Network Effects, AI Costs, and the Future of Consumer Investing with Anish Acharya on The Kevin Rose Show

18:46Anish Acharya:Yeah. Do you buy that? I mean, Boris has said it a few times. Like, we don't write any code on Cloud Code. Like, Cloud Code writes Cloud Code. Right. So I do buy it. And like, how can that not be true? It's your and I lived experience as well, right? Yeah. I just, I wonder if you have a model of that capabilities, if you aren't. like one of the things I've been really impressed about with Anthropic is just their rate of shipping it's like every freaking week something new drops every day I did multiple things yeah and so you have to imagine if you're the first one to have the model that is let's just call it 30-40 % better than what's out there today yeah you have to be like okay let's make our tools like dope as hell incredible as fast as possible of course yes so you turn it internally yes and get all that tooling and just ship it feels like that's what's happening because of the rate of shipping you're an open AI investor I think you're an anthropic investor as well.

19:33Anish Acharya:Okay, so what's your kind of view? I guess you're the most even-handed, having been in both. Well, I mean, I think that OpenAI, listen, they have the... It's hard to count anyone out at this point, because, you know, even Google, they've got their tensor processing units or their self-training model. They've been eerily quiet, and, like, those folks are just sharp as hell. Like, don't fuck with Google. Like, they're going to come back and get you. So I just have a hard time believing there's going to be, at least from someone that's doing software engineering with the models, an allegiance to anyone.

20:07Like I will go to ChatGPT tomorrow or Gemini if it's a better model. I don't care. Like my credit card just transfers to whatever model and then it starts working again, right? Yeah. So on the consumer side, you know, when I talk to family members and people that aren't deep in tech like we are, it's all ChatGPT. Yeah. Because that is the household name. That's right. And I think it does everything that they want it to do. Yeah. And it's not like they're seeing anything and we're like, oh, that co-work feature from Claude is so good. They don't realize that yet.

20:39Anish Acharya:Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You mean they're not using remote control on QR code? Exactly. They're not connecting their phone and leaving their laptop open. Karpathy talked about this this week, and it's so funny because he's like, look, the people who have used ChatGPT in a somewhat cursory way, They're like, I don't know about this AI thing. Maybe it's overhyped. Like, you know, maybe the Instagram audience. Right. They sort of don't quite get it. So I think it's like, and for the ones of us who are really deep and we're using it to make software and we're seeing all the model progress. Right. And we're not talking to each other.

21:08Right. You know? Exactly. Like every time I talk to someone that's not in this space, I try to like red pill them and I sit them down. And I said, let me show you what this can do for you. Right. And then within 20 minutes, they're like, oh my God, I need to be spending more time here. Yes. But it is a lift to get people up to that. I think it's a multi-year lift. We live in a world where we're trying everything, but the average consumer is going to try a couple new things per year, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's interesting. What about model pricing? Like the max that we're seeing these max plans for$200 and we eat all the credits and all of a sudden we're out of credits and people are complaining about that.

21:46Like, do we see a$10 ,000 plan? Do we see a$5 ,000 plan? Yeah.

21:51Anish Acharya:I think in barbells. So I think I'd love your view on this, but it feels like the most powerful models are going to be more expensive than ever. And yet the price of a token on GPT-4-0 is down 100x since the model was released. And what was that, 18 months ago? And when GPT-4-0 was released, it was this incredibly cutting edge. It had this beautiful personality. Like it seemed inconceivable that it would be cheap. And now it's very inexpensive on a per-token basis. Plus you have open source, right? So it feels like there'll be inflationary effects on the edge models. And maybe they'll even be unavailable as APIs.

22:22Anish Acharya:and there'll be huge deflationary effects on everything that's not cutting edge. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think there's, listen, like even when Google announced these models that now run on phones, on device, there are so many instances where a lighter weight model will do most of what you need done. Yeah. And so I love that that exists because there is a ton of things that I'm building right now which are kind of like backfill and data kind of fetching and like just very non-reasoning tasks that six months ago, a year ago, would have cost me thousands of dollars to do what I'm doing.

22:58And now I'm like, oh, that was$12. So I do love that that is happening. I think that the API pricing makes sense. The weird thing for me is, I believe there will be a higher tier, we're already starting to see this, where you can pay per pull request and pay Anthropic to review it with a better, more finely tuned model for those bugs squashing. It is a little bit weird. It is a little bit that Spider-Man point in the Spider-Man situation where like, I coded it for you, but I'm also going to fix the bugs for you.

