? Take us through it. But where are we going? Right out here.

1:23:01Amjad Masad:Let's see. Outside the Ultradome, second car review we've done. Here we are. Whoa, here we go. Wait, it's driving itself. There we go. What's up, Chip? Hi, I'm Chip. Look at this thing. Hey, Joey. Hey, John. This is amazing. It's a lot taller than I thought it would be. Wow. Yeah, it's like golf carts are actually really tall. So the typical golf cart that people have is actually taller than every single trim of F-150. And so what happens here is there's a couple things. So you actually want the deck here and your safety structure to be tall because you need to interact with trucks on the road.

1:23:37But also, while this looks big, it's a very efficiently packaged size. It's 4 feet 11 wide. It's about 13 1⁄2 feet long. And we've designed this. You'll notice you're sitting at a dining room table, basically, right? You're not going to be in this thing typically for more than 45 minutes. So we want to create something that's really comfortable and that's going to actually have a ton of space. And so actually in production here, we're moving the second row back a bit. And everything is going to enable, you know, for me, I still have two kids in rear-facing car seats that fit in here well. And so the design exercise, like, started from, like, inside out.

1:24:09There's a boxiness to it that's necessary because for us, like, function does, like, drive form. Yeah. And we also, like, leaned into it because I don't want people to look at this and think that it's a car that can go 60 miles an hour, right? And so the funkiness is something that we've embraced. Yeah, it feels to me out of the Pixar universe. Yeah. That was intentional? Yeah, for me, I mean, I grew up going to Disney World, and I grew up at the World of Tomorrow, and I love kind of the future that the Jetsons created. And we've leaned into a little bit of this kind of retro, kind of futuristic aesthetic, because I want to see this positive vision of the future come true.

1:24:48It feels increasingly like we're maybe headed toward a Blade Runner future. and that's not what I want to see.

1:24:53Amjad Masad:Yeah, no, I like that. I like that. What was the process for actually building this one? Because obviously this is sort of hand-built at this point. This is hand-built, yeah. How much of the supply chain, are you building on something as a demo unit? Are you using something else as a platform? I imagine that you don't have your own leather tannery yet. Yes. How did this come together? How long did it take to build? Who built it? I'm curious about this process. This prototype has been built over the last 18 months and tinker with and optimized a lot. And so we actually imported a small Chinese EV that we wanted to learn from and built on top of it.

1:25:31Tore it down. And ended up rebuilding.

1:25:32Amjad Masad:Distilled it. Yeah, distilled it, exactly. Tore it down to the chassis, ended up replacing the entire drivetrain, the battery, the whole thing. And so it's kind of over time, most of that disappeared. And they allowed us to kind of learn a lot from, I mean, frankly, they've been doing these small EVs for a long time. And that was really, really good for us. And so, yeah, that kind of exploration has gone on for 18 months and now we should have production intent units in hand in the next like four months or so. And then there are manufacturers for like these types of bench seats that you can go to at this point and pull those together.

1:26:03So actually our VP of Vehicle Engineering came to us from Canoe, who's the vehicle line sector there, but he thankfully started his career in seating and restraints. And so he's like, and by the way, in a lot of ways seating is one of the harder kind of industrial design problems for this like there's so much nuance to doing it well and there's a lot that gets improved from here and so we're having actually like optional heating and cooling in here too there's also like optional hvac and so that's a huge a huge part of our focus yeah but wait so you'll have a covered version of it as well yep yeah we have a soft top that it will come with we have hard doors we have an enclosure here we have hvac as all as an accessory but like it's you know even if you're going to be operating this in a cold place you know like we took this to aspen and people absolutely loved it or if you're in seattle it's raining like if it's a nice day you should be able to top off so our designs we'd like to say driving this home from dinner in a winter storm would be electric well if you're gonna do if you're gonna make a mountain version you got to get chains i guess yep well it's all-wheel drive um we use four in-wheel motors as well so it has a lot of torque so like it has no issue uh in the snow crazy yeah very cool interesting very very very cool i want one yeah i can make that happen what is this track back here for this is l track so this is an option here this is the standard kind of accessory you'll see in truck beds okay this is actually also the same that they use to like uh hold down airplane seats there so this This is an accessory.

1:27:27You can do tie downs and things like that. We have, so these seats actually fold down into a truck bed, so you can use it, you can put plywood. And so we designed it that way. So like the thing is people like end up wanting to buy this kind of vehicle because it's like the ideal vehicle to go to the beach. But what ends up happening and you've seen his behavior is like, they're like, oh, this is functional. They'll go pick up the groceries. They'll go to Costco. They'll take the kids to school. And we want to take that kind of like feeling of a vehicle that really empowers you and feels like very light and turn up to 11.

1:27:56And so it's a Swiss army knife that you can do and you can pick and choose what you want. You know, if you're a surfer, you can have your surfboard rack here. We'll have like a hand shower for like getting sand off and just go heavily into the accessory ecosystem.

1:28:10Amjad Masad:Yeah, that's cool. That's a great way to differentiate. What does it take to keep this thing street legal? It feels like right on the fringe, right on the edge, you have mirrors, but no doors. Like what else is like the bare minimum to make sure that you're always street legal? Yeah, so the category that we're currently operating in is called a low-speed vehicle. That's what a street legal golf cart is. It's FMVSS 500. Okay. You have to limit the— And that's because you have to cap the top speed. Top speed, yep. And you can drive on roads 35 miles per hour and under. So you can ride basically every surface road here in Los Angeles you can go on.

