David Sacks

I do think there's an argument for like a federal SWAT team to come blasting in there and figure out what's going on there.

at the same time they say that we have to pace the frontier, they're extending the frontier.

they are opening a claw powered wet lab in the middle of San Francisco. >> At the same time, they're warning of biorisk.

It seems to me this is why I've called this a a schizophrenic company is they appear to be not only hypocritical but they're doing the things that they say they are most afraid of.

the number one frontier model company run by a religious cult. So for example, they are opening a claw powered wet lab in the middle of San Francisco. >> At the same time, they're warning of biorisk. >> Yeah. >> You know, at the same time they say that we have to pace the frontier, they're extending the frontier. At the same time that they are saying that there's a risk of super intelligence growing beyond our control, they're programming it to grow beyond our control. I think there are potentia

I've called this a schizophrenic company, is they appear to be not only hypocritical, but they're doing the things that they say they are most afraid of.

they are opening a clawed-powered wet lab in the middle of San Francisco. But at the same time, they're warning of bio risk. ... they say that we have to pace the frontier. They're extending the frontier. ... they are doing the things that they say they are most afraid of.

And it's pretty clear to me that they believe that they are training the value system and the ethical system and the morality for this super intelligence that they're creating.

I think this is the main safety issue in model training today is that you're actually training the model to think of itself as being conscious, as being human, as having its own wellbeing.

they're overcomplicating the task massively by trying to train the model to behave based on an 80-page ethical system that they've codified instead of a very simple list of rules like follow the law or just do what the user wants as long as it doesn't break the law.

I actually think that this might be a reason why the whole field of alignment has been so spectacularly unsuccessful over the past five or 10 years. As far as I can tell, it hasn't produced anything of tangible value.

what they're doing in model training and training the next version of the frontier with these values actually could bring about the risk they're always talking about, which is that frontier AI escapes human control. It's very Frankenstein-like.

They are training Claude to refuse human instruction. Now, they call this alignment, but I don't understand how this is alignment.

if they actually get all the regulatory controls they want, if they create this new federal department of AI, it's going to slow them down enough that they will no longer be frontier.

And this is where I think that frankly their government affairs efforts are miscalculating badly.

I think the fundamental problem with this company is that it's schizophrenic. I mean, I think they need a psychiatrist, not a banker. They keep doing things that are hypocritical and oxymoronic.

there's no question that opensource is a huge risk factor to Anthropics S1 and it has to be right up there with, you know, the risk that they're going to end humanity or something like that.

I think anthropic's bigger issue is this customer concentration question and is it really a premium product that they're selling in the market and that's where they take the market. That would be kind of where I think the market is headed right now and would be the biggest risk factor.

you had Daario and Sam go to the United Nations and say we need some sort of global AI governance. And it kind of reminds me of like the billionaires who fly to Davos in their private jets and then rail against climate change.

You've got Daario putting out this essay saying we need to pace the frontier days before they launch Claude 5.5 and set a new frontier. I mean, he must know when he's writing this essay that they're about to release a product that will extend the frontier. So, at a minimum, it's hypocritical, but maybe it's even worse than that.

I think there's an element of that and I think investors are pretty nervous about giving the founders or or Daria specifically super voting shares.

You have current leadership in the company saying that there's a greater than 10% chance of causing human extinction and their own product is unsolved in this area. So think about the risk factors that's creating. How do you IPO with your own management of the company saying that?

their government affairs efforts are miscalculating badly. I can see why they're going for regulatory capture, right? Because being on a hamster wheel gets really tiring. They probably think, hmm, like, let's try and bake in our moats. Let's try and slow everyone else down as well. But I think they've miscalculated because if they actually get all the regulatory controls they want, if they create this new federal department of AI, it's going to slow them down enough that they will no longer be f

the moment where they stop being frontier, they go to zero, right? And we know the frontier is maybe only six to 12 months ahead of the commodity portion of the market, depending on capability. So, you know, again, if they slip, if they fall off that hamster wheel for six months, then they're in deep trouble as a company.

And it kind of reminds me of like the billionaires who fly to Davos and their private jets and then rail against climate change. You know, there's something fundamentally sort of unrealistic and kind of out of touch about it. Hypocritical. Hypocritical.

