Just how frothy is the AI Bubble anyway? | E2195

26:51Well, as it turns out, there's a lot of concentration there because a lot of other AWS services are routed through US East One. And so if it breaks, many other AWS regions can have problems. So even though it seems like AWS is very distributed because it has different regions around the world, it's not as decentralized as you might think. And so the question then becomes, why hasn't Amazon managed to fully detangle its regions from one another to prevent one area having a problem impacting the rest of the world? But it doesn't seem to be the case. And this has happened in 17, 20, and 21 as well, according to producer Claude.

27:27So something to keep in mind for people building. So it happens really, if you were to average that out, if there's been four of these, in what looks like an eight-year period, maybe my once every six months. Yeah, I was basing my once every six months across all clouds. So it seems like they're having, you know, a major network outage every two years at Amazon. That to me seems acceptable, I'll be totally honest. Really? Okay. Yeah, only because we're building this infrastructure out at such a significant pace and utilization is going up and we're still trying to keep up with, to our first story, the AI bubble, all of this infrastructure being built out.

28:05If it happens every two years, I think it's kind of in the bucket of acceptable. If you look at energy in California, I would lose my energy in the peninsula. Gosh, in San Mateo, Palo Alto, you'd lose your electricity five times a year, six times a year. So I'm more worried about the electrical grid than I am about the data centers. The data centers, they've done really well at distributing. And when something like this happens, It's typically some router. A human makes a stupid setting. They have to roll it back. But because AWS is so big, you know, that's funny. So here's your meme. There's a famous image of a series of blocks that are stacked up in a very precarious fashion and held up by one single block.

28:50And often this is with an arrow pointing at it, Jason, saying, you know, random open source repo that's maintained by one person in like, you know, Sweden. In this case, the whole Internet is being held up by the block entitled US East 1. And without that block, everything came a-tumbling down. It's what it is. It's not a big deal. It's a good reminder for people that they can go do other things in life. Yeah. Another reminder for people. If you want to use Claude like we do, of course, you can go to claude.ai slash twist, and there's a discount there for you. I think it's 50 % off for three months.

29:18What is it? That's pretty darn good. But we live and die by our AI usage internally. So thanks to our friends over at Anthropic. It is 50 % off. Twist listeners get 50 % off their first three months of Claude Pro. Just go to claude.ai slash twist to get started. All right, Lon, you were in the group chat. There was a really large series of protests. Yes. Are they protests? No kings. They estimate around 7 million people came out over the weekend in various U.S. cities. We had one. It was not that large, but we had one here in Austin, downtown. Big ones in Minneapolis. I think Providence, actually, I saw some tweets from Providence, Alex, that the largest public gathering in maybe the history of Providence, Rhode Island over the weekend.

30:07Yes. Well, I'll just say that I don't think Trump's going to win Rhode Island in 2028. Well, every call you miss is a missed opportunity, whether you're hiring somebody or you've got to do customer support or you've got inbound leads. So stop losing money and sign up for Quo. You know Quo, they used to be called Open Phone, and they've got the number one business phone system in the world, allowing your team to collaborate on incoming calls and text in one unified inbox. Quo is making the most out of AI tools. Now, every single call triggers an automated summary, of course, with recommended follow-up steps, and their AI agent will even answer the phone when you're not around, routing important messages to the right person and letting you know when an important new lead has reached out.

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31:26This goes to, you know, what I said on the All In podcast two episodes ago that got a little bit of, well, I'd say I've probably got more feedback on that episode since Trump was on or J.D. Vance or maybe the Larry Summers Ezra Klein debate club. You know, all those episodes got a lot of feedback in my DMs. You know, people calling me, texting me. And, you know, I just gave a basic overview here. And politics a little outside of our remit here. But the 2.0 agenda, you know, majority of Americans agree with those items. They shut the border, lower taxes, stop wars. People like that kind of stuff.