1:28:44Wow. And then, yeah, you have to have seatbelts. You have to follow lighting requirements. You have to have a backup camera and things like that. But frankly, we actually think that the category is severely under-regulated. like golf carts are death traps and there's a lot of like really really bad stories that you hear yeah of course and for us like we're doing a lot to not only you know exceed but push the boundaries here and so for us we are doing designing this for a crash at like the appropriate speed that we're operating at we're putting in features that we're going to be deploying for active safety leveraging the cameras and everything else we have in there too so Under-regulated.

1:29:19Yeah. It's going to be open up the Chip Washington office soon and pushing for, pushing for.

1:29:24Amjad Masad:Total and complete lockdown. So this is basically a one-on-one. Yeah. Is it street legal? Did you have to tow it here? Can you get something like this approved provisionally for a demo drive so that you can test it on streets? Or is this something that you have to go through a whole process and they all have to be street legal before? Yeah, no, this is street legal. Really? Yeah, there's like a custom build there that we've been able to do. Yeah. We typically tow it when we come from West LA to here. We can drive it. But I don't like to think about how much this vehicle is worth because we can't get insured for the value anyway.

1:29:59Start up with a prototype. You will now find an underwriter. So yeah, we take good care of it.

1:30:04Amjad Masad:I love it. I love it. Thank you so much. I mean, it's impressive how solid it feels even as a prototype. It feels like ready to ship. Well, we'd love to get you guys later. You can take it for a drive. Can't wait. Can't wait. Absolutely. Is there anything we can see in here? Is this open or? Not right now. Here is the part in the frunk, but we have a little bit of wiring we've got to clean up there right now. But yeah, that's where you'll see the TV in the frunk here. And then it's going to have a huge space that you're going to fit. You've got to miniaturize stuff. Yeah, exactly. That's the next step.

1:30:35And we have, you know, my goal is I need to have a double stroller that will fit in there that I can keep in here at all times.

1:30:41Amjad Masad:Very cool. No, I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. Jordan, anything else? No, this is amazing. Awesome progress. Thank you so much for showing it to us. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming by. Have a great day. Cheers, guys. Very cool. See ya. Whoa. That's good. Goodbye. Friendly little guy. Friendly.

1:31:09Amjad Masad:Back to the show. We have a couple more guests coming by. Tyler, did you find the car that I was talking about yesterday? Can we send that? It also looks... It's the Nissan Figaro. The Nissan Figaro, right? Nissan Figaro. Can we pull up a picture of that? I like the way this one looks. And this is just like for sale on cars and bids right now, this old thing. What a cool vehicle. I'm so glad that consumers are getting options because like wildly different design decisions than Amble, which obviously launched right at the same time. Amble's going for the very low-tech route, the most simple possible vehicle.

1:31:53They're not even really selling, I think, a screen in it. You like that? I like that. I love that.

1:31:59Amjad Masad:The Nissan Figaro? I love it. Whereas Chip is going for really creating a consumer electronic product in many ways. Tyler, do you want to send a link to the car that you were looking at picking up earlier? I think it was a little bit of an older car. I want to get Jordy's review of whether or not you should pull the trigger on this car. Have you ever owned an old car? Not since college. Because, yeah, what do they call it? Vintage or retro? I don't know. You go further back. Classic? Yeah, it's really a classic car. Yeah, so if we can pull this up, this is from early 20th century, 1922 Chevrolet.

1:32:46Amjad Masad:Oh, it's pre-war? Yeah. I thought you were going post-war. There's a few options. Tyler's thinking about getting back. Yeah, don't you think of this? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't you think this is— I mean, but why not just go for something horse-drawn? Yeah. Like, if you're going to go this far back, why not go 20 years prior and go horse-drawn? Who would have thought that this car would be put out of business by horses? because yeah if you're gonna go a horse is less maintenance than this thing it's over for the what is this model a model t something like that well it's not ford so oh it's not ford okay chevrolet and 490 touring is what it's called i mean they kind of nailed the design it's beautiful they made the perfect car and then ever since then we've been trying to get back to this yeah i think it's wildly illegal to design a car like this i don't think you could even if you modernized everything yeah we don't even know how but we do know how to tell you about mongo db what's the only thing faster than the ai market your business on mongo db don't just build ai own the data platform that powers it um adam hunt researcher at cambridge university has a phd in evolutionary psych psychiatry he said he's recently flipped from being bullish to bearish about ai he says he's updating his bearishness to be more solidly bearish early thoughts uh and his reasoning laid out here the whole it turns out if you keep training and scaling the models more they develop broad new capabilities and lots of domains thesis was wrong sorry demis uh the recent batch of models haven't gotten more general they've gotten less general this is the most obvious fact that their language outputs uh have gotten much worse in comparison to EG03.

1:34:28Amjad Masad:If they were gaining generalist capacities, we would expect them to be describing their work in ever more graceful and comprehensive probes. And I don't know if that's that accurate. I mean, you hear about like Claudish and like the little languages that emerge from the models to be more token considerate. And so there is an evolution of language there, but I sort of take his points that it feels very much like the spikes are getting spikier. And if you scroll down, you can pull up this chart. So Thomas Poirot had put out this mainstream AGI thesis, this idea that there's spiky intelligence. It starts, if you zoom in on the top left there, you'll see the circle where there's tasks that AI can do.

1:35:14Amjad Masad:And a human is better at every single task. Then the AI is helping me in some tasks, means that there's these little spikes where the AI is maybe 80 % as good as you, so it's somewhat helpful, but there's other areas where it's useless. Then all of a sudden you scroll over and the AI has a jagged frontier. Sometimes it's amazing, sometimes it's dumb. And then the final stage is, wow, the AI is unbelievably intelligent, but for some reason it fails at X. And then AGI is when it's still spiky, But every possible point on that blurry blob is beyond the human capabilities. And so it is generally intelligent, even while remaining spiky.

