$2.5B Chip Heist, The Future of American AI, and Purpose-Built Robots | This Week in AI Ep 6

23:59And they've earned the right by being years ahead, building the transformer and all these other things to really lean into that and make that happen. Now, I don't know how that factors into their cloud business. I mean, they rent them out through GCP. I guess the question is, why don't we hear about them? You're saying it's kind of like the sleeper. Why is it the sleeper? Yeah, I think they struggle with two things. One is GCP. So for a long time, TPUs were GCP only. And so that just kind of segmented off the market share that they had into GCP. Now, GCP is doing better. So that's a good thing.

24:35And now they're breaking past GCP. And so I think that's a big, bold move for Google. And I think that's huge. The other is that basically nobody can use them. If you're a big lab and you've got a team of 50 people to throw at it, you can use it. But if you're not, then you can't run open source model. You can't run Kimi K2. You can't run standard models on these devices because two reasons, one of which is that Google has no community. And so there's no developer community out there that's like using them or no hobbyist community, things like this. But also because Google itself is not investing in building into that.

25:08And so they, like many of the different massive players in the space, they're building amazing things. I think Gemini is amazing, amazing, amazing. But it's all proprietary. They're not incentivized to actually share anything. They're not going to open source their high-performance GPU code or TPU code. And so they're not actually set up to actually catalyze their own platform in that way. And this is one where CUDA is pretty amazing. This is the NVIDIA software. They've leaned into the community. They've leaned into teaching people. They've leaned into universities. They've really leaned into getting the technology out there.

25:41And that's a huge advantage that NVIDIA has going forward. So this is a huge opportunity, I think, for the whole industry to figure this out. But you have to change the playbook a little bit. You can't just run the standard mode of operation they've been doing before, and they have to decide is allowing the hardware to sing actually worth doing new things? And I think they'll probably say yes. The thing that's interesting about all this, Jake, is Anthropic, which is a major competitor to Gemini, right? They are the big first, my understanding, and Chris, you would know better, but Anthropic is, I don't want to say all in on these tensors from these CPUs from Google, but they have a significant footprint.

26:22And then Google, I believe, is like a quiet shareholder in Anthropic as well. So in typical Silicon Valley fashion, no conflict, no interest, like they're competing with Claude Code, with Claude Cowork, with the Google suite, with Gemini's products. And Gemini, I suppose is going to have a really good, you know, they're going to, they're really focusing on writing code or code, code co-pilots. But yeah, this like TPU thing is super interesting. I think who's number two, Greg? It's super funny. Comment on that. Yeah. Yeah. Super funny. And super confusing to understand like how these companies are related to each other, but Google does everything.

27:01Like it makes LLMs. It makes autonomous cars. It makes search and ads. It makes obviously TPUs. It's crazy. And who's number two? Yeah. So number two, that's, that's a big question, right? So I would go, it's either between AMD, who is the, it should be number two in many ways, because they've been working in this space for a long time, they've been competing, or, but it may actually be Amazon. And so Amazon, AWS is obviously massive, they've been leaning into this. Anthropic, for example, also uses the AWS chip, it's called Tranium. And so they're on their third generation, incredible chip, very big scale.

27:37Again, they're not, it's not the first chip they're building. And so they've done some iteration, they've optimized and gotten progress on it. I think, again, just nobody's aware of it, nobody uses it. Software is just a completely different weird world. And they do have software, it does actually work if you can figure it out, but it's just such a different universe. And again, the customers, they're not going to open source anything. They're the biggest companies in the world, they're all competing with each other. And so the ecosystem is just tiny. And this is, I think, a huge thing holding people back.

28:08So Google TPU, number one, AMD, number two, Amazon, Tranium. And is it Infer... I mean, the branding's so like on the nose, but it's Infer... It's overly clever. Inchia? Inferentia? Inferentia, yeah. It's just terrible branding. We get it. It's Inferentia. I mean, did they just ask Chachipiti to name these two products? I feel like they just asked Chachapini, what's a corny name for an inference thing? Inferentiania. It sounds like a spell from Harry Potter or something. So what do we think of the ban? I don't know if you saw this, Jake, the ban on chips in China. And then the MicroStrategy CEO was using, I mean, it's from Supermicro's co-founder, rather, not MicroStrategy.

29:03supermicros co-founder smuggling 2.5 billion dollars worth of nvidia chips to china through a middleman and then they were doing like fake paperwork and using a hair dryer to take off the serial numbers and replace them with the model numbers i mean and and then talking about it on social media there was a video going around where he was talking about it any take on the brazen insanity of this jake and people are talking about it in the group chats obviously i was That's going to bring this up as it relates to the Department of War. And I actually think it's astounding to me that our budget on the defense bill or the amount of budget going from trying to go from a trillion a year to 1.5, I'm actually surprised it's not way higher, that we're not trying to make it way higher.

29:52And why I'm saying this is, you know, it's like little insights like you just like you're talking about with, you know, with this story that indicate very clearly that this is an all out sprint. It's an all out. I don't know if you want to call it a cold war. It is a cold war. That's what it is. And it's a war that's not exactly that cold either. It's being fought in a lot of different ways that we haven't ever seen before. But this is an example of, look, there is an unleashing and this stuff doesn't get get the light of day unless the, you know, unless the government in China is also allowing it to be exposed.