23:29Anish Acharya:For like$12 a bug. But the, so is the, OpenAI security stuff is actually quite good as well. It's found a bunch of vulnerabilities I would have never found. Amazing. So, yeah, I don't know. But what's up on your... Well, so actually, let me ask you a related question though. When you think about your budget, I'm assuming that you don't have like a ceiling on how much you spend on the models. Right. But how much, if you had to make a trade-off, would you trade off against, say, your entertainment budget? Like, would you skip a movie or a bottle of wine because you wanted to spend the money on tokens?

23:58Anish Acharya:Yes, 100%. Well, but I'm building towards something. Are you, though? How many of your things are important and have to be durable versus are satisfying to work on? 80 % are important and durable. Okay. And the other 20 % are just for fun. Okay. Do you know which is which at the outset? Yes. Okay. Okay. 100%. Well, largely because, like, you know, I step back from my venture role at True Ventures or my investing role there. And because it's too fun to build right now. Like, why not build? And so when I'm tackling a bigger idea, the hope is that hundreds of thousands of people will use said product at the end of the day.

24:30And if it is not that, then it's just going to be a little tiny thing that I think should exist. And I'll put a little bit of time and effort into it. And if there's a thousand people that love it, God bless. Like, at the end of the day, I think we, I don't want to optimize for just financial outcome or usage. I want to optimize for, do I enjoy doing this? Do I enjoy building this product? I've seen some of your vibe-coded stuff. It is largely because you enjoy doing that, right?

24:58Anish Acharya:It's just fun to work on. And that's why I think your language is interesting. You didn't say it's too important of a time. You said it's too fun of a time. Yes. Right? So there's so much beauty in the process right now. And that's why I think that it will eat into what would otherwise be called entertainment budgets. Because we're discovering this part of ourselves that has been asleep. Right. Both as technologists, but even as humans, right? Like when you're a child, nobody tells you, Kevin, you're bad at drawing or you're good at painting. Right. Whatever. You're actually just good at anything you're interested in.

25:25Anish Acharya:And we're able to get back to that place again for the first time in a long time. I know. And it meets you where you're at, too. Yeah. It's so awesome. Like there's the number of things that I now know versus a year ago in terms of like how to fix like faucets and shit. And like the stuff where I'm pointing a chatty patty at, I turn on video mode. I'm like, hey, how do I do this? What does this mean? Yes. And I'm up-leveling my knowledge across an entire spectrum of different things. I've got to tell you this crazy story. So there's a guy that we met, came in and presented to us yesterday named Mike.

25:52Anish Acharya:So Mike is a personal injury attorney who won the Global Anthropic Cloud Code Hackathon, okay? So he started using Cloud Code to solve a bunch of his problems because he's running, he's like a startup guy, sort of running a startup law firm, and he couldn't afford a paralegal. So he used Cloud Code to basically start coding a bunch of, you know, things that would otherwise he'd have to hire someone for. And then he went so deep in the tooling. He came in, he showed us a software he's built. It's extraordinary. It's like what a whole venture-backed SaaS company would otherwise do. He's so deep in it.

26:22Anish Acharya:He's using Whisperflow. He's talking about slash commands. He's like, okay, I've got a slash loop that's always looking for security fixes. And this is not the guy you'd expect, you know? He's like a jujitsu, square jawed, sort of personal injury attorney. So I think there's just, this is my white pill. There's going to be so many beautiful stories of like digital homesteading or something where these unexpected people build these really incredible things based on personal need or interest. Yeah, and I think this is where I had a company in a similar vein where they were spending something like 80K a month on SaaS subscriptions.

26:58And the founder was like, well, I'm good enough to where I can build this in-house. Kind of what I want. A little bit more custom tailored to me. Took him about a month and a half and then he just cut that entire SaaS budget out.

27:10Anish Acharya:So here's my only counterpoint on the kind of SaaS is over thing, which is, yes, conceptually, maybe you could build a CRM. But have you built a CRM? I have, actually. Really? Jesus. All right, fine. Well, I guess SaaS is over then. I was going to say it's so fucking boring to work on all that software. Like, does anyone really want to build it? I wanted a really simple personal CRM, so I just built it. That was a bad example. Okay, fine, fine, fine. Okay, how about payroll? Have you moved payroll? No. Okay, payroll is safe. No, but Richard has over there. He just built some tax accounting software the other day.

27:39Richard, come on. I know. All right. So what else is on your list? I know you had some really spicy, fun topics to get into.