32:06A lot of the moderates who shifted over to support Trump and went to the right, they were part of that Trump 2.0, but the Trump 1.0 agenda, which is, you know, I'll just generally say chaos, lawfare, and maybe a little bit of violence and federalism where the federal government is taking on too much, that tweaks people. And I think that's what we saw this weekend. So it's perfectly timed with, you know, happening two weeks after me sort of saying, get back to Trump 2.0, or you're going to lose the midterms. And that seems like it's happening, but there's another angle here, Lon. Yeah, the technology angle.

32:44Well, I was on Blue Sky over the weekend, as I as I so often am checking in on what everyone was saying. And I saw an image that kept being shared and was setting off a lot of discussion and debate. Let's take a look at it. So this is, I feel, a very obviously AI generated image that's kind of playing off of all of the costumes and the funny shenanigans we were seeing from all of these protests. If you look closely, you don't even have to look that closely. There are a number of tells the the flagpole is sort of weirdly bent. The if you look at the flag, the bottom of the flag does not actually line up with the pole.

33:23That unicorn is sort of standing in an odd position that no human would stand. The frog has three eyes. Not all of the signs in the background make sense or are legible. Even that big peace and joy banner precariously swinging between two buildings, there's no strings or anything holding it to either of those buildings. So to me, at a glance. Lon, is this a Gemini logo right here in the corner that people might have, you know, noticed? Correct. Oh my God, it is. That is a VO Gemini. Obviously, this was an AI-generated image, and yet it was being shared very widely on Blue Sky by a lot of people who did not seem to notice that it was AI.

34:03In fact, Kara Swisher, friend of the pod, she shared this on Blue Sky without any indication that this was an AI-generated image. And in fact, I shared some of these in our group chat, some of these people were reacting like, well, apparently that image is AI generated. So I took it down. And it's like, to me, this is really worrisome. Like if you can't look at this image and immediately figure out this is animated, we're we are cooked. I really feel like that's a very bad sign. We're one shotted. Yeah. People are just no longer. They're no longer being discriminated. And it really made me think, you know what Sora is doing, where anytime you output a Sora video, it has that watermark.

34:52And here there is a Gemini watermark, but it's not doing any good. I feel like these companies need to be more serious about making sure that any output that you create. The word Gemini should be on it. It should say Gemini and it should have it in the same. Yes, because Sora is it says S-O-R-A and has the logo, I believe. Right. And now I have seen there is another app that people are already installing on their phone that will remove the Sora logo. So there's always going to be workarounds. I mean, that's just the nature of the Internet. There's always a game of whackable. But 95 percent of people using these apps would just leave the watermark in place.

35:30And it would go a long way towards helping the Seth Abramson's and Kara Swishers of the world who want to share every image that appeals to them that comes across their feed to be like, hang on a minute. This is fake. Just make sure you know before you post it that it is in fact fake. People are so not smart at times. So I saw this image on X and it immediately tripped all the hairs on the back of my neck because it appeared overly centrally focused as if the entire shot was staged, which AI loves to do because it's making something for you, not showing you reality. And then I zoomed in on one of the signs and went, yep, AI and moved on.

36:08Lon, that's why I was so surprised to see it today in our chats, because apparently everyone else got it wrong. So, Jason, in a world in which open source AI models from China are able to do nearly everything that the Geminis and the Soros can do, will adding those watermarks actually help the problem here? Or is there not really a solution in a world where open source AI is free range and powerful? You know, there's a Michael Crichton novel, I believe it was Disclosure, which was made into a major motion picture. And the premise of it was, even back then, and producer Claude will tell us what year that book came out and give us a little summary of it, specifically around videos.

36:48And the premise of this excellent book, and Michael Crichton was just such a great author because he would make these real page turners based upon some new technology and how they might in a procedural, you know, thriller. or procedural slash thriller. He kind of, he worked in both those genres. He, he nailed it because they were like, oh my God, this video is, I don't want to spoil it for people, but I think it's been out long enough that I can, Lon. I don't know what the rules are. I think I can spoil it. So basically this, it actually also predates the Me Too movement because the premise is Demi Moore is harassing Michael Douglas.