1:35:55Amjad Masad:Now, if you scroll down, this individual has a different story that he is playing out. AI is a fun toy that is helping me do some tasks, has a jagged frontier. But then if you go over, he's saying you're going to get crazy, crazy spikes while the actual frontier broadly sort of stays within that human circle. And then at the final stage, you have this extreme strength in a few domains like coding and math, but it's weaker in many other areas. And he claims that through the process of optimizing for coding and cybersecurity in these specific business use cases, you might actually shrink the broad capabilities.

1:36:36Amjad Masad:But Tyler over there thinks he knows better than the PhD in evolutionary psychiatry from Cambridge University. No, we were debating this earlier. But give me your pushback because you think that this is maybe too soon to call this or not exactly? I'm not saying that it's not correct, but I think if we want to make models really good at language, common sense, or social reasoning, it seems pretty clear to me that right now we could do that if we wanted. All of the recent advancements are because we want a really good coding model, so we can make the model really good at coding. and it's not clear that like it's impossible to make length maybe it's true that the methods we're using right now to make models better don't apply like equally to all kind of types of capabilities but like there's a reason that like the models aren't really good at social reasoning right now it's because like it seems like social reasoning is not that valuable

1:37:35Amjad Masad:even even writing it's like look at some of the most iconic like exchanges in business history you're never even like never like oh well when steve emailed the adobe ceo his prose wasn't absolutely electric yeah just like what did it actually say and so i think it's possible that like incredible writing just isn't valuable enough to... Yeah. I mean, so I agree with you that there's a world where every task needs to be hill climbed. There's some debate on the timeline today about chess bench. So Gary Marcus has taken a little bit of a victory lap saying, AGI, smarter than the smartest humans? My ass.

1:38:27Amjad Masad:Says Kasparov, peak rating 28.51. One probably could have crushed the best commercial language models in chess when he was seven years old. And so this graph of chess bench shows that GPT 5.5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, Preview are all around just north of 1 ,000 ELO, which is still impressive. It's crazy, but it's not by any means superhuman. and but like every time someone points out something where it's like the models are bad at this, it does seem like there's a very quick cycle of like, let's make them good at that. Yeah, also like I think it was Amjad that was talking about this. He basically took an LM and he said like, help me make a chess bot.

1:39:15And then it was like became superhuman. So like if the model can just do the thing, like yeah, maybe it's the model doing it or is it the model writing code that then does the thing? It's kind of the same thing.

1:39:24Amjad Masad:Yeah. yeah i mean i had a certain point tools to then at a certain point a really good model would just be like i'm going to go download stockfish and just run the actual chess engine like i don't need yeah i mean that seems fine to me i don't i just think that when people say the model is generally intelligent they're hoping that uh it's just like a natural like they're implying that chess is like indicative of some other cognitive ability right because clearly the chess is not the actual thing that matters because the chess can just download Stockfish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Anyway, fun stuff.

1:39:57Amjad Masad:Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. I really like the dog one. It's great. Anyway, we've been keeping Stanley Tang from DoorDash waiting for far too long. He's the co-founder and chief product officer. Stanley, welcome back to the show. How are you doing? Hey, how are you, John, Jordy? Good to see you. Great to see you. Yeah, I could see you. Thank you for joining us on a big day.

1:40:27Amjad Masad:I also want to know your take on this idea. I don't know if you were listening, but this idea that LLMs and AI models are so incredible, and yet they're underperforming at chess, on this chess bench. What is your overall frame for thinking about progress in AI, the intelligence, the spikiness of these models? because I imagine that that flows through what you will do with a harness or with a new initiative and what you will just wait for the model to naturally get better at. Yeah, I mean, I feel like we're going through one of the most exciting phases in kind of the tech industry. I think AI is going to be huge.

1:41:06I think the models are only going to keep getting better and better. I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking through how do you apply AI, not just in the LM world, but seeing all the stuff that's coming out of the AI LM world and bringing that to the physical world. And I think that's probably going to be the next frontier. Like robotics, physical AI, drones, et cetera. And honestly, like a lot of the things, the reason why you're seeing like the Waymos that are happening, the dot robots, that DoorDash that we announced last year, the drones, a lot of these, it's all part of the same revolution.

1:41:39It's these AI models getting better and better. And the moment you sort of flip from kind of this classical heuristics approach to now this AI ML learned approach, that's when all these robotics started working, too. And so I think things are just going to keep getting better and better. I think what you see now is probably the dumbest version of what you ever see.

1:42:03Amjad Masad:Yeah. So give us the overview of DoorDash Air, and then I want to know how AI is accelerating the deployment of that program, how it's integrated into the actual vehicles and the drones and the business broadly. But just set the table for us on DoorDash Air. Yeah. Well, we're really excited to announce DoorDash Air today. It's our in-house drone delivery program. It's the same team that's built behind DoorDash. It's part of our DoorDash Labs group. and I think the big milestone we announced today is that we officially got our FAA Part 135 certification. So essentially, it's our air carrier certification.

1:42:44It's the same certification that actually whenever you charter a corporate jet, you have to get a Part 135. And with that, it means we are now officially legal to do drone deliveries commercially in the U.S. We're the eighth company to get the part 135 for drone delivery. So we're really excited to bring drone deliveries to the DoorDash marketplace.

1:43:09Amjad Masad:Yeah, this feels AI accelerated because if we were talking five years ago, eight years ago, ten years ago, and the discussion was around launching sidewalk robots or drones, the ore would be very important there, I imagine. And it feels like this year it flipped to and very quickly. And is that because the team is accelerated with coding agents and AI? Or is it just that the opportunity is so big and your company is bigger that you can really, I know it's one team, but I imagine the team can be very big now. But what's actually enabled you to move so quickly here? Yeah, I think it's a combination of a bunch of things all coming together.

