Zuck’s AI Vision, Celebs Are Dating Private Equity Guys, AI Agent Hacks Gym | Diet TBPN

0:02John Coogan:Big, big news. Mark Zuckerberg dropped a blog post. Also, I mean, the bigger news is that they open-sourced already one model and they're planning to open-source Muse Spark 1.2. That's big. But the blog post lays out his AI vision and we should go through it. Meta was sort of set up to be and also ran in the AI race. Like the Lama project stalled out. Jan LeCun exited. their biggest model behemoth never shipped which was ironic because in the bible behemoth is this untamable land creature and of course it was just the model was too big to be tamed to be released and it was like nominative determinism in action happens a lot in tech unfortunately but they also turned over the entire team and zuck said i'm not quitting i'm not out of the game i'm still in i'm all in yeah and i'm raising debt equity doing all sorts of deals uh making things happen making big offers to AI researchers, rebuilding the team, bringing in Alex Wang, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, bunch of heavy hitters.

0:59John Coogan:And they already build massive data centers. They have a huge surface area to distribute AI, consumer experiences. If they come up with new ones, they have billions of users that can put some, hey, try this thing. And maybe they'll get a bunch of users from it, if it's good. Semi-Analysis also just one month ago laid out a much more detailed bull case for MSLs in particular. It was interesting because I was always optimistic about, okay, they have a lot of data from Instagram. They have a lot of images. They'll do a great image model. The image editing will be the best in class. They can finally kill CapCut with their edits app, which is great.

1:35John Coogan:And when I think about you're taking an image, you're taking a video, you have a bunch of videos from a trip. You want to edit all that together for some Instagram story or Instagram reel. reels editing is its own skill its own talent it's not available to everyone a lot of like family friends of mine will use instagram and they'll just post a picture on stories they're not doing edited cinematic reels but with ai you potentially get someone from oh you took a bunch of video some of it's horizontal some of it's vertical some of it's sort of cropped wrong some of it's some brain wrap for you you can just throw it right here in this trough yes adding those programmatically uh no you actually could you actually could um and so and so i was optimistic about that and then obviously we talked to eric suford about uh just the gem model and how ai can immediately move the needle on ad monetization targeting all of that so there were lots of reasons to be optimistic semi-analysis laid out this more detailed bulk case and they said that there was this interesting detail that maybe was getting missed which was that by uh recording the screens of every meta employee, which is very controversial and bold, but actually ripping that bandaid off and just saying, hey, we're an AI training company now, and everyone's going to be recording their screens and their flows and how all their work gets done.

2:52John Coogan:They basically got a frontier leading AI data labeling company for free. I mean, they took a PR hit for it, had to answer some questions. But in general, the volume of tasks, the volume of quality data that's coming from that workforce now is on the order of a scale, Mercore, Handshake, et cetera, Surge. And so they just get that more or less for free. Obviously, Meta's lawyers are great. Meta's researchers are great. Meta's finance team is great. So if you're getting all of that, it's equivalent to hiring a really talented person to do a training task. Yes, yes and no. I think a lot of the data that the Surges and Mercores are creating is much more specialized.

3:37and I think there's just a lot of noise coming out of that data. They also have like rolled some or maybe most of the program back.

3:44John Coogan:I think there was so much pushback. You can pause it for 15 seconds once a day. I think you can pause it for like half an hour, an hour, if you want to go get a nice scroll in at work. But, I mean, that's on brand. If you're like, yeah, I was scrolling reels at work at Meta. Testing. I was hunting for bugs. Yeah. Your Honor. For sure, for sure. But, yeah, I think there are some employees who are just fully excluded because they work on proprietary things. They don't want leaking into the training data whatsoever. There's a whole bunch of nuance there. There's these funny, like, leaked messages from Boz being like, if you're saving time with AI, don't take more vacation days.

4:22John Coogan:Like, go ask your parents. What was that line? Like, ask your parents if it's a good strategy every time you talk to your boss to ask for more time off. It's a good point. So it was a really good point. It's a really good point. That's a really good point, but the timing was funny because over the weekend, Zuck had a UFC fighter in Tahoe. And they're just like on this like, you know, on water octagon. Okay. You can tell there's like, you know, all of Zuck's like security boats around it. And they're just like fighting, like, you know, wrestling or whatever. Let's pull this up. Zuck busy fighting with Marab in Lake Tahoe while his execs tell employees not to take vacations thanks to AI.

4:56I think I've seen enough after this. I think he's ready for the octagon.