27:47Anish Acharya:Yeah, dude. Well, I wanted to actually get your take on, you know, obviously there's a stuff that happened with Sam's house. There was a bunch of attacks on his house, which is, you know, super tragic because whatever you think of AI politically, like, you know, he's a human running a company who has the best of intentions. What's your kind of view on the conversation we're having as a society about this new technology? I like how OpenAI came out and said we're going to have to heavily tax us and provide some type of safety net fund. And we have to work that into the legislation at some point so that when we do displace all these jobs, which it is coming in my belief, you know, maybe five, seven, ten years from now.

28:25But I believe that we're going to have to have some of that flow back to the public in some way. I think when traditionally, and of course, I'm not answering your question correctly, but traditionally when we talked about 10 years ago, universal basic income, I was like, well, how are they going to fund that? How are we just going to print money to give people money? And now it's clear to me that if the bigs continue to dominate and disrupt and just crush jobs across every single vertical, we're going to need some way for those profits to flow back into everyday consumers so that they are just everyday humans so that they can live and thrive in a world where they might have been displaced from a job loss.

29:11Anish Acharya:You know, it's interesting. So one of my good friends is an executive at Google. And, you know, I talked to him about this and said, hey, how much are you guys actually laying off people? Because you're obviously, you know, you're at the edge of the new models. Plus you have all the TPUs. So presumably they have all the tokens that they want and need internally. And he said, look, we actually haven't laid off anyone. We're just ripping through our backlog. So we're doing like 100x more than we ever did before. So it's interesting the kind of point. A lot of people have made this point on like, hey, where are all the jobs going to be?

29:39Anish Acharya:but I think there's no ceiling on human desire. There's no ceiling on company ambition. And so far we're seeing it as like companies doing more versus, hey, let's do the same amount with less people. So we'll have to see. I also think on the UBI point, like the thing that I think we need more than UBI if we ever get to that place is universal basic purpose. And the way you actually get the French Revolution is less that people don't have enough money, that's part of it, and more that people don't have something important to work on. Like everybody's got to feel like they're on a hero's journey.

30:08Anish Acharya:Right. Right. And even if it's a little, I mean, look, arguably, we both have fake jobs right now. So even if it's a little bit contrived, I think that we have to make sure people have a sense of purpose in addition to the means to kind of go achieve it. Where do you think that's going to come from? Okay. Again, I think there's no ceiling on human desire. I think people are going to want vacation homes on Mars. I think people are going to like, you know, companies are going to be doing more ambitious things. We're going to have a hundred X more skyscrapers. Like the history of all technology is it increases productivity and it also increases human desire.

30:38Anish Acharya:Right. You've heard this thing of like luxuries become commodities, right? Therapy was considered a weird luxury 50 years ago. Yeah. Now therapy is an expectation. Right. Right. With Instagram culture, so many bottle service used to be something that was unheard of 20 years ago. Right. And now it's only bottle service. Nobody wants to go to the club unless they're getting bottle service. So I just think we're underestimating how much human desire will continue to grow. Flying was a great example of like people used to get dressed up and put ties on and suits on just for their flight because it was such a luxurious thing.

31:05Anish Acharya:I mean, I wouldn't mind if we went back to that. Yeah. I'm big on manners. But yes, exactly. So I don't know that it's like the end of jobs. And, you know, the other thing, I'd love your take on this since I know you're big in meditation and sort of self-awareness is it feels like this technology is a tool to explore our emotional, spiritual self in a way that no technology ever has been. Like the fact that you can talk to it like a human and you can explore things and you can get into flow state when you're programming, it has all of these attributes that are just so different from, you know, spreadsheets and word processors and even the creative tools of the past, which are very point and click.

31:42Anish Acharya:Do you think that's overstating the case? I mean, what's your take as a Zen practitioner? Listen, I think that the one thing that's exciting to me, well, two things. Certainly human connection, real friendships, spending time together. If we can have more time to do those types of activities, and we do lean to that versus just being hooked on our phones. Yes. I think it will lead to better and stronger emotional states, better family units at home, like a whole slew of benefits from that side. There are certain pieces that, you know, I'm not going to want a digital meditation instructor in terms of like, you know, I want a real human teaching me.

32:21It might come in digital form, but I want a real human that's behind that, not just some AI. Therapy, maybe not so much. Maybe I do like the idea of having a digital therapist. We'll see. So it's not all doom and gloom. I hope that we start to shift to celebrating craft and celebrating that if you find a niche that you are into, and you're the best at that particular thing, that we can hopefully put some value behind that. And Japan is quite good at this.

32:56Anish Acharya:I mean, they've done it for 700 years, right? You find these small little artisans. Yes. They're the best. And there are people, like I've gone to coffee shops in Tokyo where it's like one guy doing aged coffee beans and there's like a line down the street to get in. Yeah. And it's just like, he doesn't want to become a billionaire. Isn't that beautiful? He's just happy to do this thing that he's found this very small little niche that people love. Yeah. You know, I hope there's more of that. What's your version of that? Oh, probably Japanese woodworking, a little bit more meditation. Okay. More time with friends and family.