30:29I think it's kind of just like a look, we can break the rules. We can go around things. And also, like you interviewed with Jensa, I mean, you know, it's opening back up and there's a lot of folks that are looking to buy this. I think there's like a look, there's you cannot you cannot regulate this stuff. I mean, it is going to be just like life will find a way. And just it's NVIDIA chips will find a way is basically like the idea here. And the A infrastructure is an all out race. It is a matter of national security, energy is a matter of national security. These like sectors and industries, wars are being fought like around these assets in particular.

31:05And so I think what I'm saying - We've fought over oil for 100 years. Oh my gosh, yeah. So now we're fighting over the chips and the oil. Now we have two things to fight over. We got employees in the Middle East right now. Like we, in UAE in particular, we've like, I can't comment on the sites that have been hit, but just to let you know, like there is, this is all very real for us at Gecko. Well, if you, yeah, if you do share it, the UAE government's like, please don't share pictures of Dubai getting hit. A little sensitive to it, which I understand. But what I'm saying from all this is basically just like there needs to be, government needs to be getting way more involved, both in the amount of, both in the amount of spend that they have on ships themselves.

31:42the amount of independence they have on the compute. This is why I think Chris is probably right as it relates to Amazon over AMD, by the way. I just think there's going to be, you know, there just needs to be a much more aggressive amount of spend, both from a deterrence, but also as it relates to, you know, if you want to actually supercharge, you know, these companies and not stifle growth, you cannot, you know, we cannot over-regulate here that we have in the past. We take too much of a historical perspective on regulating these sectors and industries. In reality, all of this is very different.

32:18There are not a bunch of historical precedents for what we're seeing right now. And we need to be unleashing and unlocking and having more primes emerge, having more integrations between old primes and new ones that are trying to emerge. And also just becoming way more self-determined on the government side as relates to leveraging these tools. And, you know, I'd be interested as well, you know, Jason, if you, you should have someone on this podcast talking about how is AI being used in the government? Is there, is there how much code is being written or being evaluated using these tools? I mean, there's, there's test procedures.

32:51These are like, these are like great applications. I'd love to hear, you know, from the horse's mouth as it relates to, you know, how, how much impact the tools that we're talking about here are being used with our most important, you know. Apparently, like when we had Emile Michael with that whole kerfluffle, Chris, on All In, I don't know if you saw that interview, Claude was, you know, like a leading provider and Claude is a leading provider to Palantir. So it's integrated. It's probably the top model right now or the one that's kind of taken a lead all of a sudden leapfrog, Chachapi. So it's definitely being used.

33:27I didn't believe the reports that they would use it to pick the targets without a human in the loop. I mean, it could evaluate targets, I guess. I think that would be a fine use of it, probably a good use, but you would definitely want a human in the loop there. But Chris, what are your thoughts on just broadly export controls? And do we want to really, are you on the SAC side? Hey, we want to have our standard be the global standard. So we have to let China and other people use it. So Huawei doesn't beat our standard globally like they did for 5G. where do you or should we just you know not give them the top ones you know yeah and let them suffer with the previous ones i'm not the expert on geopolitics here but the thing i'll point out is that china's building their own chips we know this they're quite good yeah yeah and so there's a number of different groups there um they're increasing in sophistication um i kind of agree with sacks if you hold yourself back then uh it feels like a short-term win but long-term you end up kind of losing.

34:27And so I can see definite advantages for short-term tactics. And Chris, how many customers do you have internationally? And what does your customer base look like? Yeah, we're global. And so we both have a big commercial base, but we also have a big open source community. And so with open source, you don't know where any of your bits go. And so I'm sure there's folks in China that are playing with things and doing things. But honestly, what I love is I love people coming together. I love the developers building new things. I love people and the ideas getting out there. And this is where, again, with AI, there's a, I think, fair argument to make that AI moving faster is just good for everybody.

35:05And so it does not know any walls. Like the Chinese models, the open source Chinese models are really good. The Kimmy K2s and all this kind of stuff are actually quite good. And we're benefiting a tremendous amount. We as America are benefiting from their work on that stuff. And yeah, they also benefit from our work. And so we can either be defensive and try to hold things back or we could be aggressive and lean forward. And I think if you look at OpenAI and Anthropic, for example, both American companies, they're leaning forward. You look at NVIDIA, they're leaning forward. You look at Google, leaning forward.

35:34And I think this is the way that you make good progress. Now, we could be that, you know, try to put up walls around everything and play defense. Again, maybe if there's a short-term strategy that you're trying to like make work, that can work. But I think that leaning forward and driving the status quo is driving the standards, being the platform, being the leaders is really what winning looks like. Yeah. And they're making bets. There's this concept term I heard, Four Little Dragons. I don't know if, Chris, you've heard that one before, but this is for Morthreads, MetaX, Byron, and Inflame who are doing GPUs locally.

36:13This is not Huawei. These are these little ones that are startups there. And that's typically how China does it. They create, underwrite, you know, pick, they don't pick the champion. They kind of let 20 champions bloom and then narrow it down to the two or three big winners and have this like more constrained version of capitalism with the goal of, of course, flooding the market with things that are, you know, under underpriced, right? Like we're seeing with cars right now, I think is probably the best example. Yeah, I think the thing I respect about the Chinese system is it's very competitive, right?