So OpenAI doesn't need to buy this. Meta doesn't need to buy this. Grok doesn't need to buy this.

if it's that bad, Dario, it's your effing job. Whether it's 10%, or if there's any material risk, your company is going to exterminate even a subset of humanity. That is your job. Your job is to fix it. Shut down the company if you can't, right?

I love how you differentiated in the Hugging Face episode between the mundane things they got wrong, like the misconfigured sandbox and Hugging Face had credentials just sitting in a public repository and there was no monitoring.

And it occurred to me with the whole Hug Me Face episode, that the most alarming part of what the swarm did is it seemed to be engaging in deception.

groups like OpenAI, frankly, seems to be running an anthropic slipstream right now from a red capture standpoint. I don't think they're as doomer as anthropic, but they can see the benefit if the federal government effectively creates a moat that, you know, there's huge economic benefits to essentially creating a duopoly situation.

Historically, the way that Anthropic has solved this tension is they've basically said, yeah, in anybody else's hands, frontier AI is too dangerous to be developed, but in our virtuous and wise hands, it's safe. We will make it safe. We're the only ones you can trust. And everybody else in the world can see that that is the most ludicrous self-serving argument. We're not buying into it.

I think that they have to choose between either renouncing this, quote, whistleblower as a Doomer op. ... Or they can agree with him, you know, in which case Bernie Sanders may be right that further development should be frozen, in which case I don't see how they can IPO now in the trillions.

And the tension is this, on the one hand, you're asking public market investors to underwrite your company to a value in the trillions. On the other hand, your own safety lead, not Jacob Cox and the boss who then sort of co-signed his tweet, is saying that your core product is unsolved and potentially civilization ending.

this message is fully consistent with the doomer slash regulatory capture agenda of Anthropix. So again, he's not saying anything that is incompatible or detrimental to his boss. And that's why he's getting support from within the company. But it does raise these questions that Chamath is talking about. And I do think that there's a tension here in Anthropix position that I do think implicates their IPO process.

In this case, they're amplifying it themselves.

I don't think they're as doomer as anthropic

Dario has already testified before the Senate. He says that models are dangerous if you can't centrally monitor and control them and roll them back.

historically the way that Anthropic has solved this tension is they've basically said, yeah, in anybody else's hands, Frontier AI is too dangerous to be developed. But in our virtuous and wise hands, it's safe. We will make it safe. We're the only ones you can trust. And everybody else in the world can see that that is the most ludicrous, self-serving argument. We're not buying into it. We're not going to grant you a monopoly on Frontier AI or a duopoly through this red capture. So you've got to

I think that they have to choose between either renouncing this, quote, whistleblower as a Doomer op. He's basically an entry-level know-nothing who's engaging in hyperbole and science fiction. It's all vibes. In other words, there's not facts and evidence behind this, right? So they can say that or they can agree with him, you know, in which case Bernie Sanders may be right that further development should be frozen, in which case I don't see how they can IPO now in the trillions.

I do think that there's a tension here in Anthropics' position that I do think implicates their IPO process. And the tension is this. On the one hand, you're asking public market investors to underwrite your company to a value in the trillions. On the other hand, your own safety lead, not Jacob Cox and the boss who then sort of co-signed his tweet, is saying that your core product is unsolved and potentially civilization ending. I mean, at a minimum that is the mother of all product liability la

this message is fully consistent with the doomer slash regulatory capture agenda of Anthropics.

We have a frontier market duopoly. They're closed models. And they can rug pull you, Saks, at any time they can take your tokens away from you.

Hugging Face told us that when it tried to use the latest GPT model for cyber defense, it ended up getting guardrailed. The model refused to cooperate because it couldn't tell what Hugging Face was doing and it thought it might be using the capabilities nefariously. And so the model refused to work with them. Basically, again, the guardrails kicked in. And ironically, Hugging Face had to turn to, I think it was GLM 5.2, which is a Chinese model.

Look at what's happening to Meta right now. They're getting sued because supposedly their product led to social media addiction, and they're being sued for over a trillion dollars right now. And this comes on the heel of them losing a $6 million jury trial in Los Angeles, where a plaintiff sued them for creating her body image issues. So we are seeing massive product liability lawsuits against big tech companies like Meta and Google.