5:00John Coogan:He's looking good. What are those leg braces that you got on? Is that for striking or kicking? They're effectively gloves for your knees. Oh, okay. So you don't get your shins bashed up or something? Yeah, you don't. Okay, that's cool. Anyway, so following up on the op-ed that Mark Zuckerberg dropped in the paywall in Wall Street Journal section, which is a little bit ironic because he's saying it's for everyone. Yeah, I will be abundant and free except for this article. Well, now you can go read a more lengthy version of his thesis for free, not paywalled, on Meta's corporate blog, effectively.

5:33John Coogan:I don't even think you need to log into any Facebook property to get access to this. But it's a 6 ,500-word encyclical, the Wall Street Journal called it, like it's a papal bull, on the AI future. High-level AI, it's for everyone. Turns out it's for everyone. Whoa. That's what he's saying. But it's good. It's an anti-permanent underclass message, which is good from a comms perspective to lay out a more optimistic philosophy here. And it also seems to be borne out by the data in the short term. You're not seeing any crazy displacements in the economy. And so this comes from a place of strength that's backed up.

6:12John Coogan:And it's also just a very optimistic, correct version of the piece. He takes a shot at fear-based marketing early on in the piece. He says, still, it's surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. The notion that AI is so dangerous that the only safe path is an extreme concentration of power seems inherently problematic. Historically, hoping that an absolute power will benevolently provide for humanity if sufficiently enlightened has not led us to safe or positive outcomes.

6:53John Coogan:What do you think? Do you want to read a little bit more before I deal? Well, so I mean, my take on that was basically that, so he's framing this as, I don't understand why anyone who believes in AI would try and become like the emperor and the dictator of AI. I understand it. It's funny that he's like sort of playing dumb here because extreme concentration of power is awesome if you're the one that has the power. Like I don't see, you have to imagine that most dictators living in other countries aren't like, oh, I would kill just to be like a normal American citizen. No, it's like, yeah, it sucks for the citizenry.

7:30Also, this is coming from a guy who is effectively a monopoly, more like a duopoly, and has enjoyed the benefits of extreme concentration of at least users and social media activity. I came away from this.

7:48John Coogan:First, there are three very concrete proposals that I think are good, and then we can go into what's downstream of it. So there's some hand-wavy parts about the future and how things will align in the future that are sort of just guesses about how the future will play out, in my opinion. But there's some really solid concrete proposals in here that I thought were awesome. One, he calls out that in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta is building a large data center, teachers received a$50 ,000 bonus this year because of the increased tax revenue from their investment there. The superintendent told Metta that teachers are now moving there from across the country, and he believes it will become one of the nation's best school districts.

8:30John Coogan:There's been a lot of skepticism about money actually flowing from AI companies to citizens because a lot of times money just goes into the government, and then it gets squirreled away into weird projects that different developers can pull from, and the money just sort of disappears. This feels like a pretty linear track from like data center built dollars in citizens' pockets. That's very, very good. I like how that played out. He also said that Meta's data centers are designed to be among the most water efficient in the world. We are committing to being water positive, which is a frame like a term that I hadn't heard before, but I think is a good one.

9:06John Coogan:So what that means is they will restore more water than they use in the watersheds that they operate. and the goal is by 2030 to be net water positive. And in areas with high water stress, the goal is to restore 2 % of the water that they use. And so I think that's good. Obviously, there's been a lot of, it's been a bit of a quagmire on the water issue because there was that calculation error that people got way wrong. They thought the data centers were using way more water than they were. And so a lot of tech people just sort of wrote it off as like, ah, I don't even need to address it because it's misinformation.

9:39John Coogan:But of course, it's a resource. It's important to address it appropriately. And I think this messaging does a good job of laying out like, okay, yes, like it might not be that much of an issue. But if it's not that much of an issue, then you can deal with it pretty easily. And we're going to deal with it. So here's our plan. On electricity, they were a little bit less, a little bit softer. The language is just we help keep electricity prices low by building our own energy generating infrastructure wherever we invest. This ensures that not only are we consuming energy that could, we are not consuming energy that could have gone to the local communities, but in some cases we even supply a surplus of low-cost energy back to the communities.

10:19John Coogan:We think this is an important investment principle for sustainability. In some cases, it's doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Ideally, you would wind up, I think a lot of people would want to see like, oh, yes, in every case, when you build a data center, you bring enough power that the price of energy does not increase in the local community. But good direction. He does call out nuclear energy in a really interesting way. He shares this stat. Countries like China are bringing online one gigawatt of nuclear capacity every other week, which is insane. And he says, so we'll need to accelerate building of both energy and data centers to remain competitive.