36:49And so there's, like, the people are very competitive, and they're pushing hard, and they're trying to make themselves better. They're learning, they're studying hard, they're working hard. But then the provinces within China are all competing against each other. And so they're all trying to build and one-up each other. A lot of this nature, a lot of this mindset is really what's driving the open source AI movement coming out of China. And they're trying to one up each other, trying to do better things. And when I look back on what made America great, it was really about that capitalistic competition of companies trying to outdo the other and capture value and deliver value.

37:24And so I think that, again, this is where progress comes from. We shouldn't be playing defense. We should be leaning into building a bigger, better, faster moving flywheel and be able to capitalize that and be able to drive that up into our products. And I think we're seeing that. And if you look at the American economy over the last year plus, it's been just on fire. And a lot of that's been because of the transformations people have been able to roll out because of the increased value being delivered. And yes, all the fabs getting built too, that doesn't hurt. So let's pivot a little bit here and talk about self-driving.

37:55Chris, you were involved a little bit in the self-driving space. What's your assessment of it today? I asked Jensen last week about the NVIDIA stack. There's been a lot of talk about this. There's a really good podcast, The Road to Autonomy, with a couple of gents every weekend just go through all the announcements. Obviously, Uber and NVIDIA have a big relationship. NVIDIA has got a giant relationship now with, I think, 18 different original, I guess they're the OEM to the car companies. Then you have people making their own software like Neuro who use the NVIDIA stack, but then I guess are going head-to-head against the NVIDIA driver, which would be like the Noro or FSD.

38:36So your assessment of this now, Chris, and your history in it? So, I mean, I haven't worked in the space for nine years, but I led the autopilot team at Tesla and helped convert them from hardware one to hardware two and a bunch of technology ecosystem improvements back then. Are you curious about like who's going to win? Are you curious about what it looks like in this new future? Are you curious about - I guess your assessment - Because Waymo's obviously in the lead. Yeah, Waymo has the most miles, most rides. It works in a constrained environment. Then I guess you have Tesla going for this incredible vision.

39:14No, Tesla's not a realistic player. They're not filing the permits to have actually autonomous cars, and they still have humans in their car. But I think that in China, again— So that's the thing to watch, is when they file for not a— because right now they filed for ride sharing. Yeah. So they're doing, yeah, like Uber, but they're using the software under supervision. So you think that's the tell. When they start filing to be autonomous, that's when, you know, it's going to get real. Yeah. So my understanding, which again, I'm far from being an expert in any of this stuff, but my understanding is they have single digit number of cars that are doing anything.

39:54And they're in one geo area in Austin or something like that. And so it's a very small, small, small program. I don't know the time frame, but it does take months to get approval in a place like California. And so when they start applying for those permits and going, then you can see that as a lean forward of when they're going to scale. Yeah. Again, if you look at China, China has amazing humanoid robotics. Jake, I'd love your take on this. They have amazing autonomous cars that are pretty widely available as well. And so this is one where for a company like Tesla or for these other players, like the question is kind of where do they sit on the world stage?

40:29And I think this is a huge question. Jake, I'd love to know what you're seeing from the China robots world. And I see these videos on YouTube of the humanoid acrobatics almost. It's pretty crazy. Is it real? Yeah, yeah. I mean, like it's demos can be written and can be executed. And the kind of the kind of way that you saw, I guess, I got the price of the kung fu moves and the and the Olympics and those kind of things. But what I'm tired, entire like onstage shows with like 30 robots and humans and robots all dancing together doing crazy stuff. What it shows off is like the the actuation. It shows off the the perception.

41:08It shows off. It shows off a lot of those things. The real tricky stuff is a dexterity. I think this is stuff that probably Elon talks about with the Optimus 3. I mean, Jason, you've probably seen the Optimus 3. Yeah, I got to see it early. It's super, super. Yeah. I think the real questions are going to be who's going to buy it? What sorts of ROI is there going to be? We've tried out from Europe, from China, and from the US the best mobile platforms. So the walking dog types, these sorts of mobile platforms. What I have been able to determine is that there's very little value that the data sets and the actions that can be taken from the mobile robots actually have.

41:51And I've looked and tried my hardest because it's so cool, right? It's like so cool to be an implementer of that on the cantilever stack. But what I've determined is that there is just too little ROI for the amount of effort that it takes to actually get these systems to be valuable and useful. it's much more i'm i'm curious on that because it's also it's not just about having a general robot which you might want for a consumer product it's also about being efficient good reliability what does the repair look like more complexity is actually just worse for operating at scale in an industrial setting i would i would think jake here's the figure robot with i believe this is mark benioff messing with it it's sorting packages just putting the barcode face down i I guess, or the shipping address face down.

42:37Yeah. And then it's got Benioff throwing packages back at it and it's sorting it. You see something like this, Jake. I mean, what is this? You know, we were talking about demos being faked or, you know, perfect conditions or even self-driving demos, Chris, in your day. You know, five years ago, a lot of times the self-driving demos were very canned, I would say. I wouldn't say, you know, they weren't fake, but they were produced in a way for a limited, you know, space, you know. So they, you know, didn't have the edge cases, let's say. But that video right there, that looks like a general purpose robot doing a general purpose task that humans are doing right now for 20 bucks an hour, 24 bucks an hour.