1:43:56I think certainly the AI piece, the models are getting better and better. things that weren't possible five years ago, all of a sudden, now the dot robots can now handle it, drones can do it. I think the second is the hardware as well, just hardware getting better and better. This investment, because of the AI revolution, there's so much money now being invested in things like compute. Again, five, eight years ago, we didn't have things like the NVIDIA, Thor chips, and things that can actually run these powerful AI models. There's a lot of investment going behind that. And obviously now with robotics and physical AI being a thing, a lot of investment going behind the hardware itself as well, like the drones, the components, the supply chain.

1:44:45And then last piece, of course, is the operational piece as well. Obviously, we've actually been, you know, we started the labs almost eight years ago. It took us a while to just even figure out the operational piece. And I think that's the other big thing a lot of people don't realize is with something like drone deliveries, it's not just putting an aircraft out there. A lot of what we spent the past few years working on is also thinking through what does the end-to-end stack, the end-to-end infrastructure looks like. How does a drone actually plug in to the DoorDash network? Like what is the loading infrastructure at a merchant look like?

1:45:25How does a merchant handoff look like? How do you, how do you route a drone order, a dot robot versus a human dasher? How do you, how do you even know that an order is drone eligible or not? Like how do you build? So, so we have to build, we have to build a device called smart scale where we give out to these merchants where you have to weigh the device so that, you know, it's actually, you know, there's, there's weight limitations on these drones. That's actually a drone eligible order. And so we have to build all that. I mean, a drone is a drone itself is not particularly useful if it's not connected to our marketplace, if it's not connected to our customer, to our merchants.

1:46:00And we spend a lot of time working on those. So I think it's you got to do all of the above. I think it's a confluence of a lot of these things all coming together. That's which we feel like is which makes it the kind of the perfect moment to do DoorDash Air.

1:46:14Amjad Masad:So there's a lot of AI, I imagine, accelerating just the development of the SaaS products that you need to create the ecosystem, actually run the drone program. Then there's probably some AI-assisted hardware development, everything from procurement, sourcing parts, the supply chain. But then what does the AI actually look like on the drone? You can't probably bring an NBL 72 with you. So what does that look like? What does the autonomy stack look like on a modern drone these days? Yeah, I mean, we'll have more to share about the drone itself. But, I mean, you can imagine it's just even things like how does a drone, like I think thinking through, like, for example, the pickup experience or the merchant, like how does a drone actually, the way it docks at a drive -through standalone store is very different than a strip mall.

1:47:11It's very different than a rooftop. It's like, how do you build the perception system to handle these various merchant pickup infrastructure? Again, that's part of going back to you've got to think about the system end-to-end. And the consumer side, again, there's a lot of nuances. How do you know the exact coordinate to drop the package? It's not as simple as, oh, just take the lat-long from Google Maps. And, okay, that's where you drop because that might be over someone's, like, car or someone's, like, building, or there might be, like, wires or et cetera. So, it's, like, how do you build the perception system?

1:47:50And then, of course, like, while it's actually traveling the air, like, how do you handle deconfliction with other drones? I mean, and, for example, in airlines, like, the way you do it is, like, every airline sort of has this thing called ADS-B, which essentially you think of it as, like, it's find my friends, but for airplanes. So I'm a pilot, so I actually kind of deal this all day. But with drones, you can't have that. So it's like, so what becomes a system to do aircraft deconfliction? There's a lot of, again, there's a lot of nuances that goes into building something like DoorDash Air. And again, it's not just getting a drone just to fly.

1:48:29That's like the easy part. It's how do you build kind of the engine system, actually commercialize drone delivery, manage the fleet, handle pickup, drop-off, deconfliction, merchant loading, routing. which areas, what orders are good for drones, et cetera. It's that whole system. And honestly, that's probably more of what we've built as part of DoorDash here. In addition to, of course, we've got to build the aircraft as well to get our FAA Part 135 certification.

1:48:55Amjad Masad:Tell me the story of DoorDash's original go-to-market, your selection of markets, because you took a pretty contrarian stance, if I remember. And then I want to know about if you're thinking of applying that same philosophy to the rollout of DoorDash Air. Yeah, I mean, we started DoorDash 13 years ago in Palo Alto. It was literally a Stanford food delivery project. It was called paloaltodelivery.com back then. Eight PDFs and a Google Voice phone number. We're delivering out of our own cars. like Tony had a Honda Accord who were just driving around delivering orange hummus. So we've definitely come a long way, but I think the principle remains the same.

1:49:42It always starts. I think this is a common trap a lot of these companies make is instead of saying, oh, let's just build something cool, a cool technology for the sake of it, you always have to start with, what's the use case? What's the customer use case? What do these deliveries look like? Especially with DoorDash, I think, again, people kind of have this misconception that delivery is very nuanced. It's not like we do over three billion deliveries a day. It's not like you just, all three billion deliveries look different. You don't just plop the drones.

1:50:16Amjad Masad:That number is so mind-blowing. It's crazy. But specifically, I seem to remember, I don't know if it was investors or just commentators, but people were saying, it is crazy that DoorDash started in a suburb. Everyone assumed that delivery services and like Uber, for example, would start in like the highest density because it's the lowest distance to go. It worked out. What is unique about where DoorDash Air you think might be successful? Because people might say San Francisco, they're techies. They might say New York. But there's different considerations around tall buildings and regulations. Like where should we see this flourish early?

1:50:57Amjad Masad:Where's the last place? it's going to go. Yeah. I mean, it's actually, I mean, in a way it's kind of similar to what I like. DoorDash thrived in the suburbs and I see kind of see the same roadmap here of drones. It's like, again, you start with the use case where the delivery is happening. And does this use case fit into our form factor? And turns out drones are do really well in suburbs because, um, uh, one, you can travel, you know, like it's, it's great for deliveries where things are further out, where perhaps there's not a straight line you can just get to, or maybe more rural areas where it's less desirable for human dashers to take an order.