33:28getting off of technology. I found that I need breaks. We mentioned how it is so fun to do coding right now. And because it is so fun, I can literally wake up and kind of like out of my trance of coding and be like, wow, I've been on the computer for 11 hours today. It doesn't feel like 11 hours, but that can't be healthy, right? So I just need to figure out what is that balance. Am I really, truly finding the time to hit the gym? Am I finding the time to do the things that are going to benefit my body over the long term? Right. Am I staying connected with my kids, my family? Yeah. You know, I think those are very important questions to ask.

34:03And I worry a little bit that AI makes it more of a trap to kind of get sucked in and avoid some of those.

34:10Anish Acharya:I don't know. Like, maybe it's barbell, you know? So maybe you spend these really productive, satisfying, fulfilling time on your computer. Yeah. And then you don't have any of the overhead that you typically had, right? All the meetings. You don't go to meetings. Your agent goes to meetings for you, right? And makes decisions. and handles conflict and sells customers and all this other stuff. And the rest of the time, you're, you know, practicing meditation, hanging with your kids, touching grass. Right. So I think there's the potential to have this, like, really productive, satisfying technology time.

34:40Anish Acharya:And it's really productive, maybe, or satisfying sort of fulfilling human connection time. Why can't that be the shape of our life going forward? No, I hear you. And also, I've danced around the edges of this in a dangerous way. Oh, God. So I thought about, so I was talking to my wife and I was like, okay, listen, we're getting a lot of arguments about X, Y, and Z. And what if we just had a conversation with a model that built out these frameworks for us that understands what we like, how much we care about certain things. And then we just have our models go and like duke it out and be like, actually, tonight we go out to dinner because historically, Daria has had the right to go out to dinner.

35:19I'm just making this up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And she's like, and I explained this whole thing, and I'm super proud of the idea, and I think it's going to save us a ton of time and effort. And she looks at me, and she's like, this is one of the worst ideas ever. I'm just like, shit, you know? So I worry about outsourcing too much of that negotiation and conversation and just saying like, oh, the agents are just going to handle it. That said, around certain things like policy or conflict resolution between nations and things like that, there might be a little bit more of a steady hand to have two agents discussing their and getting to a resolution faster.

35:54I don't know.

35:54Anish Acharya:It's interesting. So, well, I'm not sure about the family setting, but if you think of the corporate setting, you know, there's this old saying like the best way to compete with an incumbent is to pick a product area that lives between two VPs. Because the idea is the VPs hate each other so much, they won't possibly be able to collaborate to actually like handle the competition in this area of crossover. Yeah. And that's like an area in which I think, Like, look, if each VP had an agent that went in, I mean, we'll have to see. And I guess there'll be agent politics, corporate politics. But you could just imagine conflict resolution feeling so much less personal.

36:24Anish Acharya:I think so many issues at work come from this, like, misattribution of professional decisions to personal feelings. Where it's like, hey, the boss went against me because they don't like me. It's not because they just had a professional judgment that was in a different direction. Right, right, right. And I hope that this technology helps to lessen that. Yeah, absolutely. What is the coolest thing you've seen in the last few weeks? Because you must see so much stuff in terms of pitches. And what has you excited to be an investor still? Because for me, early stage seems like, I'm not saying that you're squarely in early stage.

36:57Yeah, yeah. Because obviously your fund does a whole gamut. Early stage seems pretty dead to me. Yeah. Just because it's like people, entrepreneurs are just going to skip that round altogether.

37:07Anish Acharya:Well, I think that there's venture exciting and then there's sort of like human exciting. Yeah. And when I tell you a story like the one I told you about this guy, Mike, who built this incredible software and he's like, you know, a clod pilled and all this other stuff. That's one of the most hopeful things I've seen in a long time. I mean, we should put Mike on billboards. I actually pair that with a lot of the stuff that Elon's doing. Like when you see the, you know, the effort to get to the moon, when you see SpaceX, when you see Waymo, like, oh, my God, that's what we meant when we said technology.

37:36Anish Acharya:Right, right, right. You know, how about you? I mean, what do you think? No, I'm in the same boat. I worry that the kind of early stage, like, sassy world, the, like, little bite-sized pieces of consumer stuff is going to be largely dead. Hardware is still very capital-intensive to get off the ground. I'm very bullish on, actually, devices that encourage us to kind of disconnect and have more shared reality together. Have you seen TenCan at all? Yeah, my son has one. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah, so my— You should describe what Tin Can is for everyone. So people that don't know, Tin Can is this little device that is a phone, like an old-school phone that you plug in the USB-C, and it connects to the Wi-Fi, and then as the parent, you can tell the app which kids they can call.