10:58John Coogan:I thought this was a good framing and good reminder of how slow we are because we bring on one gigawatt of nuclear energy like every couple decades and they're doing it like every two weeks. Good to see that. And then also Meta's been spending on nuclear power, making commitments. All of them are long dated. There's a lot of regulatory hurdles, but he is putting his money where his mouth is in that regard, which I thought was good. And then of course the news is also paired with some real action from Meta. They're opening the weights of Muse Glimmer, a 30 billion parameter dense model that can run locally, along with a plan to release the weights to Muse Spark 1.2.

11:37John Coogan:Makes sense from a business perspective, I think, to ramp adoption. There was a lot that was going on, like the Lama ecosystem, and you could imagine that you download the weights to Muse Spark 1.2, fine tune it, you're pretty happy. You're like, okay, yeah, let me get on the API plan as well. and also you can imagine that there's businesses that want to cut costs but don't want to use a foreign model that definitely exists for a variety of reasons so this is a good option there and then it also just disentangles the geopolitical discussion from the safety discussion so if you're talking to someone who has a strong opinion about open source one way or the other you can you can just divide the discussion into okay how do you feel about mu spark 1.2 is that too dangerous to release is this a safety issue because it shouldn't be a distillation issue and and it shouldn't be a geopolitical issue.

12:27John Coogan:So you can narrow it down just to, are you okay with strong, powerful AI being in the hands of just random people? Anyway. I think a lot of the stuff in here is great and directionally correct. I think it was good that they tried to ground it in some concrete actions. It seems like they've chosen to position him as the the pick me ai uh lab leader right uh he's saying uh if you're not familiar pick me is an internet slang term for someone who tries too hard to get validation attention or approval and uh that is certainly what he's doing i think there's an incredible irony that like he i think on friday of last week is having to uh uh go through this like basically a billion dollar settlement for causing harm at scale with all of their other products.

13:22And then ultimately, I still don't think that he has, or like MSL has any type of cohesive vision or strategy, right? They were doing open source.

13:35John Coogan:We were excited with the Manus thing. We were like, oh, this makes sense. There's like you deploy an agent within your Instagram account. There's a lot that you could do there, but that never really came to fruition. So they were doing open source, then they're getting cooked, and then they stop, and then now they're back. And the first thing they released was Meta Vibes, which is kind of what you would expect them to release, but obviously got a horrible reaction. Wasn't world positive at all. Wasn't personal super intelligence. It was slop intelligence. Very much too soon, I think, for Mark to be the good guy, like tech leader, where I just don't think he has people's...

14:13His brand got so much better over the last few years. He was just doing the UFC thing and wakeboarding and all that kind of stuff, but it's too early to be trying to parlay that into, like, I can be trusted with being... Do you think he needs to put points on the board

14:28John Coogan:or do you think he needs to move the needle before he can actually take a victory lap here? I think he's trying to move the needle. He needs to be more focused on getting some points on the board. Because open sourcing a model that isn't a frontier model is just like, okay. I don't, like knowing how commercial this team is, I don't think they would open source or make the model open weights if they felt like there was going to be exceptional demand for it. I think overall, like Mark standing up and saying like, hey, I want to be the leader of world positive AI probably hurts AI's public perception even more.

15:07Yeah, he's been called by Bernie Sanders now, right?

15:09John Coogan:He was included in that? Yeah, yeah, which is amazing for Meta, MSL, to be included in that group. Like you would think that Elon and DeepMind were not included. Wait, Elon wasn't so bad. That was just because there were the three cyber incidents. Oh, okay. And so, I mean, people have been, you know, alleging that maybe the Meta, you know, cyber incident was maybe, you know, somewhat not as real as other ones. Yeah. I think he has no confidence from the market on the strategy. He still has not actually explained what their product vision is. They're coming out with a coding harness. They're coming out with coding models.

15:52They're also doing open source. There's whispers of them getting into becoming a neocloud. I can see why shareholders and employees just continue to be deeply frustrated.

16:06John Coogan:Yeah, the coding harness thing would be, it feels like it would be much more believable from Microsoft. Like, we own GitHub. We were first in GitHub Copilot. Yeah, Nat Friedman's not here anymore. But we have a really strong relationship with OpenAI for the models and Azure in the enterprise. We are going to make a run at this seriously. And they have a better strategy. I like the strategy more. But it's a really, really crazy pivot to go from social media to the enterprise. Ultimately, it's a lot of words from someone who I don't believe has any real vision or strategy. At least when Dario comes out with an essay, this is someone who is undeniably a visionary, has made a bunch of calls correctly.