37:37And they have video of people coming in and out of people's offices, and it's been manipulated. And it was, the entire premise of the film was that you could see a video and it was not true. Now this is 1994. That's 30 years ago, 31 years ago. He saw this coming. That video could be edited and it could change reality. and people could go to jail, lose their jobs based on it. And the obvious place this is going is, you could start riots based on these videos. If somebody were to release a video of Rodney King or a Rodney King-esque video, that video came out, Los Angeles burned. And so we need to be really thoughtful about this.

38:26Probably where we're going to get to is nobody will trust social media. and nor should they, nor should they ever have. And so that's where this will come from. Social media, citizen journalism, journalism by organizations that don't have insurance and more than 100 or 200 employees and something to lose, they're going to become more valuable. The institutions of journalism, if they can let go of their bias and stop looking at themselves as the resistance or, you know, the retribution group on both sides. And they can actually say and make, they could literally make their living just saying, this is fake, here's the source of it.

39:09In other words, Snopes, the function of Snopes, which was to find Jimmy, you know, the kid from the peanut butter commercial didn't die from Pop Rocks or whatever it is, the Wheaties commercial kid. Like, it was trying to get rid of urban legends, you know, that existed for a decade. Now we're going to need the equivalent of Snopes or community notes, which I think Instagram and threads have now are also working on. We're just going to need real time fact checking sources. And people are going to need to stop retweeting things that fit their narrative. That's what's occurring here. People are so tribal that the first thing they do is retweet things that fit their narrative.

39:54and so I've stopped retweeting this stuff or you'll see in a lot of my recent tweets the last year I'll say if this is true I've seen that if this is true here's my opinion and I literally did it for those robots remember I showed the robots of the port there was a Chinese port video of like robots going around and I said if this isn't AI and this is in fact China we should really go and then somebody immediately said oh yeah that's a port in the United States and I was like that was the port of LA I don't think it was. I don't know. I don't know. Well, welcome to hell, everybody. This is where we are.

40:28I still don't know. And where this is the slop issue. This is the same thing that happened to me when we were having debates about the southern border. And they were like, people are streaming across the southern border. And then people were sharing videos of people coming across the border. And it was like, well, wait, that was a border crossing under Clinton or under Obama. And I saw people correcting and saying, no, no, here, community notes was pointing. That's from this story so people were just finding videos and the problem is there are incentives like getting followers and getting revenue share on social media getting followers and then putting ads on and it's not just x it's all the platforms they would reward you for publishing this stuff it doesn't matter if it's correct or not it just matters if it trends so this is a really uh difficult spot where now it turns out a friend of mine elon musk went to the border and i was texting with him and he's like it's true people are streaming across the border it's nuts and i was like and he showed me pictures before he publicly tweeted them and i was like yep people are streaming across the border and that was before the border crosser the board the border crossing data had come out and we were looking at it and like this doesn't make any sense like look it's been the same the same the same across multiple presidencies multiple parties and then it's the same and same for biden then all of a sudden it's spiked up and i was like i don't know if this is true or not and i gave this disclaimer um turned out in that case it was true people across the border there are some good projects that are happening jason to help establish ground truth one of them is are you familiar with usa facts.org i have seen that is it partisan in some way or not no it's not partisan indeed it's run by um it's founded by steve balmer the former microsoft ceo and multi-kajillionaire um also it's a great place to go to learn stuff because if you click on government spending, we talk about that on the show quite a lot, they put together this awesome chart and they really do a lot of just really fantastic information on what's going on.

42:26So here's immigration channels into the US, authorized and not. And I do think that this type of thing is going to become incredibly important. The problem is this is entirely predicated on government data. So it still has to lean on some other authority to have it standing. So as long as government stats remain uncooked, then we're good. We'll still have some ground truth. But when it comes to, you know, no offense to boomers, but boomers and AI slop, I think the ship has sailed. So maybe we're just going to have a post-truth senior voting block lawn. And for everyone else, we'll just have to look at the charts.