1:51:32And also, of course, drones don't have to sit through stoplights and things like that. And then, of course, single-family homes and suburbs are the perfect use case for dropping off the drone package right in front of our front porch or backyard. So, again, I think you always want to start with what the use case is and kind of figure out, okay, these deliveries are really good for drone deliveries, but then these deliveries are really good for our dot robots. And then the remaining maybe is a complicated grocery order where you have to go up steps or high rises. You still want humans to do that.

1:52:09So, again, it's all about picking and choosing. There's no two deliveries across our three billion deliveries that look the same. And it's all about how do you build kind of this multimodal system, right? And that's kind of the future we believe in is kind of this multimodal platform. What does range look like for DoorDash Air over time? Like if I have a favorite restaurant that's 30 miles away, am I going to be able to get that delivered hot? Yeah, maybe one day. I mean, but so far, like most of our deliveries tend to fall between kind of the three to six miles, maybe up to 10 miles. And if you can kind of get a coffee delivered in under 15 minutes, when before it might have taken 45 minutes or an hour, that would be a killer use case.

1:52:58Again, it's like, what are the use cases we can unlock that is possible with drones that you couldn't do with someone that's in a car?

1:53:06Amjad Masad:You're thinking about ordering French laundry to Malibu? Is that what you're trying to do, Juri? i'm actually looking forward to getting to the 500 mile range yes exactly exactly i want you to break the sound barrier yeah what i'm asking for a little bit time i'm sure you'll get there well congratulations yeah really really cool thank you so much time to come chat with us have a great rest of your day congratulations we'll talk to you soon cheers goodbye let me tell you about crowdstrike your business is ai their business is securing it crowdstrike secures ai and stops breaches and we got amjad massad from replet the ceo the founder you know him you love him he's been on the show multiple times and he's back how you doing look at that's what we got on the shirt oh there you go thank you wow royalty that's clapped that's uh that's vintage that's vented thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us my pleasure i haven't seen you in a while it's been way too long yeah i mean we went to your office we recorded an episode in your Most people don't know this probably because it was just a blank wall in the background.

1:54:10Amjad Masad:But we recorded an episode in your office, and we didn't actually get you on the show that day because we were just hanging out. But I'm so glad that we have you here. Catch us up to speed on what's happening in Replit World, the new launches, the AI-powered creative suite. And then I have a million other questions to ask you. Awesome. Yeah, so a few things are happening. One is you might have seen we signed this big letter with NVIDIA and Microsoft around open models. We're really excited about open models. Look, for two years, Anthropic was the undisputed king of coding agents. And right now, actually, it's not just GPT that's caught up, but also the open source models.

1:54:52Kami K3 is an amazing model. It's at maybe quarter the price, sometimes even better. and it's also a fantastic design model. So we have this new, what's that?

1:55:04Amjad Masad:I saw the Arena leaderboard. We were talking to Joe Wiesenthal about this an hour ago that Kimmy K3 really outperformed spiky on front end, which is, we were talking about how it changes the conversation because if it's spiked on bioweapon development, that would be a different conversation. But if we wanted to spike anywhere, front end is probably a good place for it to spike. Absolutely. It generates beautiful aesthetics. It's the first model that I see that is actually trying to reason about design. If you read the traces, that's the cool thing about open models. They kind of show you the traces now.

1:55:40Those models don't show you the traces anymore. or things about page structure and layout and aesthetics and things like that. And so RepliDesign, for one, is the first product on the market that's purely multi-model. We kind of, we evaled every model on the first of the earth. Some of them are good at SVG, others are good at animation, others are good at CSS. And so we created an environment that brings up the best of these models. You can also select the model you like. You want to design purely with Kimi? Go ahead and do that. And so there's no other place on the internet where you could do that.

1:56:15And kind of the motivation behind that is we've been on a now multi-year crusade against slop. We don't want to be purveyors of slop on the internet, right? I mean, we're all inundated with tech slop. I mean, LinkedIn is sort of unusable at this point. But also all the apps kind of look the same. That's good because I haven't logged in in months. Yeah, it's not worth it, honestly. and so we're like okay how can we make it so that look we think people largely have taste it's hard for them to express how they want designs to look and so we came up with this concept we're calling ambient intelligence where you can design by point and click and the way that happens is you sort of we we well first of all we give you a mood board we integrated with mobbin It's typically a paid service.

1:57:08We're providing it for free. And so you can find inspirations from around the internet, from the best UI UX websites and landing pages. You can drag and drop them into the canvas. Then when you click on an artifact on the canvas, it gives you options to continue the design. It's like, let's design another page. Let's look at different vibes. Let's generate different variations. And so I'm someone who I think I have a good taste. I know what looks beautiful, but I can't express it. I can't say it should be brutal style or whatever. I don't have the language. And so by just pointing and clicking, I'm arriving at really cool designs.

1:57:44Like I'm working with an architect in our new office. I kind of know intuitively what I want my office to look like, but I can't go in Pinterest and search or whatever. So I went to Replet, put an initial prompt for things I like. It created kind of a mood board I like, point to click, point to click. An hour later, I have something that exactly that I would like. I would never in 100 years be able to express it. So it's really for the first time. It's designed for non-designers. Sometimes you don't have words for it, but you also just need to see every possible direction, and then you can really hone in.