16:48And so when he says something, I think it means some. But I think that the product strategy so far just feels like throwing slop at a trough. Maybe. But defend it, John.

17:02John Coogan:Steel man. What is the steel man? I mean, the steel man is the, basically the steel man is like, this could go the deep mind route where they get too, they get a little bit too, there's too much tension between the various corporate organizations. And the nightmare scenario would be like the Reels team at Instagram saying like, we need the compute for Reels and ad monetization. And that putting tension with the researchers. So the researchers are saying, hey, that new data center looks amazing. We want to train some amazing model or we want to do some cheap inference. And the ad team and the Reels team says, hey, we really got to keep the lights on over here.

17:45John Coogan:And so that tension just keeps butting heads against each other and they can't move as smoothly as some of the pure play labs. At the same time, there is, I like this Boz quote about like, you know, Boz recently told employees that any extra time freed up by AI should not be used for vacation. Instead, it should go towards building cooler stuff at Meta. Like, you have so many users, so much data, so many different product surface areas. It's clear that we're not at the end of history in terms of what you can do on your phone, what you can do in these apps. and there are really delightful experiences that we run into all the time.

18:25John Coogan:Like Suno is a really cool consumer product. We have the CEO of Whatnot on. That's seeing a bunch of traction. There are things that you should be able to build faster, leverage the current technology stack more efficiently, and then also add AI features to actually bring those to consumers at scale. When they launched their AI image model, I was like, why can't they just like when you open Instagram say, hey, we've pre-generated a Studio Ghibli version of your latest post or your Instagram profile. Do you want to share on your story? Like those little like product-led growth hacks that would be compute intensive.

19:04John Coogan:You'd have to inference all that. Got a lot of compute. Yeah, you got a lot of compute, but actually get people on board. At the time that there's whispers of selling compute, they're also buying ultra long-term contracts. The social network was formative on all of us. Zuck is a legend in his own way. But it's just like putting this out while it's coming out less than two months ago that you're working on a gambling integration on Instagram. Like, please. There's no strategy. And then the other irony of this, the thing that stood out to me is he said, Still, it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom.

19:40I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that. The AI doom over the last two weeks has been around these loss of control incidents, which are serious and real. And so to stand up there and be like, actually, guys, nothing to worry about. I got this. AI is awesome. The birth rate might be collapsing, and I might have something to do with it, but don't worry about it. Yeah, part of this is like we've met Zuck multiple times. We've had great conversations with him. I like him. I like Boz. I like Adam. I like a lot of people over at MSL.

20:23But this whole strategy continues to confuse. It's deeply unfocused. It's deeply memetic. And it doesn't seem like it's going to get any better anytime soon.

20:36John Coogan:The Wall Street Journal had a huge scoop. This summer's hottest arm candy is a private equity boyfriend. Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Olivia Rodrigo are all hanging out with finance guys. Jordy chimed in on this. It was remarkable. Every single person got Jordy's joke. I thought it was a little like inside baseball and you'd have to have more context to understand it. But it was like this rare, weird scenario where everyone understood that you were joking. Yeah, I didn't get any pushback. There was no pushback. I didn't get called any names. It almost would have been better if there was pushback, but it was just uniform praise for your quote across everything.

21:17Yeah, a lot of people were saying brave. Finally, someone said it. Yeah, so I don't know that there was a... It's like you take a lot of celebrities that are based in New York.

21:25John Coogan:Yeah. At least a few of them are going to end up dating some people in finance. So should we start maybe with what Mr. Wonderful said? He said, if you live in a celebrity bubble, party after party with the same people, the same 25 people, life gets really boring. Yeah. When you end up with a private equity guy, your life gets far more interesting. So he, I don't think, was rage baiting. No. I think he. So maybe that's how some people would have taken my quote out of context. What did I say? The piece centers around. I almost don't want to read that quote out loud, but you should read my quote.

22:04John Coogan:Your quote that burned up the internet. Whether they want to admit it or not, many women have always been attracted to bad boys and risk takers, said Jordy Hayes, co-host of the technology industry talk show, TVPN. I can't think of any archetype of man that fits that description more today than capital allocators that put it all on the line every day in the markets. And I like that your screenshot included the scroll wheel showing that you're hunting around for this. And then so I posted this and I said, I weighed in on one of the defining stories of our time. And so putting such a silly caption above a silly story and a silly quote, I just assumed that it would be quite obvious that it was satire.