38:26Yeah. And so it was so funny because my daughter picks it up. She goes—she listens to it. She goes, someone's calling us. And she hands me the phone, and it's a dial tone. And she'd never heard a dial tone before in her life.

38:37Anish Acharya:Yeah, why would you? She was like, someone's calling, it's ringing, it's ringing. And I'm just like, no, that's what you had to listen for before you could dial the numbers. But now when that rings across the room, they get so excited. They don't know who's calling. And they go running to go pick it up as fast as possible they can. But I want 10K for grownups. It would be so cool to have a little phone that is only with your friends. And you don't know who's going to call, but you're going to pick it up because you know it's a trusted friend. yeah so it's little bits of technology like that that i think i just gonna provide these little moments of delight and real connection yeah that i'm excited for it's very funny so my son has one as well and when he so he gets he geeks out when he gets a call right yeah races darts over to the phone he picks it up and it's his bro calling and they'll be like what's up what's up and they'll talk for maybe 20 seconds and they won't know what to talk about right and i don't know if that's like the kids don't know how to use this technology or that's just how men talk to each other yeah So just be on the phone for like 10 minutes, just sort of like, just grunting a little bit.

39:35Anish Acharya:And then they'll hang up. And how was your call? It was great. It was really good. It's amazing. Yeah, but he's still young though, too. Like, it's not like they have like. A ton to talk about. I know it's just, it's such a funny little microcosm of like male relationships, you know. Are you looking at more hardware these days? Yeah, we're open to everything actually right now. One of the most interesting, coolest pieces of hardware I saw recently, we're not an investor, is this company Pocket. You know, a bunch of companies are doing things like this, these sort of like passive recorder devices.

40:00Anish Acharya:I know you, Sandbar, I think you guys have invested in one that you're excited about. It's just, it's really elegant hardware design. And also just love that founders are being ambitious enough to try hardware again. Hardware has all of these like, you know, it's just a challenging place to operate. But founder ambition is higher than it's ever been. So yeah, we're definitely open to hardware. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I've been looking at the always on recording stuff for me has been a little bit like, eh, I don't know if I want that in my life. I know, I know. Yeah. Still, it's just cool that people are building things in those directions, you know?

40:30Anish Acharya:I also think that you're too skeptical on consumer. Like consumer feels like dead, dead, dead, dead. Oh my God, it's on fire. Right. Yeah, I guess the question is, I think the reason I am a little bit skeptical on it is I think it'll be dead, dead, dead. Oh my God, it's on fire. And then when it's on fire, it's on fire with three engineers and they've hit something and all of a sudden the first round is done at a$500 million pre. And I'm just, I worry that what we're going to see is just a decimation of all the early stage funds because they won't, they'll skip all those rounds altogether and go straight to B or C.

41:04Yeah. In which case, Andreessen will do fine. But like all these other funds are just going to be completely wiped out.

41:10Anish Acharya:So I have a history question for you. When you started Digg, what did the environment feel like in terms of consumer? Like, did it feel like a good or a bad time? It was dead. Okay. Yeah, it was largely dead because we were coming out of the dot-com burst. Yeah. And then the thing that was a technology enabler, which was Ajax that allowed for dynamic content to be refreshed that enabled a new wave of kind of consumer apps to be built on top of that. But it wasn't obvious at the time when you guys started tinkering that it was going to be like a global social media, like, you know, I mean, it would be regulated.

41:41Anish Acharya:It would like potentially influence elections. Did you have any sense of how important it would be? No, there was none of that. And I don't think it was just, it was a very, it was a time where people said, what if, and then they tried it. Like Flickr came out and it was the first time people actually shared their photos publicly. Right. Because that was a weird thing. You're like, oh, there's a picture with my family. Why would I ever want to put that online? Someone might see that. Those are my private photos. Photos were always kept in albums in your house. Yes. You know, and like some family would come and look at them, you know?

42:11Yes, yes, yes. And so there was a lot of that going on. Like, you know, Foursquare was like, oh, I'm checking in somewhere. Is it weird to tell people where I am right now?