1:58:21To me, that's the – it's so crazy to me. I used to go when I was like a teenager, I'd go on the freelance platforms and I'd do like a$5 project to make a logo. And I'd have a bunch of people do it. I'd spend whatever. I'd spend$25,$30 on it. And I was so excited to get all these different kind of variations. And now it's actually as simple as a single prompt. You can just put in the prompt, make me 30 versions. You know, don't just make a logo. Make 30 versions of the logo. Yeah. It's not even a prompt. It's two clicks on Replit. We talk a lot internally about the post-prompting world. I think we're entering a period where prompting is no longer needed.

1:59:07Some people will still do it. But it's not just in design. I'm sure you're kind of following the narrative around loops where you specify a high-level intent and then agents prompt other agents. And so this is something we're increasingly focused on because, again, people are really not good at prompting. It is like we went from coding, which is a very low-level kind of task, to prompting higher level, but it's still somewhat low-level from how people think. The way people think is they specify an intent. Like I want my sales leads to get responses in five minutes. Sure. I don't want to say I want the routing to be that way, and that way agents should be able to figure it out.

1:59:55Yeah. How are you thinking about it? John wanted like a large kind of lever, like a slot machine, to not have to prompt anymore. Just pull the lever, you know? Yes. If you could use that to start a new loop, that would be a very satisfying user experience. How are you thinking about it? It'll be like these Vegas casinos. Yeah, exactly.

2:00:15Amjad Masad:That's a good game. How are you thinking about game development? There's been some very impressive web-based games. There's been some acceleration in what I'm seeing on Steam with little niche games. And it feels like that's a place where you're particularly just well set up. And I feel like a lot of, I don't want to characterize the Repli community too precisely because it's huge, but it feels like there's a lot of folks who want to build a business. They go to Reddit. They want to build a tool. They go to Repli. if they want to build a game, they might be going there too. They probably already are, but it feels like that's the next thing to really fall, really get polished, really get deployed into the mobile app stores, into Unreal Engine.

2:01:03Amjad Masad:And there's more harness there and partnerships that I could imagine you creating a really amazing product around. Yeah, I will say... And last week has been a huge week for AI for game development, right? I mean, for a long time, we actually spent some time about a year and a half ago building a game dev stack, which still exists in Replic, but it wasn't very good. The models were really bad at 3D reasoning. Sure. And I think between Kimi K3, Opus 5 now, they're starting to actually be good at 3D. And so it's something that we're paying attention to. There's actually already a large community of people who do a lot of 3D and games things on Replit.

2:01:50We recently launched a CAD integration so you can make real physical products. And we actually have some folks in the office that designed something on Replit and actually went and produced it. And so it's not just games. I think it'll start affecting robotics. It'll start affecting kind of physical industrial design. And so it's a very exciting time, and we're paying attention to that.

2:02:14Amjad Masad:What's been the biggest source of growth for you this year? There's a lot of companies that are doing direct response advertising, influencer marketing, channel partnerships. There's so many different ways, just SEO, GEO. What stuck out to you as a particularly valuable marketing strategy that's grown the platform? We do all of the above. I think we have one of the best performing UGC ads right now. I don't know if you saw that, but we have a bunch of videos where people – there's one that's really going viral right now where typically a woman is getting an app from Replit, like a Replit built app about asking her ad on a date.

2:03:04Oh, I think I have seen this.

2:03:06Amjad Masad:Yeah. Yeah, 25 million views and all of that. And now a lot of our competitors are copying it. But the biggest source of growth has been enterprise. Interesting. And I think Repl.it differentiates in many ways. But one of the ways we differentiate is because we've been building the platform for a long time, we actually have a really deep stack. When you buy Replit, you get a hosting environment, deployment environment, security agent. You get admin controls. You get all this enterprise stuff. And we've been growing really fast in enterprise because vibe coding has been kind of proven out. And now we've went from kind of the consumer excitement that happened last year and now real adoption in enterprise affecting real impact on how people actually work.

2:03:59And the really cool thing is, when we talk to our enterprise customers, it's like this is the most impactful tool, more so than the co-works of the world where you're doing the same thing. You're sitting in Excel or whatever. It's saving you 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there. This is actually automating entire workflows where it's like I used to do this for 20 hours a week. Now I built an app and I do it for zero hours a week. And so you can automate entire work. And we have a bunch of products and launches coming up around this idea of loops and really automating work coming soon. And so enterprise has been the largest growing segment for us.

2:04:44We're still growing consumer, prosumer, and all of that.

2:04:46Amjad Masad:Are enterprises asking you to sort of act as a de facto router? Because you're model agnostic and you understand the different pros and cons, there's a world where if I have a workforce that's pretty deeply integrated into the Replit ecosystem, I could either go to you or maybe even enforce a rule that says, hey, for front end, we're using Kimi because it's cheaper and this meets our standards. So at this company, we want you to... They're asking for that. Okay. And they're asking for that granular control on a user and a group level. So I want my designers to be on Kimmy. I want my front end to be on that.

2:05:27They want that deeper controls. And what we're seeing from enterprise customers is that they're saying, like, look, I know the big AI labs are trying to lock me into these big contracts where I'm just using them. And there's this whole token maxing thing that was happening and everyone was sort of burnt by it. And there's like really deep mistrust because also a lot of the big AI products don't put guardrails around their product. And so a lot of employees, you have instances where employees are spending, like one employee could spend like$10 ,000,$20 ,000 a week, like a month doing that. And so they're asking us for controls on models, on spend, for routing.

2:06:12but also I think more importantly is I think the guardrails that we build into Replit. So when you're doing design, you're in design mode. The agent is a designer. It doesn't go off, veer off and do a lot of random things. When you're building an app, we have the guardrails around building apps. And even with that model routing, Replit is a lot more outcome focused and actually cheaper. And we see a lot of companies now ripping out, say, Claude. They gave everyone Claude, right? And they're like, okay, my engineers are great at it. But actually, people in legal and finance, they're burning tokens for no reason.