43:27And that robot, if it doesn't break down and it has decent fidelity, could be sorting packages 24 hours a day at a factory. That's hundreds of thousands of jobs. It's probably millions of jobs. Irregardless of if that robot was teleoperated, if the more complex task of flipping over a more complex, a greater need for a more dexterous robot, It is a fundamental shift in the way that economies can be built and economies can run and unfairly advantage that companies that adopt this sort of technology early and natively will have over the next three to four to five years. I've talked about this publicly.

44:10I think there is no better decade for private equity than this decade that we're in right now. And the reason is because your ability to take and buy especially capital intensive and commoditized infrastructure assets, you know, like, you know, waste waste, turn energy, you know, from waste into energy or, you know, water treatment facilities or power plants that are old or these sorts of these sorts of investments over the next decade are going to be incredibly high return because you can be able to. you can be able to turn these assets into more and more autonomous assets. You can be able to self-insure more and more.

44:52So reducing the amount of risk, taking on more risk itself with tools and technologies where you can understand the health of these assets. Because the management team's not going to do that, but this might be what we're seeing with these open AI and private equity deals they're doing. And they're going to buy legacy businesses and then AI them. You see Thrive Holdings, right? Like with Josh Kushner. So he's buying accounting companies and injecting AI models and stuff. We're still seeing how much return there is with that strategy, but you can see the strategy being implemented. I think it should be way more money, but basically he's doing that for manufacturing because he's seen the impact that millions of robots have for his distribution centers and helping two-day shipping.

45:32It's robotics-defined operating platforms that gives us such an advantage. And so I think it's like, look, it could be humanoids, they'll be involved, but you're going to see an extremely high growth of specialized robotics that are very specifically focused on these critical tasks, these critical data sets that help to unfairly run large pieces of infrastructure over the next decade. And then I'm going to think you're going to see a consolidation of which energy, which manufacturing, which mining companies are the dominant ones, because you just have unfair P &Ls as it relates to how you run and manage these things.

46:08Well, and J.C. also knows and has talked about quite a lot, as the cost of software goes to zero, it's not just the hardware side. Right. So the transformations are going to accelerate. Here's the story. Hold on. Let me just share this. Here's your New York Times story. So Thrive, and this is Josh Kushner, Jared Kushner's brother. Jared's making peace in the Middle East right now or attempting to. his brother, Josh. I guess Sam Altman and OpenAI took a stake in this company at Thrive Holdings, which then has this roll-up where they've bought, I think, 20 or 50 accounting firms. And so it's called Crete, C-R-E-T-E, Professional Alliance, and the IT service provider, Shield Technology Partners.

47:00And so those are the two that they've put together. they've committed 500 million to Crete, which the trade publication Accounting Today described this year as one of the fastest growing accounting firms in the United States. So the idea here, buy up all the accounting firms. A lot of those already have offshore, and that's always my little tell to figure this out. The step before AI automation was move the work to the Philippines, move the work to India, the top 1 % to 5 % of those markets, knowledge workers, are better, more consistent than the average worker in America, which is to say the averages are not the same, but the elite in India, the elite in Philippines are going to be better than the average in America, and they're going to cost, in my experience,$4,$5,$6,$7, $8 an hour versus$40,$50,$60 an hour in the United States.

47:56So that's an interesting kind of wrinkle here. Yeah. Well, if you look at that analogy, I think that analogy may also be comparable to the AI replacement cycle, right? Where the lower value jobs get replaced, the higher value jobs don't, right? For the same reason that people have been out offshoring and getting lower cost labor and other geos, but there's still an incredible amount of engineering an incredible amount of talent in the US. And so a lot of people are betting big on American talent. AI, I think, will transform and will continue to push the world forward and it will affect a lot of jobs and people will upskill.

48:32The question is, what are they upskilling into? And where does the value accrue? Where does that get captured? Well, yeah, you were sort of talking about commodity work. And being a CPA, an accountant or a lawyer, was considered professional services, not commodity. And here we are in 2026 and we're like, Well, obviously that's a commodity job. Like, you know, the bottom 50 % of those jobs are chores that machines can do easily. Maybe the top half is going to be harder. I think it's like we're still going to have to see, like, is that strategy pan out like this year, next year? It's still like one of those things.

49:10Also, as it relates to manufacturing, there is just like, listen, like there are single points of failure in so many supply chains, whether it's turbines and generators and, you know, nuclear reactor parts and like all these like different parts and forges in the U.S. ecosystem, the reindustrialization that's happening right now. One thing that's important to understand is that there's also when you see technology companies, you know, saying they're taking on manufacturing in the kind of ways that you see, or you see empty materials, you know, taking on a mine and making it more effective and efficient.

49:43You have to understand these sectors have not changed for the most part in the past 40, 50, 60 years. And so there's actually not a lot. Look, technology is like there's low hanging fruit. There's low hanging fruit. Like there is just like, hey, look, we're still using clipboards, guys. Or like we just like don't know how to hire because like no one wants to come work in these sectors and industries anymore. Like there are 200, you know, folks who graduate with mining degrees every single year in the U.S. Like, look, let's just make this sexy. And just like, first and foremost, just try to get, you know, the low hanging fruit to be wins.