43:00Yeah. I mean, I think it's sort of done. I feel like to me, there isn't the will. Like people don't care if the thing they're posting is true or not. They just want to post it. They want to be right. They want to win the argument. They want to share this thing that they're ideologically aligned with. I think we've reached a moment in our culture where the idea of being fact-based is sort of over. And people are like, I just want my side to sound good. I don't care about whether it's real or not. Pull up this producer, Claude, of Disclosure. I just want to read the synapses here. Sure. Disclosure, published in 1994, is a techno thriller set at a fictional computer hardware manufacturing company in Seattle.

43:48The protagonist, Tom Sanders, is the head of advanced products manufacturing at Digitom. He expects to be promoted to run the advanced products division after the company's merger, but the position instead goes to his ex-girlfriend, Meredith Johnson, who has recently relocated from the company's headquarters in California. when Meredith calls Tom into her office to ostensibly, ostensibly to discuss CD-ROM drives, discuss a CD-ROM drive, she makes an aggressive sexual advance towards him. When Tom spurns her advances, Meredith angrily vows to make him pay. The plot then concerns Tom's struggle to prove that he was actually sexually harassed by his female employer, and she falsely accuses him of harassment.

44:27Instead, the novel incorporates elements of computer industry sabotage, corporate mergers, stock options, and technology to help Tom clear his reputation and save his career. The book explores themes of power dynamics, workplace abuse, in a high technology corporate setting. It was based on a true story of a male employee being sexually harassed by a female executive with Crichton reportedly basing it on a 1988 case. I don't know if you guys remember this, but it was also about VR. Like in the movie, especially, they really play this up, that the CD-ROM they're developing is a virtual reality thing that allowed you to like go into your computer and look through the files and organize things like as if you were there in like Tron.

45:07So it was, Crichton was always trying to be a little ahead. Like it was really trying to be cutting edge. But I mean, just that description is like 20 and 30 years later, all that stuff is, yeah, a big part of our dialogue in pop culture and in the news. There was also something going on with AI, speaking of AI. somebody made a trader that's beating everybody the holy grail of ai is of course to build an ai that can beat the market and that was the same thing with machine learning or with quants and algorithms so hit me with that one because that's fascinating yeah i found this now it's only been running for a couple of days jason but what the company in of one has built is a really fun game that pits a lot of the leading ai models against one another so it gave each ai model ten thousand dollars they can only invest in crypto perpetuals on the hyper liquid exchange and their objective that they were given is to quote maximize risk adjusted returns so who do we have here gpt5 we have claude sonic 4.5 gemini 2.5 pro grok 4 deep seek chat 3.1 and then quinn 3 max and then there's just bitcoin's performance now we only have a couple days of data here jason but you can see that google and open ai and quinn are losing and grok deep seek and uh sonnet 4.5 are in the black and they're all beating bitcoin uh but the idea here according to n of one is that alpha go i believe was the model that google trained a deep mind to beat go and chess their idea here is do we need to create something net new to beat the markets or can out of the box algorithms today

46:54I'm not going to lie. Like this is a nerd's dream. What's so great about this is there is a real world, there's real world stakes here and it plays off the competition between the LLMs and there, I'm assuming they're all been given the same instruction set. so um this is a really interesting approach they've taken what would be very interesting is if people could enter their own horse into this race with ten thousand dollars and make this available to anyone so the three of us could come up with an instruction set because the prompt and the data in the context window is obviously got some major part to this So how cool would that be if we could say, you know what, we have our own instance of Grok or DeepSeek 3, or we're going to use the one that's available, you know, whatever cloud service.

47:56But we have our own proprietary instruction set we're giving it. And then you have to reveal your instruction set when the final, you know, time period ends. And that would actually be an interesting one. You could make it a race to see who can return, who can double their money first. I like that. So a time-bounded challenge. But that does incentivize risk-taking, Jason. Sure, you're going all in. Oh, I see. So you want to know which AI not only is the smartest, but also has, what do we say now? We don't say cojones anymore. You can say cojones. Yeah, sure. Okay, all right. I'm literally the twist PC police.