2:06:55So let me implement Replit and let them be focused on a certain task.

2:07:00Amjad Masad:Yeah. There's a remarkable story in the chat. Somebody in the chat says that two years ago, they were$50 ,000 in debt. They would meet business owners at restaurants and build them products in real time with Replit, and that got them out of crushing debt. I'm sure you hear those stories all the time. White pill. Yeah, total white pill. Thank you for your service. What advice do you have for young people who are nervous about the job market, AI? How can they take advantage? Look, the AI narrative has been totally warped. Like the politicians, just the discussion and debate in our country has been about job loss.

2:07:41It's been about spend. It's been about all this stuff. Stories like this, someone who was$50 ,000 in debt discovered a droplet and got out of debt and perhaps is making more money than that. Those stories are not getting told. And I understand negative headlines get more attention. I think there's a perverse incentive for some of the players in this space to generate the negative headlines because you can create regulations coming out of that. And we know the story of regulatory capture that's been happening. It's a story as old as capitalism, right? And so kind of my advice to people is kind of a first of all mindset shift.

2:08:23AI is incredibly empowering. Look, even for me, you could say, oh, it's easy for you to say. You've been always like a technical programmer guy. I've never trained a machine learning model. Now I'm training models with Replit. I'm going to Replit agent. I actually trained a chess model that's on its way to become the best chess LLM model. It's actually already beating state-of-the-art GPT models and these kind of models. And so I feel huge empowerment. And to me, it's like, fuck, there's nothing I could not do. Like I can, I was thinking like this math thing that's happening. I've never done math.

2:08:57I want to go find some proofs. It was like bio. Conjecture, Max. Conjecture, Max. Do you know there's this video where PDD, I guess, you know, he did not be named now, but there's this video where he closes the deal. He's on the phone. He closes the deal. He hangs up the phone. And he's like, what can't you do? I can do. And he gets exposed for his work. Yeah, it's unfortunate that he is, that is him in the video because it's a great video. It's a great video. It's a great video. And I feel the same way with AI. It's like, what's out there? Let me go do it. The world is your oyster. I think that mindset is important.

2:09:45Amjad Masad:I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking it down. Awesome to see you. Always great seeing you. Good to see you guys. Always crushing. Have a good rest of your day. Great to see you, dude. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about that. Someone should use AI to take that video of he who shall not be named and put Amjad in the video. That might be worse. I don't know. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. That, your soundboard is fantastic today. We have Adam Cohen from Weave, the co-founder and CEO, coming on the show with an amazing fundraising news.

2:10:26Amjad Masad:Adam, how are you doing? Good. We're in good spirits. We're in good spirits. Yeah, we signed with Standard, so we're all happy. What's behind you? What's behind you? You got a gong? Whoa, what do you got there? The gongs are going viral. Why don't you guys hit it in unison? Yes, tell us. How much did you raise? We raised$13.5 million, thanks to Standard.

2:10:50Amjad Masad:Congratulations. All right, quick history on the company. Please. And yeah, then we can get more into the round and where you're going. Yeah, so we started this company just under two years ago. We went through YC at the start of last year. The idea originally would just measure software engineering. Very quickly, this turned into measuring AI because that kind of took over. and what we realized ahead of the curve we've always kind of been working with the token maxers of the world is figuring out once Opus 4748 came out people realized they didn't need the best models for every task and specifically for coding this is like 80 % of AI spend so we built the world's best prompt router it reads your prompt and actually shifts it to the right model at the cheapest cost and this is what Standard's super excited about and we are starting to go crazy with Who do you sell to?

2:11:44Amjad Masad:Do you sell to the CEO, the CFO, the CTO? Yeah, we sell to the CTO. CFOs, CEOs obviously love us, but we're only focused on engineering. We think that's still the majority of where AI spend is happening. So we're just focused on every engineering task as opposed to a lot of the other routers are trying to do some other things or either app-level routing or just code routing. Okay, and then how do you differentiate against the router? Break that down. app level routing that's somebody that's integrating a router into their product so that behind the scenes, it's just deciding it for the user. This is more of purely this sort of enterprise focus where teams are doing various tasks or they have agents running and you're sitting in between them and the models to run all of those processes as efficiently as possible.

2:12:40yeah that's exactly like the app level routing for us what we're doing is like anybody using cloud code or codex plugs in our router it sits directly in their current workflow adds like next to no latency and it will route to whatever the most cost-efficient model is so we host all the open source models in the u.s they prompt it routes to the right spot and they save up to

2:13:02Amjad Masad:well some companies up to 80 that's amazing uh how what is a customer acquisition like is this person to person at the highest level, you're going after enterprise CTOs. So you're meeting them, talking to them, or is there a self-serve option for small businesses? Because it feels like a lot of small businesses, they might be starting to use AI, starting to use coding, but a lot of them are on a$200 plan. They're getting great value. They're not really in the token maxing is going to make or break my business this quarter. Exactly, yeah. So all the max plans, people still don't care that much.

2:13:40We have some startups spending$5,$10K per engineer per month. We're in that bucket. But startups still don't care that much. So it's mostly enterprises that we're targeting. We work with developer experience or developer productivity teams. They're kind of owning this now, the optimization layer. Sure, sure. Is it fair to say that something like 15 minutes could save you up to 20 % on your token bill? Absolutely. What's that tagline?