50:16And if you want to masquerade them as technology advancements and improvements, great. I mean, I guess that's like, fine. I don't love it from a, I don't love it as a, as a trying to tell the truth in the matter and understanding the truth. But I also don't I also really want there to be a resurgence into the sector and technology advancements are going to come. You're going to see contracts being won by companies that are able to show like, look, we're using automated welding, automated inspecting, we're using humanoid here, here and here. But that's that's like it's going to happen. You need to be forward looking and you need to be as native as you can possibly be.

50:47But I think it's important to understand this, like there is like the same sort of principles exist with accounting. There's the same sort of principles exist, you know, in these in these like sectors that you're seeing this innovation like flooding into. But, you know, in just reality, understand there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. There's a lot of just like get smart people into the sector, make it cool. And then I think, you know, the leaders and the CEOs, it just boggles my mind, Jason and Chris, like the best recruiting tool in the world is just like get robots everywhere. Get AI everywhere.

51:17Like there is like that's so exciting if you're like in energy, you're manufacturing, you're mining, whatever it is. It's like make it cool. And like the folks in these communities will run towards these jobs. Otherwise, they should run somewhere else, right? And so you want to reinvigorate the working class. You want to reinvigorate these towns and these places around the U.S. where you just have so much dissipation, people moving away from these cities and towns. That's beautiful. That's America. We want there to be a research. Yeah, it's super hard to do that. I mean, Jake, I'll give you one example from my little world.

51:48is I'm trying to get software engineers who are one of the biggest groups of people that are under threat from this AI tooling explosion that's going on. And all these folks, depending on who they are, have like this existential dread of what does it mean for my job? Or if you're a college kid, you're entering the workforce. Am I going to get a job? What are people hiring? What does it all mean? But there's this amazing platform out there of GPUs and there's this amazing thing happening, AI, right? Just your point, it should be obvious. Everybody, it's happening, right? But what I see is that, you know, some people do adapt and adopt and jump in and upskill and then differentiate themselves.

52:27And some people do that. But a lot of people are just kind of following the university playbook. The university playbook is a few years out of days. It's happening like the most, by the way, Chris, it's happening in the countries that are most a threat economically. They're the hungriest. Yeah, yeah, right. Exactly. It's in the Middle East. Jason, you know this well, whether it's in Saudi or it's in the UAE or it's in Israel, there is threat to the economy that is causing these leaders to be big, bold as it relates to how they are adopting technology, trying to be... 100%, yeah. Trying to figure out, like, we have to be technology first.

53:00We have to be robotics native, AI native, to drive and create a technology company out of these energy companies. And they are doing so because they understand that survival is the most important thing. Whereas in the U.S., we've been very accustomed to peacetime, very accustomed to, you know, we all get this percentage of the energy market. And, you know, we have utilities that have 30-year power purchase agreements. I can just pass through my losses down to, you know, to the single mom who's just trying to make it every week to week, paycheck to paycheck. And this is why we're spending time out in these regions.

53:38But it's my goodness, the U.S. needs to wake up as it relates to these sectors. We need to have a reindustrialization and an excitement in these fields because it is going to hit us hard and it's going to hit us fast as it relates to how vulnerable we are because there's just not enough people in these sectors using and trying to adopt big, bold visions from these CEOs. And these CEOs, most of them are finance, you know, were CFOs before that. And so their minds are not focused on vision and ambition. They're focused on how am I going to get an extra couple cents, you know, up tick in my ticker today.

54:12And my goodness, that is not what America needs. We need a complete change in that approach. And so that's the CEOs that I look for. You know, we work more looking to do big deals. And yeah, very clear. We're going to need a lot more tradespeople. we have, even before the AI boom, needed more plumbers, electricians, teachers, nurses, doctors. Like there's a whole group of jobs that have been desperate and literally bringing in people, you know, essentially importing talent, you know, whether it's Jamaica, you know, or India or the Philippines to find nurses, to find doctors and underwriting. This is the funny thing.

54:51So 10 years ago, people in AI were saying that all radiologists were going to be obsolete. Yeah, how'd that go? Definitely don't go into radiology because you'll never get a job, right? Here we are 10 years later, and there's not enough radiologists. AI is definitely being used, but we have so much demand. And I think this is the thing that everybody kind of forgets about is that the market, the economy, the capabilities are expanding. As you get more creation, you get more products, you get more customer experiences, you get more opportunity. Like this virtuous flywheel is what has made our ecosystem and our community and our world great.

55:25And so AI is an accelerant. Yeah. And I think that CEOs like me and you, Chris, like we've got to be judged more on how quickly can net new people have no idea about the sector use the technology that we're building for them. I mean, this is what it's all about. I mean, how fast, you know, for me, it's just like, can I get a McDonald's employee or a Home Depot employee to be, you know, an expert in weld inspections and evaluations within three months? The answer is yes. Maybe not all of them have the motivation, but when faced, hate to be, you know, um, based here, but when faced without a job and faced with having to put food on the table, humans, not necessarily the entitled humans we've had in America who have had massive abundance and an incredibly low unemployment rate and incredible wages when compared to the globe.