48:41There's no more. I think, you know, that's. Yes. All right. Well, keep an eye out. If you want to take a look at that, the website is, I think it's theinofone.com for the background. And then you can take a look at the Challenge Yourself Live. Fantastic. All right, Lonnie, Donnie, you're up. All right. We got to talk about this. So there is a sequel. Aaron Sorkin is currently working on a follow-up to the film, The Social Network. Of course, that was directed by David Fincher. Sorkin is directing the sequel himself. It's called The Social Reckoning. It's coming out next year, set 17 years after The Social Network.

49:17This one's going to be about the Facebook files. But Jeremy Strong, a succession vet, was amazing in The Apprentices, where I call him last year. He's going to be starring as Mark Zuckerberg, aged up from Jesse Eisenberg's classic performance in The Social Network. He did an interview on a red carpet this weekend. I believe it's for the Bruce Springsteen movie that Jeremy Allen White, who's also in this one, was in. I'm pretty sure. Don't quote me on that. It might have been an Academy event, but Jeremy Strong was on a red carpet. He was asked about playing Mark Zuckerberg in a film. Okay, let me hear it.

49:49And here is the video of his response. Now, Mark Zuckerberg, tell me, how do you even begin to play Mark Zuckerberg? You know, I'm approaching it the way I approach everything else. With empathy, with objectivity, with care. What made you want to do the role? I'm utterly fascinated by the material. It's one of the great scripts I've ever read. I've made two films with Aaron. I mean, I'd like to put my feet to the fire. Will you reach out tomorrow? No comment. No comment. Are you on Facebook? You know what? I'm not on any social media. No secret account. No secret account. so for those of you don't get the joke here he's doing zuck right in that moment yeah he's got that red carpet yeah that that was the academy there was an academy motion picture academy benefit over the weekend you can tell by the carpet behind him it's got oscars on it so this was i think that's variety's video this is yes this was a yeah that's variety on the red carpet at this academy fundraiser over the weekend but yes we pulled a few videos of mark zuckerberg speaking recently.

51:03And you can see that clearly Jeremy Strong has been studying the videotape and trying to master Zuckerberg speech patterns. I think the one of Zuckerberg on Theo Vaughn, if we could pull that one up, is the best example I could find. Here's the real Mark Zuckerberg answering the question about being so clearly on. Theo Vaughn's hilarious. All right, here we go. Theo Vaughn. You know, it's an interesting question. I just think that there are a bunch of factors here that you need to peel apart um i think someone can be i think socially perceptive and understand kind of what is going on in social dynamics and what is have a lot of empathy and care about other people while still being quite awkward in how they communicate and oh my god so that's what i I really wanted you guys to do these like five seconds back and forth.

52:05So when we cut this into the actual show, just go back and forth five seconds. Okay. Well, let's play the other one now. This is Mark from his Horizon Worlds recent presentation at the 2025 Developer Conference. Here's another clip from Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe we can try to go back and forth a little bit. It has also been really neat to see how many people are using Quest to watch video content. You know, it's just a lot more immersive. So we think of this story. The pauses and the... Yes. There was that one line where it goes, we think people are changing the way they watch video content. And that's what Strong is doing.

52:51that like weird pause in the middle of the sentence thing. Like I'm going to start my thought and then I'm going to finish. But you're not sure if I'm really done. And if I'm at the end of my sentence, I'm going to, you know, think about the end of the sentence. Mark Zuckerberg is clearly a man who is not accustomed to being interrupted. Because if you leave gaps that large in your speech, normally people jump in. Yes. But if you're worth several hundred billion dollars, apparently, you can just do it like this. You know, I was thinking about... So some people might... If we're reading from the docket, you know...

53:42I think... Look, okay. You know what? The SNL sketch where they were doing the delicious dish, the NPR ladies, and they were just like, And all of everybody was like, so in my opinion, the needs you need for a great barbecue are meat, bread, and sauce. You know, like very thoughtful, very long pauses between everything. With a so and an um. Go back to Jeremy Strong. Give me the Jeremy Strong one more time. Okay, after this, I'm going to run my Zuckerberg defense strategy here. Go ahead, give me the Jeremy. Let's play Jeremy. Give me the Jeremy one more time. But skip to after the question. Yeah, here we go.