2:14:07Amjad Masad:Is that Geico or something? Yeah. Geico. Sorry. Bad joke. Bad joke. Couldn't help myself. So what does your actual team look like? Are you building in San Francisco post YC? Ours. It's the only way for what we're doing. Yeah, we're all in person. 996 kind of feel here. Team's really fired up. They all want to join the video, but we weren't sure how far to push this. they can come say they can just come say hi if they're if they're hanging out why not but what what what nine nine it's not even enough you don't you're not even that differentiated if you're doing nine nine six these days i feel like there's an opportunity there's there's you've got companies that are you know putting in seven sometimes eight eight days a week yeah there you go there you go that's why you have to jump out of a plane to attract talent this is uh the best part of the video is we've had like an influx of people um that are interested uh i think just because I did my fears of acting was scarier than the, uh, uh, jumping out of a plane.

2:15:07Amjad Masad:Yeah. I talked to, I heard one entrepreneur who said he changed and manipulated time. He has, he every day is three days. His first day goes from 6am to noon. His second day goes from noon to 6pm. Then he works a third day from 6pm stack that up over, over a day. Yeah. He's going to crush you or a month. Yeah. Yeah. And he's not crazy for saying it. You're crazy. sorry we're having we're having too much fun it feels feel feeling like a friday over here um what are you where are you where are you going from here are you going to keep the team small or yeah so there's about 16 of us um we are hiring very aggressively uh yeah we need some like incredible uh engineers and aes to just scale up uh we are swamped um i feel bad our kind of like campaign to our account executive and to our go-to-market team is death to Jerry.

2:15:59Jerry's our AE and he is too busy with too many meetings. So we want to make him as tired as possible. And now we need a second.

2:16:06Amjad Masad:Yeah. Is there going to be a light long tail demand for fine tuning of, of open source models from your customer base? Like if they're doing something really routine, typically that's been the domain of like the Neo Labs. And I don't know if that's the right term for your company, but it feels like you could slide there over time. Is that an ambition? Absolutely. So actually we already have like a early version of this where you can give feedback in the router to the router based on what model you're choosing or what model it chooses. You just easily pass feedback and it's going to learn from this.

2:16:42So we do this both as like a company, we have RL built in, but now we're exploring what this looks like at a per org basis.

2:16:49Amjad Masad:Yeah. So if the company is just printing money, they can be like, when I ask for the weather, I do want you to use the frontier intelligence for that. No, that's probably the default thing is like, you know, people are just hammering off prompts for everything. Routing around the obvious solutions is the benefit. Makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations. Don't break that gong all too soon. You got to warm them up. We've learned this the hard way. Every time we hit our gong, somebody comments and says, you didn't warm it up. warm it up you didn't warm it up but so far may the gong so good for us ring loud and often for your business good luck and thank you so much for coming on the show to break it down great to meet you have a great rest of your day uh let me tell you about shopify shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business lets you sell in seconds online in store on mobile on social on marketplaces and now with ai agents uh big news out of the fed uh the fed holds rate steady but Three officials voted for a rate increase.

2:17:45Amjad Masad:The rate has been unchanged in this July meeting. The split shows pressure building inside the central bank to act on inflation two months after Chairman Kevin Walsh took over. And the Dow skids 1 ,100 points as investors worry about Fed next steps. They're thinking that there might be a rate hike in reaction to inflation, of course, somewhat driven by energy prices, oil prices. oil is spiking again and so lots of tricky news for the global economy but fortunately the economy chugs on and the economy is strong so i believe in it i believe in it too never never black pill dorkesh patel certainly not black pilling gavin baker uh quote tweeted dorkesh's uh post that predicted uh lab revenues and the trillions very shortly uh gavin baker says i see of a series of fairly wild thoughts from Dwarkesh.

2:18:42Amjad Masad:I thought I was bullish, but even I am not assuming that the price to rent compute continues to go up. I will say that I am in Silicon Valley this week and Dwarkesh is capturing the zeitgeist. Net-net public markets would probably be trading differently if they saw the OpenAI, Anthropic, GrokCursor, and open source numbers over the last six weeks, because everything is growing. There's so much horse race around, oh, open source is going to come and grow. And it's like, well, sometimes open source comes and grows and everything else grows too. And that's what we've seen throughout the whole deep seek saga when the lab revenues grew a ton, even though open source was big.

2:19:18Amjad Masad:Yeah. There's a comment here that I think is on the nose. Jay Capital says, timeline is very interesting. All private AI companies have their best six weeks while retail AI slash semis have their worst six weeks. Very, very interesting. Disconnect there. Yeah. I mean, one of them, SK Hynix,$64 billion in quarterly profit. It was a disappointment for chip investors and SK Hynix fell 10 % despite record results powered by the AI boom. The profit increase was incredible. I think they grew profit over 500%, something like that. And still the stock traded down because expectations are so high, everything's priced to perfection.

2:20:00Amjad Masad:In other news, HBO Max is launching HBO Max shorts for those who don't have the attention span to watch an episode of TV. It's a mobile feature designed for users to watch iconic and memorial scenes from the HBO library in a vertical and scrollable feed. This is already happening on Instagram and TikTok. You see a lot of movie clips, just great moments. And it actually is great content, so I can understand why they're trying to own a piece of that. You've got to get the Jeffrey Katzenberg apology form. Oh, for sure. Yeah, for sure. But yeah, High Yield Harry captures it pretty well. watching society become too cooked even to watch TV episode.

2:20:38Amjad Masad:And this is from Idiocracy. Mike Judge is one of his best works. The creator of HBO's Silicon Valley, actually, who will now be available in short form because you will be able to watch short clips from HBO's Silicon Valley on HBO Max Shorts. You'll be able to see the, I don't know, all the iconic moments from Silicon Valley when they're hanging out on the roof of Google or whatever the Google equivalent is, Gavin Belson's company. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com.

2:21:18Amjad Masad:We'll see you tomorrow. Love you. Goodbye. That's the outro. Goodbye.