56:15Now they, People might take offense to my statement and cut out the when compared to the rest of the planet and the rest of humanity. We are massively entitled with the job opportunities. If an Uber or, you know, being a greeter at Walmart existed in the Philippines or in India or other places with high unemployment, the Middle East, China, if those jobs actually exist, people would be racing to them and be thrilled with them. Yeah. Let alone a trades craft where if you need to put food on the table, you're making$18 an hour in fast food or$25 an hour being a gig worker. I think actually if you presented the path, here's the training, here's what it costs to get trained, and on the other side is$45 an hour, you're going to make twice as much money and benefits, which I'm guessing McDonald's doesn't pay benefits.

57:03And obviously you get a token amount of benefits as a contribution. Are there enough electricians in the US? Not even close. Right. Right. So there's so many opportunities. Yeah. It's an unbelievable amount of opportunities. And yet we are incredibly pessimistic. And I also find it, I don't know if you guys find it offensive, but when like rich people or powerful people, successful people are like, yeah, but poor people, they're just not capable of learning a new skill. and you're like, are you not paying attention to humanity? Like humanity learns new skills as a group. Like nobody knew how to use a laptop, a phone.

57:38Nobody knew how to use any of these tools until, you know, there might be laggards in terms of the technology adoption cycle. It's not an insult. This is one of the reasons I see everything accelerating, right? Because it feels like things are accelerating. I think we can all feel that right now. And it used to be, you go back five, 10 years ago, it was YouTube, right? And you could learn anything off YouTube. And before there was, you know, you could not learn how to, you know, fix your car or whatever it is. But now with YouTube, you could do that. Today we have AI. And now everybody has assistance.

58:11You have infinite knowledge. You have problem solving. You have reasoning. You have all kinds of different capabilities that people haven't had before. And so we talk about the open clause, right? People get personal assistance. And J.K.L., you've had a few assistants, I suspect. And so you know what that's like. But for somebody that's never had one, having to deal with the inconsequential details of everyday life is a huge drag that prevents you from investing and upskilling and doing whatever it is that you want to do with your actual life. I think, too, like we also like look like you and you guys all know, like you've talked to so many people.

58:44There is such patriotism in this country, like real patriotism about like really, really proud. I mean, you might not agree with every decision being made by the administration, whichever administration it is. there's patriotic Americans. And for the most part, I grew up in a small little Maryland town, like people don't typically leave. And they want the ability to be able to, you know, to, you know, to be able to, you know, not have to do the same job that, you know, their, their like father or their mother like did. And if they did, that's great too. But we have to understand that like this, this, this hillbilly allergy that JD Vance like ran on, and that was very successful, that is hitting on a very important part of America, especially in the Midwest.

59:25This is where Pittsburgh is a very interesting vantage point. People don't want to leave. They want to be able to be, they want to be able to be in technology companies to invest in them, to be able to bring them along for people who are building products, to build products for them that are oriented towards how much, like how easy it for me to use, how like foreign is this? It's so, this is such an opportunity, Jake, is I think what you're framing here. And if you were to just think for a moment, like from first principles, as all these jobs are getting cut, you know, Square, obviously, and people are saying, hey, you know, maybe they're using AI to make a bloated job cut or whatever.

1:00:01OK, fair enough. But there are definitely AI cuts happening in customer support, in product management. And, you know, maybe just not hiring more developers because the current developers are getting 20 percent faster a year. Okay, even if it's just 10, 20 % fast for a year, if you had 100 developers, you needed 10 more. Now you don't need 10 more. You just need to keep paying more and making sure your 100 developers are happy. That's right. But what an amazing opportunity for professional development. And if these big companies don't see that opportunity, well, then they're missing what I think would be a massive strategic advantage.

1:00:35It's not just massive strategic advantage. I'm sorry to cut you off, but you're hitting it. I'm getting very passionate about this because if we have just a few companies that are all benefiting from the big wave we have right now, which, by the way, is the natural progression of these free markets, this capitalism, it's going to make these larger companies larger and larger and larger. I'm telling you, there is going to be a degrading of democracy that will happen as that continues to happen. Just like with the farming industry, you had small local farms that would create food for the local villages, the local cities.

1:01:14And then as free markets and capitalism went on, you began to get these large Tyson facilities that were making large things. And they were putting a bunch of chemicals into our food and all this kind of stuff was happening. But Jake, let me... And so we I really really what we need to do is have there needs to be these like robots, this are AI. There needs to be a, you know, government and and capitalism. There needs to be a, you know, how can we create like these small energy facilities that are creating small data centers instead of like these like big like your reaction. Yeah. So, Jake, Jake, Jake, I hear you.

1:01:50I see I see what you're talking about. And yes, the small farmers having a bad day. How do you square that with the power that every person has in AI? Like people can build things like they've never been able to build before. They could become a software developer. They could build apps for the app store. They can do anything, right? They just have to imagine. They could be a great writer when they were a terrible writer. They could be a great handyman or whatever the non-gender version of that is. Like 90%. What is it called? Handy person? It sounds so weird. I'm sorry, I'm just going to say handyman and I mean human when I say it Andy human, I'm just taking out the HU for efficiency it's a non-gender term, don't cancel it this is where like there is a shift that you're all seeing right now as it relates to atoms and I think that is where, you know, there is there's incredible natural resources around the US there is like these you know, these like US steel towns these like US manufacturing These are the sorts of like, these are sorts of, you know, when I talk about like, you know, why we're in Pittsburgh, like I want to be in Pittsburgh because you're not supposed to build a billion dollar, you know, multi-billion dollar technology company in Pittsburgh.