42:20Anish Acharya:Yes, yes. You know, like Twitter was like, what am I up to? You know, like there was a lot of strange things. Yeah. And we're seeing kind of very similar experiments happening right now. And I do believe we'll see, you know, multi-billion dollar companies on the consumer side come out of this wave. I have a feeling it's going to be structured very differently than it was in the past. Maybe. I mean, I don't know about venture economics, but I feel like if there's a big new set of consumer categories, venture will be fine and consumers will benefit. And I love that you talk about the photo sharing thing because I feel like anytime you have new culture, new technology, and they both happen at the same time.

42:56Anish Acharya:It's amazing. Like think of the photos thing. Photos went from hyper private to being public, to being public and seeming so important that you would never want to delete them, to Snap coming around and being like, no, now they're disappearing. Right. Which felt like, whoa, why would I want it to disappear? Right. 10 years after you're like, whoa, why would I want to share it? Right. But then it went back to Instagram saying, I actually want my photos to look cooler and stick around. Yes, yes. And so it was kind of all. And now if you actually, if I shared an AI generated photo of myself with you, you'd be like, this is slop.

43:24Anish Acharya:Yeah. So it's just, there's so, these cycles, there's locations, another fascinating one. There's this whole moral panic around privacy and security and will people share location and location-based ads, like this whole topic. Now, if you look at it, Gen Zs, they share their location with friends, family, exes, like everyone, right? They have zero expectation of location privacy. There's no more like sort of distorting effect on culture than AI right now, right? Think of even AI companions and friendships and psychosis and productivity porn. and there's so many topics here that are going to drive culture, not just technology.

43:57Anish Acharya:Yeah. How can that not result in interesting new consumer products? Yeah, I agree. So let's wrap things up. I have one final question, but if you have anything you want to touch on before you go, let me know. I know you've got a hard out soon. I've got a little bit of time. I mean, I... You've got a good one. Let's hear it. Okay, so let's like explore this and we can cut it if it ends up not being interesting. But we were sitting here getting ready for the pod and we were sort of trying to get our mics on the right way and you were saying, oh, you've got to wrap the cord around the mic in a certain way.

44:30Anish Acharya:So there's this sort of knack for getting things done, small things and big things in this world. And it's just in people's heads, right? Nobody has sort of written that kind of thing down. You call that dark data, right? So what's your kind of view on that type of information? Does that have value? Does that have more or less value than traditional information that's written down? And how does that show up in the future? Yeah, I mean, there is, I think that is a huge opportunity. I don't know how you monetize that, but it's an opportunity to unearth it, save it, and then work it into the models that we're doing.

45:03You had a great example off mic where we were talking about the one person that knows how to adjust a carburetor in a certain way for a certain model of car. That's right. And if that person dies, that knowledge is then lost, right? That's right. And so I believe that this exists kind of all around us in terms of little tiny micro things of dark data that we just have yet to work in and record and little tiny preferences and nuances that just never make it their way into these models. So, you know, for example, this table right here, one of the things I wanted to do is I wanted to get a very Charlie Rose-esque table, which was an old, he basically was very famous for doing these interviews where he could like lean in and talk to someone.

45:48Yeah, yeah. And I actually had, there was no stats or dimensions for his table anywhere in the models. And so I provided the model with like five different screenshots. And then set it on the heaviest working mode. And then it calculated the size of the coffee cup. And then estimated the dimensions of the actual table. And so I could actually buy a similar table in terms of size. So I could fit up to four guests sitting around this table as Charlie did. And that was an example of something that the data was not in the model, but I had to back my way into it, right? And so I just think there's a lot of that.

46:27Proprietary data sets, I think, are really interesting. In some sense, there's probably a market to go raise a fund just to acquire proprietary data to resell it.

46:36Anish Acharya:In a sense, this is what Mercor and others are doing, you know? They're getting human data generation, some of which is like coding and math and all that. But I imagine in the future, some of which will be this type of tacit knowledge you're describing. Yeah. So that to me is very interesting. It's not a business I would want to go build, but certainly I think we're going to get a lot more of that unearthed as robotics and other sensors come online. I mean, I think Google Maps was probably the earliest going in mapping this kind of dark data. But yeah, models will – this is where I think when you talk about the layoffs, you're like, oh, none of my buddies are getting laid off at Google.

47:11if anything, they're just accelerating. But that doesn't account for the models getting better. Because when the models are, you know, three times as performant as they are today or five times or 10 times, then you really don't need as many humans. Your backlog quickly dries up. And, you know, one person can orchestrate, you know, 20 projects or 100.

47:31Anish Acharya:Yeah, but dude, then Sundar says, like, I want to be the first$100 trillion company. You know, like, what is, Sundar is not going to say, you know what, we should, like, keep our market cap but just, like, be more profitable. Well, no CEO thinks that way, right? They want to shoot for the moon. So I think Sundar's ambition will grow at least or faster, as fast or faster, than model progress. Do you think government regulation steps in there and says you can't run everything? Because there is a world where just it's open AI, Anthropic, and Google, and they're kind of just everything to everyone.