54:20All right, we're not. You know, I'm approaching it the way I approach everything else. Everything else. With empathy, with objectivity, with fear. What made you want to do the role? I'm utterly fascinated by the material. And I don't think this is how Jeremy Strong normally talks. He doesn't. Also, who knows Jeremy Strong was three feet tall? He does not talk like that. He's trolling the interview right now. he is in full character. This is why the guy, the, the, the other two or three stars from succession couldn't stand this guy because he wouldn't break character. And I can imagine when you're trying to read the notes or talk about the shot or, you know, trying to change the lighting.

55:08If the guy won't break out of Zuckerberg. Yeah. Brian Cox is going to choke this guy. Brian Cox, the star, the other star of succession who played the dad, He famously had an interview where he was like, Jeremy's a brilliant actor, but he's impossible to work with. And it's very frustrating. And like there are I've seen Jeremy Allen White, who also is in this movie coming up, the Social Network movie. He's the guy from The Bear. He's Carmy from The Bear. He's playing Springsteen in that new one. And he said there are some actors. He talks about this on Hot Ones this week. There are some actors who on set, they could just be gabbing with you between shots.

55:43Well, how the kids do and what you do this weekend. And then as soon as the camera goes on, boom, they're in character, they're ready to go. And there are other actors that they need to like warm up and they need to be in that mindset all day to make it work. And I guess it is hard for those two kinds of actors to work together. But Jeremy Strong is definitely one of those. Like he's Kendall Roy all day on set. Don't talk to him unless you want to talk to Kendall. Who is Jeremy Allen White playing in the social network? I got to know who he's playing. Is he playing Peter Thiel? Here's the capsule review, the summary we have.

56:20A young Facebook engineer named Francis Hagen, played by Oscar winner Mikey Madison from Enora, teams up with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horowitz, Jeremy Allen White, on a risky mission to bring attention to Facebook's biggest secrets. So they're playing Mikey Madison's the whistleblower who leaks the Facebook files to a reporter. Jeremy Allen White is the reporter and then Jeremy Strong is Zuckerberg. So they're going to have some like heat level De Niro and Pacino scenes together. I'm predicting. Correct. Where he's interviewing him. Love it. I cannot wait for this movie. I haven't watched the social network since I saw it.

57:02I don't know if it holds up or not. Oh, it holds up. It's really good. I think, yeah. Yeah, Sorkin's dialogue is a bit, yeah. Purple? No, it's like, it's almost a bit too dramatic for my taste. He's a playwright and he comes from that world and it's very theatrical. Like A Few Good Men was Aaron Sorkin's big breakthrough. And it's like all of his stuff has that, like you want the truth, you can't handle the truth. Handle the truth. I've never been in a conversation that sounds, that's literally, and I've been involved in a lot of amazing conversations in this life, and none of them have ever reached Sorkin levels of dialogue.

57:46Yeah, it is theatric. But I mean, the West Wing has that quality too. I was going to say. Is it very realistic or is it what we wish Washington was like? And I feel like that's, Veep is the realistic version of Washington. West Wing is the aspirational one. if you want to be a mensch you want to be a super mensch you know everybody always says to me alex jacow god provide so much value for startups uh you know your programs that you do found a university you're always available for a meeting or uh you know the podcast itself to get people inspired is there anything i could do for you and generally no unless you can get me a couple of extra ski days or Nick's courtside tickets, I'm good.

58:31And I can get those things myself. But what I can't do is I can't go write a review on Apple podcasts or post really thoughtful comments on Spotify. But you can do that. You can send us a picture of it and you can email it to reviews at this week in startups.com. Email us at reviews at this week in startups.com. And we'll give you a shout out at the end of the show. Thanks so much. And we'll see you all next time, bye bye!