1:03:07You're supposed to build in California. And I think that's like, that's what I'm trying to, that's a side request, I guess, of like this mission of Gecko. It's like, I want to be able to show that you can build these kinds of companies in strategically and statistically bad decisions of where to localize. Sure, sure. Places that are not growing. But you can find value in those areas. It's happening in Austin where a group of us saw in Austin, hey, wait a second. You can own a home for 500K, 250K, 750K. You could save 14 % on your taxes from California. Your 1 ,000 employees could be happy. They could be happy and be able to hire a nanny.

1:03:56A white-collar couple with dual income in San Francisco can't hire a nanny because the nannies in San Francisco, I hate to blow people's brains who are not from the Bay Area. They're getting paid$100 ,000 a year to be a nanny,$125 ,000 a year to be a nanny, to be a housekeeper. I know this sounds insane to people, but$40,$50 an hour for a domestic staff is the standard in the Bay Area because the cost of living is so high. It's no dig. But then when you could hire a nanny for$50K for$25 an hour or something like that and make the same salary in Austin or in Philly or Detroit, this is why these cities, I think, I agree, are going to have a huge comeback.

1:04:36I'd love to invest in a company. I just had a company idea. So if anybody's listening who wants to start a company, a company that was a bridge between gig workers, you know, and the lowest end of knowledge workers, you know, fast food workers, and then doing handyman services. And by the way, handyman is handyhuman. The HU is silent. I just learned the HU is silent. Imagine just that. Handyman. People who can fix things around the house. then handyman to junior plumber electrician hvac yeah just a company that just does that from home for but five hundred dollars a month in tuition six thousand dollars a year in tuition you work at home you do zooms and then maybe you could come and do an intensive for a week or two if you wanted to and pay an extra fee just that job you could go from 20 bucks an hour to 50 overnight overnight make somebody build that company i will incubate it as the resident software guy sometimes i joke i just turn zeros into ones and ones into zeros that's all i do i don't get to build build cool things like jake does um yeah uh but in this world it turns out there's a huge amount of opportunity right and it turns out that building software is faster cheaper more accessible than it ever has been uh anybody can build ai and gpus these days and gpu software we're seeing people that are taking Python and a lot of people program Python, of course, they're using our stuff to move it to this Mojo language that we're helping build.

1:06:11It's open source. And you can just take AI tools and say, hey, move this stuff to Mojo. And it goes thousands of times faster. Right. And so what this means is that there's a huge amount of opportunity out there in the world. And what we need is we need people with imaginations. We need people that are willing to like put themselves out there. We need people that are willing to try. And I think this is where, again, it doesn't matter if you're in Pittsburgh or if you're in the Bay Area or wherever you are. It's really about your mental mindset. It's about what you want to achieve, like your ambition and drive.

1:06:40And I think that if we can catalyze that, then everything else flows from that. Yeah. Here's something interesting, breaking news. I'll just get your final comments here as we wrap. Brett Adcock from Figure Robotics, which we just talked about earlier, making humanoid robotics, the ones sorting the packages. Today, I'm excited to introduce Hark, a new artificial intelligence lab building the most advanced personal intelligence in the world. We've been in stealth for eight months, assembling one of the greatest AI and hardware teams on the planet. I want to explain why I started Hank, blah, blah, blah.

1:07:13Spent the last three years working on the hardest AI challenge, AI humanoid body. Digital side, I've been using the existing LLM chatbots and have to say they feel incredibly dumb to me. Whoa, diss shot across the bow. AGI, quote, in the limit should feel like a sci-fi movie. It should be able to listen and talk. It should have persistent memory and be highly personalized. It should see and touch the world. But we're far from this today. We're crafting a new interface to AGI intelligence that lets you offload your mental workload into a system that begins to think like you and sometimes ahead of you.

1:07:46Build the world's most advanced personal intelligence paired with next generation hardware, hark.com. This is breaking news, folks. This just happened. I guess this is a new entrance into Jake, the space going from hardware to LLM as opposed to LLM and then adding hardware. Your reaction, did you know about this project? Has there been back channel about it, Jake? no this is breaking news to you as well i don't i mean like i uh i don't really follow figure all that closely yeah but um yeah i think i think it's um yeah it is there's a there's a there's a rising amount of attention like in this in this particular uh text text i don't have too many comments but i'm actually kind of interested in chris's thoughts on it yeah chris any thoughts here of uh i know nothing right so i this is just my me as a tech tech bro uh commenting um i the curious thing to me is not just the technology but the product like how do you actually bring something full full featured full product into the market something people were willing to pay for right i think jake like you've shown i mean you've learned it's really hard to do that right getting some of the technology components there is one thing but getting it to scale shipping the thing having people actually use it and then breaking it, breaking it in the field and then trying to fix it.