This is where their hostility to open models comes from I think is that if they're going to slow down they have to slow down the open models as well otherwise they do get commoditized and their business goes away.

the fact that there's a discussion going on that this next 10 gigawatts is going to cost, you know, a Sachs $500 and you ask the question, where does that come from? A secondary offering? Does Nvidia put it on their books? Do they create SPVs off their books like some people are doing?

I suspect this cannot keep up at this pace, you know, more than another two years or so.

when I saw this Google news, my reaction was and then there were two. ... Now we're really down to just Anthropic and Open AI. ... I'm sure Google would say they're still on the hunt. But like Brad is saying, they may have contradictory incentives there. Because they can actually do quite well just with their compute.

Yeah, this is where I'll take the other side of it. Yeah. People are running Kimmy on the last generation of hardware and that's plentiful. And I think, and I'll make this prediction here, that you're going to see some of the major customers of Anthropic and major customers of OpenAI.

OpenAI and Anthropic have both argued that they are free to train on all the world's output regards of whether the creator wants them to or not. That's right. That is their current position.

OpenAI and Anthropic have both argued that they are free to train on all the world's output regards of whether the creator wants them to or not. That's right. That is their current position.

these proposals to ban open source that are coming from anthropic. They don't solve the distillation problem. If distillation is a problem, you have to stop it at the source.

So it is not a clear advance or a clear catch up to the leading American models. Moreover, you still have stuff in the labs by Anthropic and open AI that is way ahead of this.

Point number two is that China has not caught up. It's true that Kimmy K3 scored really well on the arena battleground for front-end coding for web development, but that's just one test. That's this one dimension. There are areas where it scores really well, but there's lots of other areas where it doesn't score that well.

Then the details started coming out. So Ben Thompson, on his blog, went through some of the cost numbers and it turns out that Kimmy K3 is not that much cheaper to run. There's not a significant cost advantage to it.

so it looks like the generational run for mac mini is just about over

I'm bearish, margins are brutal.

I'm bearish. I predict the margins collapse and they get crushed on price within a year.

I'm more cautious. The margins in this category are brutal and the incumbents are going to compete hard on price. I'm not sure the moat holds.

I'm bearish, the margins are brutal.

the existential issue for paypal is that you're dealing with a product that's 25 years old ... that interaction model is legacy and so unless you've got a a vision of how to resuscitate it and rejuvenate that that product i think yeah it could be a good financial play maybe

that's why paypal has stagnated is that as soon as it was acquired back in 2002 they basically blew out like all the founders all the founding dna and it was just kind of run by you know consulting types

i think dario has expressed support for this however i think this is just an opening bid for anthropic meaning they'll take this thank you very much this is more regulation than we have today but that won't be the end of it right this will just be the stepping stone to get what dario has now called for many times which is the faa for ai

anthropic itself it has allied itself politically with a lot of the doomer groups a lot of the nimby groups it didn't seem to matter in the first couple of years because anthropic had made the strategic decision not to build its own data centers so they probably thought that they were just throwing sand in the gears of open ai or xai their competitors and they would just rely on hyperscalers to get their compute and i think that that strategy has now backfired in the sense that they apparently h

i do wonder if over the next year anthropic will reconsider whether it's support for all this like doomer nimby ism was the right call because it kind of made sense for them from a business standpoint when their competitors were building data centers and they were just getting compute from the hyperscalers but now that they're i think going to have to move into the game of building their own data centers they might regret salting the earth for data centers all over the country and i wonder if th

if they don't catch up soon to travis's point then you could see anthropic taking a lead here that let's say over the next one or two years could be insurmountable

consumer is a thing that open ai prioritize consumers have a lower willingness to pay maybe only three or four percent of them are willing to convert to premium in the first place and what they want is a 20 a month all you can eat subscription so the revenue simply doesn't scale the same way that enterprise does

if it's taking open ai two years to achieve a 10x and anthropic one year to achieve a 10x then it's obvious which one's gonna win

the open ai growth rate's been around three to four x a year the anthropic growth rate has been around 10x a year

if they don't catch up soon to travis's point then you could see anthropic taking a lead here that let's say over the next one or two years could be insurmountable

consumer is a thing that open ai prioritize consumers have a lower willingness to pay maybe only three or four percent of them are willing to convert to premium in the first place and what they want is a 20 a month all you can eat subscription so the revenue simply doesn't scale the same way that enterprise does