48:01Anish Acharya:But it's just not the world we're living in, right? Meanwhile, here on Earth, there's hundreds of open source models. There's all kinds of distilled models. The model price, token prices for what we're cutting Edge models three months ago are going down. There's Edge devices actually having models embedded in them. So that could happen. But I think the case for sort of outlier, you know, N of 1 outcomes is much stronger in social networks than it is in foundation models. We just don't see foundation. You said yourself, right? I've got my credit card. I'll use Opus one day and Codex the next day.

48:33Anish Acharya:Right, right. So, yeah. Yeah. That's fair. All right. Right. Any predictions for the next six months? Let's hear the craziest, wildest prediction that you have. I mean, weirder, better, faster, man. Weirder, better, faster. Give me a hard prediction. Open AI IPO. I mean, I'm not supposed to talk. Look, I think all these, fuck. Look, I think all the big model companies are going to go public. Yeah. I think that's pretty well known. You think it's this year or next year? I mean, I don't know exactly, but I think that it's going to happen in the next 12 months with no inside information. That would be my prediction.

49:06Anish Acharya:I agree. I think that, look, okay, maybe like my strangest prediction is that I think we're going to get to the four-day work week in a uniquely American way. And let me tell you what I mean by that. So I'll tell you a little bit of a story. So if you think back to the conversation we were having about diet and nutrition 30 or 40 years ago, there's two schools of thought, right? There's the European school of thought, which is we should eat less sugar. There's the American school of thought, which is we should eat less fat. And, you know, maybe they were sort of influenced by industrial lobbies and whatever else.

49:36Anish Acharya:So we ran the experiment for 40 years and Europeans stayed pretty slim and Americans got really fat, right? Now, probably what Americans should have done, and a lot of people try to make this better, is said, hey, we need to just change our habits as a society and, you know, moderate a little bit and sugar intake and all the, of course, that didn't happen. Instead, Americans did this uniquely American thing, which is we invented Ozempic, GLP-1s. We're like, we just break through new technology to solve this problem that we really should have just solved with like perhaps different choices as a society and as individuals.

50:04Anish Acharya:I think the same way the Europeans have aspired to the four-day work week, and they're like, this is better for human flourishing and families, and I think that's right. But Americans have to do it the American way, which is we create this incredible new technology that makes us so much more productive that we can actually reduce our workload from five days to four days and maybe even three and a half days. So there's some sort of a parallel here, and I think we're heading to a four-day work week. That is how the 20 % productivity increase is going to show up in my view. And that's my strangest prediction.

50:34Okay. My strangest prediction is that in the next three years, we will probably discover and produce and create and get into humans another 50 to 100 peptides that alter our longevity in a meaningful way. Can you tell me about the peptides thing? Give me the quick take. So peptides are just small chain amino acids. They're very easy to produce in the lab. and they kind of like think of them as upstream regulators that can then trickle down and cause other things to happen in the body. So they're not as powerful as like a straight-up hormone. And they're not as heavy as a hammer. They just kind of like cause things to happen.

51:15And so the most famous peptide is insulin. The GLP-L1s are peptides. But there are 20 other candidates that are out there that I've seen people experimenting with that are producing wild results. There's one called the Wolverine stack. Oh, God. Where literally I have had friends that have had back injuries and knee pain and elbow pain. Yeah. I had tennis elbow really bad in my, which I didn't even play tennis, which fucking kills me. But I had tennis elbow in my right arm really bad. And I took the Wolverine protocol for like two weeks and I don't, I feel amazed. Really? Yeah. Literally. Yes. And so I believe, and there's a lot of people working in the space that they're going to identify these peptides.

52:01We'll be able to easily compound them and create them. And the FDA has backed off a little bit. They were banning them for a while, and now they actually have approved quite a few. One for muscle mass in AIDS patients, and so they can give them this peptide and they'll gain more muscle mass. There's another one that actually, I believe it's Eli Lilly, that is this three agonist GLP-1 that you don't lose muscle with now, which is really interesting. That's in the pipeline. It's phase three trials right now. So as AI allows us to do a lot of this modeling in more real time and hopefully candidate discovery, I think peptides is just going to be a fascinating space to watch.