1:09:06Like all this stuff's really hard. Yeah. I think like the reason I don't pay attention to figure is like figures philosophy is the exact opposite of our philosophy. And I just, I just, I just don't, I don't. Yeah. General purpose robot versus specific ones to the task. Built in a lab, then like try to use it in the environment. So I think like, like I think I'm excited for, for the attention to the sector. I'm excited for the potential for the products. I'm really excited for the amount of people that are hitting us up in terms of just applying for jobs because robotics is cool and it's a sector doesn't create death much.

1:09:42And so it's like, that's great. And I think one thing I was going to say on the last part, Jason, just to finish up my thoughts is democratizing the amount of ability to create prosperity across the country. And also just like provinces are competing against each other in China. States should be competing against each other. They're kind of like they were like 100 years ago, 50 years ago when we first created the United States. They should be competing with talent pools, not with tax rates. Exactly. Exactly. And the whole game of politics just doesn't reinforce this fierce amount of competition amongst the districts and states.

1:10:18But I think the vision of the future we have to be really excited about and striving for and helping to create as well is like I want my nine-year-old to be able to create a lawn service business and use robots. or be able to... Yeah, for sure. We call that job shepherd. Yeah. Shepherd for robots. I have a cynical take on it. I'm guessing figure... No, no, just on the figure. Oh, figure something, yeah. I mean, I think the most generous take is what he said. Hey, we tried to use these LLMs. It doesn't work for our robots. Okay, fair enough. You make your own. Cynical take, which would be, hey, the valuations of open AI, the valuation of Claude, you know, getting to 800 billion, 400 billion.

1:11:03I'm sure Claude's next valuation will go from 350 billion to 800 and be neck and neck with open AIs. I believe they'll probably be similarly valued. So if they're going to be worth 900 billion and XAI as part of SpaceX is worth 2 trillion, I need to be in that group, not in the robotics group, you know, competing with just Optimus head-to-head and the Chinese companies, I want to be part of the bigger sack. And part of that is, you know, OpenAI and Claude will get into robotics. So we need to get into their business now and just, you know, kind of put us in that competitive set. A lot of times founders and CEOs and boards will be like, hey, wait a second, let's rewrite the rules here.

1:11:45Let's be in that set. Actually, Jake, for you, with your robotics company, if you said, hey, we have our own proprietary LLM just for maintenance, it would increase your valuation. It would be another asset. I would look at it as an investor or a board member or just a market participant as, oh, wow, they're going to power other robots with their underlying technology. It might be something for you to think about. Yeah. And also, Jason, there's also other kinds of data sets too as related to this. We are in all these sectors collecting so much information about, and we're basically, in some ways, you can think about the data sets of the YouTube for these industrial sectors is a very valuable data set to be able to train on.

1:12:20I think it's also a sign that manufacturing is hard. I think it's also a sign there too. Yeah. My take on this is when you're building a business, when you're building anything of merit, you have to decide what your contribution is. Trying to play other people's playbooks, trying to be the same thing that a relative has already done, trying to just appeal to the investor isn't really actually a great strategy because you get too diffused. You don't achieve things. is you can't differentiate. You become mediocre at a bunch of different things instead of exceptional at one, right? And so I think this is the challenge.

1:12:54The North Star should be the customers and the value you're providing to them. And then what happens in a hot market and in an escalating market is people will do unnatural acts. And don't get lost playing games, right? I mean, I think that the creating core value that people are willing to pay for is the recipe, right? And play games, you can get caught up in it. Yeah, and then Chris, I think the thing that's like, for the listeners as well, uh jason is like what we are we are a uh we like to mimic things like from a very gerardian perspective like we like to mimic things and we see we want to mimic as founders like i want to get as much validation as i possibly can look this person is achieving like this valuation i need to achieve this valuation i think the lessons that chris is talking about are only lessons that come from scars from failures from from understanding uh the you know the uh the fallacy of pursuing the wrong things and the potential wisdom or lack thereof of folks that seem to have been performed.

1:13:49And what is success? It's really important to understand. There's no replacement for the grit and hard work that Chris, the people like Chris, his wisdom right now is like, it's so important to just really rock and success will come if you adopt those principles. Yeah, success is not the press release. Success is the product. The press release needs to compound and propel the product. but if you get confused and you just want to have announcement announcement announcement and there's nothing of substance behind it then you're not winning even though it feels like it in the moment bingo short-term gain versus long-term gain uh and the long-term gain takes a lot of pain another this week in ai is in the books thisweekina.ai to sign up for the newsletter and all the links uh thank you to jake thank you to chris uh they're both hiring go to their websites and uh hardest position to fill, Jake, right now for you?

1:14:41Who do you need? Robotics engineering. Perfect. Robotics engineers, if you want to get in on the ground floor of a company that's going to go 100x from here. I said that, not him. That's just my professional estimation. And sitting there with Chris, what are you hiring for, Chris? Cloud platform, GPU programmers, AI software professionals of all sorts. Little tip here. Sometimes the CEO or founder gets their first name at companydomain.com or.ai. So just, you know, and a lot of times if you build something and share what you built, as opposed to a resume and begging for a job and promising things, sometimes you build something dope.

1:15:15You send it to a CEO. Sometimes they'll click the link and see what you built. Just a little professional tip there from your boy, Jake. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.