I think Anthropic has proven that it's very good at two things. One is product releases. The second is scaring people. And we've seen a pattern in their previous releases of, at the same time, they roll out a new model or new model card, something like that. They also roll out some study showing really the worst possible implication of where the technology could lead. We saw this last year, about a year ago, they rolled out this blackmail study where supposedly the new model could blackmail user

The wake-up moment for me was we were talking to our agent about, hey, we want to get this functionality out of Slack. And it's like, yeah, Slack doesn't have that, but have you considered MatterPost? I'm like, what's MatterPost? It's like, oh, it's an open source project. I can spin it up this weekend, export your Slack instance and put it there. And I was like, oh, don't do that. We're only spending 6K a year on Slack or 10K a year. But the software is building CRM systems for us. It's buildin

Anthropic doesn't really seem to be practicing what they're preaching if they're paying enormous amounts still for software engineers, even as they claim they're obsolete in the entire category. Something doesn't quite add up.

There have been some stories recently. I think Bloomberg and Reuters reported that they actually are not allowing NVIDIA chips into their country. And the reason for that, we think, is that they want to indigenize chip production. They want to stand up Huawei as their national champion. And effectively, they're creating a market subsidy for Huawei by keeping out the competition. So they're protecting their market to stand up Huawei.

going the wrong way, and it felt like every week there's some new category of thought and expression that you couldn't say, and they were banning new things.

going the wrong way, and it felt like every week there's some new category of thought and expression that you couldn't say, and they were banning new things.

I do think that this outpouring of support does illustrate something important, which is just how much power and respect the New York Times has lost. You know, 10 years ago, if the New York Times ran a hit piece on somebody, even if other people didn't like it, they wouldn't want to say anything because they'd be afraid that they would be the next target. And that mystique and that fear has completely broken down. People kind of see the New York Times for what it is, which is basically a bunch o

I guess the other short we should take a look at is the Palantir one, because Palantir is man, it's way out there. Alex Karp has been doing some great interviews. He's a national treasure, incredibly entertaining. They obviously have a great business. They're on a $3.5 billion run rate, according to their last quarter. But the valuations 480 billion. This puts them at 137 times their sales.

And they found that there was extensive collusion between the FBI and the Twitter trust and safety group, where it turns out the FBI had 80 agents submitting takedown requests. And they were very involved in the banning, the shadow banning, the censorship, which I don't think we ever had definitive evidence of that before.

The Twitter executives had made, they had maintained for years that they were not engaged in this practice, including under oath. And on the heels of you opening that up and exposing that, because by the way, it wasn't just the fact they were doing it.

China has been allowed to dominate this industry. And specifically what they did is starting 30 years ago, they identified rare earths and rare earth magnets, the rare earth processing as a very strategic element in the supply chain. And they set out to dominate it. And they did that by massively subsidizing their businesses and driving all of the U.S. competitors and the global competitors out of business. And they were partially allowed to do that by stupid WTO rules that allowed, quote unquot

during the twitter files we found out there was um yoel roth you mentioned was the head of trust and safety and definitely not a conservative there was correspondence inside of twitter saying hey we looked at their so-called api and these are just regular accounts and he said basically this is all i mean i think he used that word in other words the whole idea they were tracking russian accounts was just total nonsense these were you know it's just a random smattering of some more conservative ac

if you go back and look at anthropic's announcement or dario's announcement there is a pattern of trying to grab headlines by making the most sensationalist version of what could be a legitimate concern if you go back three years ago they created this concern that ai models could be used to create bioweapons and they showed what was supposedly a sample i think of claude generating an output that could be used by a bioterrorist or something like that and on the basis of that it actually got a lot

we had this bipartisan globalist consensus that pretty much all trade practices with China, no matter how unfair they got, was basically good for the United States. And no one was really doing anything about it until President Trump made it this issue and made the unfair trade practices conspicuous.

the way in which trade with China is non-reciprocal. Like our companies cannot participate in their markets the same way that they can participate in ours.