52:47Anish Acharya:So, okay, so I have two questions. One is what's the basic stack for somebody playing with peptides? Like, what would you recommend? What's the right amount of risk to take? I would say go listen to Huberman's two podcasts. He has two podcasts on peptides. Yeah. And they go in depth about each one. Some of them are for sleep. Some of them are, you know, they really increase your deep sleep and you sleep better. I have one buddy that says he sleeps like he's 18 again, where he just like wakes up like fully rested from doing these peptides. I have one buddy that's removed all of his visceral fat and is done by a DEXA scan, which we know visceral fat is like really the bad type of fat that you don't want to have around your organs.

53:23and yeah, there's almost a peptide for everything now, which is just really insane. And these are largely, you gotta be very careful though, because as you will talk about, there's grain markets, there's contaminants that can get in there. You gotta work with a high quality company when you're thinking about this stuff.

53:38Anish Acharya:So my second follow-up question is, if we radically extend human life, do you think we're sort of emotionally, spiritually, societally prepared for people to live to 120, 150, 200? I don't think so, no. Sadly, not in America. We just don't have the support infrastructure for the elderly nor the care, which is a huge bummer. But what if we controlled for that and said people live, you know, their full, most flourishing 25-year-old lives? I agree. The thing you don't want to do is have, extend dementia for an extra 20 years because we're taking peptides. You know, it's like, so that's the tricky part.

54:11But, you know, there are candidates like Clotho and some of these other, that's a protein that looks like it's in the pipelines for a potential treatment for a lot of dementia. So it's a very exciting time on the science front. So that to me is, and then I would say my other prediction by the end of the year is that I just don't think we'll ever look at code again. I think that Elon talked about how, why are we actually writing languages? Yeah. Like writing code in languages? If the AI is smart enough to understand the inner workings of every single CPU, GPU, and every piece of silicon that it's going to touch, it can just compile directly to binary and just work.

54:48which is wild because then that rewrites all of how we think about infrastructure in general. You don't have to pick databases anymore. You don't have to like think about any of these things. It's that I believe is going to be in the next five years there won't be weird questions like should I be using a graph database for this or you know it'll just kind of be solved which is strange.

55:10Anish Acharya:It'll be interesting to see what happens when agents make these choices on our behalf because there'll be technology with trade-offs. Presumably there'll be marketing but not to humans, to agents. Because ultimately it's going to be Codex that chooses the database. So how does that marketing show up? What are the tricks? I mean, this is very wild. I don't think it'll have to be marketing. I think it'll just go spin up an instance, run it, benchmark it for its use case, come back and be like, yeah, I just test that out. This is the best one. And then actually Chamath had a really interesting point about it that a lot of people were calling bullshit on, but I kind of believe, which is he said that these agents will just shop around.

55:43They'll go and they'll be like, okay, that graph database that was serving us well six months ago is now more performant on this type of database, on this infrastructure for this cost. Yeah. I'm just going to do the migration. Yeah. And so you have to imagine that just happens like seamlessly at some point.

55:57Anish Acharya:Dude, it's so cool. So when I worked at Amazon when I was a kid, which was 2003, delivering packages. Yeah, exactly. Were you? That's where you're going door to door. No, hell no, dude. I was a programmer. I didn't know. I was a programmer. So Jeff used to say this thing. He said a lot of things, which are forward-looking, but one was we should assume that we're going to live in a world where our buyers have perfect information, right? And if you think of like how much of industry and commerce is based on either buyer laziness, apathy, or this asymmetric sort of information between sellers and buyers, what if that goes away?

56:29Anish Acharya:Yes. What if like you have to win by product quality, always 100 %? There's zero value in brand. There's zero value in marketing. Like, isn't that just a better world to be in? 100%. And so many of these areas, I think financial service is another big one. We were talking about Hero before the show, right? which is a company that was acquired by OpenAI yesterday, really talented founder Ethan, who started Digits prior with this sort of consumer fintech mission that many of us had, which is like, hey, why can't we just make this system efficient and work for the everyday consumer, right? And it's like, why should they have to know how the credit system works and how to play the game and how to do all of these things?

57:03Anish Acharya:And I think with agents, a lot of that just goes away. Your agent goes and makes great financial choices on your behalf, given your constraints. Yes. And I think that's going to happen in a lot of product categories and it'll be a much better sort of world and society as a result. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. Awesome. Well, always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much, Kevin. Glad we did this. Come back. Let's just keep doing these, man. I love these little round tables. It's so fun. Especially because every four to five weeks, everything changes all over again. I mean, we could do this once a week.

57:30I know. We run out of time. Brand new topics to talk about. Awesome. Thanks for having me, man. Good seeing you, brother. Super fun. Cool. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, Be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our sub stack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold or sell any investment or financial product.

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58:42Thank you.