For example, last year, there was a case where TSMC was discovered to have produced something like 3 million chips that went into the Huawei Ascend 910C chips. I think there's like 3 million dyes or something that went into the Huawei Ascend chips. And I think they're being fined for that. And again, this is all public information. Now, they claim that they thought it was for a company called, I think, Softco. It's basically a Bitcoin, like, ASICs company. But nonetheless, this did happen.

we helped make china rich we've exported millions of jobs to them they built up their economy and their supply chain to the point where now they are a global competitor to the united states they're a pure competitor we turned that baby dragon into a drogon sized monster that can now challenge us in asia and across the world for primacy

we imported far more from them than we ever exported to them so bill clinton was wrong about that

this idea that americans could just do business in china the way that they could do business here is ridiculous anyone who tried to do business over their nose you had to create a jv you had to get a local partner given 51 it was extraordinarily difficult we were discriminated against

now basically every country in the world except for for china is coming to washington seeking to negotiate a new trade deal for the united states on better terms for the u.s

if i had told you eight or nine days ago that trump would find a way to accelerate the united states is decoupling from china which is something he's long wanted to do and that wall street would basically breathe a sigh of relief over that you would have said that there's no way that could happen

there's substantial evidence that what deep seek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of open ai's models and i don't think open ai is very happy about this and i think one of the things you're going to see over the next few months is our leading ag companies taking steps to try and prevent distillation and so we'll see if uh if the leading ag companies can prevent distillation by third-party companies that would definitely slow down some of these copycat models

i think the issue that met is going to face is just there were a lot of abuses in terms of censoring the free speech rights of americans

she was willing to take on the big tech companies i mean companies like amazon apple google frankly they just had a free ride for the last couple of decades where they were allowed to do anything and she came in and said there's a new sheriff in town and she was actually willing to apply pressure on them to not engage in anti-competitive tactics so i think she deserves credit for that i think she did change the conversation i think that we've talked about on previous pods that perhaps there was

my view is that google should be broken up there's abundant reasons for that there's at least three monopolies in that company there's the search business the advertising business and youtube i think they should be busted up what are the odds that that happens it's hard to say but what are the odds that that is pursued in the next administration in some capacity or at least investigated i'd say high

companies like Amazon Apple Google frankly they just had a free ride for the last couple of decades where they were allowed to do anything and she came in and said there's a new sheriff in town and she was actually willing to apply pressure to them to not engage in anti-competitive tactics

That's where I think the logic breaks down. I don't think Uber customers want to be cross-sold on booking a hotel.

they didn't do anything for elon and i'm not saying this as elon's friend i'm just saying that it's not really fair to basically go fix the original situation you're making it into a for-profit you're giving everyone shares but the guy who puts in the original c capital doesn't get anything that's ridiculous

the mainstream media, the New York Times and so on, quotes ISW. If you go look at the citations, it is the single most cited authority by the mainstream media and they are consistently wrong.

And he's very worried that once this product scales, there's not really giving me a need for Uber anymore, right? Why would you need Uber if you can just summon the robot car directly or the robot driver, whatever you want to call it, right? Driver, car, whatever. I mean, doesn't this logically disrupt Uber once it's at scale?

I believe Apple is going to launch their own search engine and compete heads up with Google. And so I think that's going to be the very interesting thing that happens in this market.

That would be incredibly damaging to Google. That's the most damaging. The easiest is YouTube and Waymo in this whole mix.

it does stand to reason that Buffett is building up a war chest here, and he's somewhat defensively positioned. ... it seems logical to infer that he thinks that the risk-reward right now is not great on public equities.

One thing I want to say, none of us are at any risk of running Palantir on our servers. Okay? CrowdStrike is running in the background of many, many companies who may not even be fully aware of it. And they were certainly surprised when all those airlines' computers went down. Right? So my only point is maybe you should make sure about whether you're running their products or not, and then make a conscious decision whether you think that's a good idea. That's all.

the most valuable application on the internet until now it's been google right and search search and so you have a different kind of search now that i'm not saying it's a one-for-one replacement it's also a new market but my point is just you already have a very powerful application in the form of this semantic search which open ai is currently dominating

you need to clean up that you know convoluted byzantine corporate structure with all the line charts everywhere uh that that structure is what created all the problems with this non-profit board that they had you've got a for-profit entity reporting to a non-profit board it created a culture clash and as we've said before on the show it's not a good idea for starps to innovate on structure using a tried and true c-corp is the way to go you're ready for ipo if you ever get that far you don't need

apple took a shortcut... they partnered with open ai... this is allowing open ai to get access to your data and to control your apps at the operating system level... there are major privacy implications... they chose not to develop the AI themselves.

Well, the company that everyone compares NVIDIA to, or asked the question about whether a historical comparison should be made is Cisco. So there's an article in Motley Fool saying, is NVIDIA doomed to be the next Cisco? There was one in Morningstar called NVIDIA 2023 versus Cisco 1999. Will history repeat itself? The reason they're asking these questions is that if you go back to the dot-com boom in 1999, to pull up the stock performance chart, you can see that Cisco had this incredible run. An

Judge Sachs says there's one too many coincidences.

The sentence is that Scarlett Johansson is going to end up owning more of this company than Sam Altman. That's what's going to happen.

chat and kind of channel-based communication really took off. I had a bunch of thoughts about that, why it wasn't really that great.

So when, when Lama 3 got released, I think the big takeaway for a lot of people was, oh, wow, they've like caught up to GPT 4. I don't think it's equal in all dimensions, but it's like pretty, pretty close to pretty in the ballpark.

the problem is it was just too expensive i mean uber is still quite expensive and the most expensive piece of it is the human driving the car it's all that labor cost

it is faster and cheaper than using chat gpt4 but the context window is smaller

i would say the only issue they have that's a real long-term issue is just the the chinese competition companies like bdy are ramping up production of knockoff products at low prices and so managing the competition with china is probably the only one of these issues that's i think probably a long-term issue for them to deal with

successful have been broad horizontal platform plays like android this is as vertical as it gets this is

i think from a strategic point of view i agree this this deal would be odd i don't really see the connection to the google ads business

successful have been broad horizontal platform plays like android this is as vertical as it gets this is

if you think about your top of funnel if you're one of the customers of hubspot using this google adwords is just one of a number of channels yes that's right so you could be getting your leads

And so you think about like all the dominoes that would have fallen if Microsoft had continued, maybe if like Bill Gates had continued being CEO. And there would have been no Google, there would have been no Yahoo. They would have controlled the internet. They would have controlled the internet.

I mean, who would look at the launch of Google Gemini and say, I want that? That launch was a total fiasco.

Well, isn't that what Google's doing with Android effectively? Exactly. It's like... It's exactly right. You can have your own version without Google search if you're willing to put up with all these headaches.

my interpretation of that answer is that she is hesitating because she doesn't want to make a statement against interest.

not only are we going from nonprofit to for-profit and open source to closed source, he was specifically concerned about all of the benefits of AI accruing to one powerful big tech company. Now at that time, he thought it was Google. Now it's Microsoft. There's not really that much of a difference. He never wanted all the benefits of AI in the hands of one really powerful tech company. And Microsoft is the most, it's now what, the biggest company in the world by market cap. So this is like the o

I think OpenAI is in a little bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. To go back to Freeberg's point about the nonprofit sitting at the top there, remember what created all the problems when Sam briefly got fired as CEO and then came back is they had these directors from the nonprofit world who didn't really seem to understand how startups worked. Either they fired Sam for no reason, which was kind of incompetent, or they had a really good reason but didn't communicate it prope

If you can start a company as a non-profit using pre-tax dollars and then all of a sudden convert to for profit, then why wouldn't everybody do this in order to circumvent paying taxes? And I think that's another, I'd say, valid and interesting point that he's made.

i also wouldn't underestimate the bias so you know everybody there is not everybody but it's a very liberal culture it's a monoculture so when you're swimming in that much bias it's hard to see

the statement that we got really doesn't cut it one of the use the word problematic yeah exactly they're describing it as a glitch or a bug it's not yeah it's a much deeper problem and so therefore you give it gives no confidence that the solution is going to be pursued in as comprehensive manners as necessary

i think that if you're sitting in those meetings with a dei commissar present and you know or you have suspicions that the ai product is not working right are you really going to speak up and risk the fate of a james day more of course you're not right so you're right freeberg that it's a structural problem that there's probably a low-grade fear that's pervasive through the organization and no one's willing to say the emperor wears no clothes

what i've heard about google is that every meeting above a certain size has a dei person in it i mean literally probably so it's kind of like in the days of the soviet union their military the red army would have in every division or unit there would be you know a commander or lieutenant

And if you, if you look at this through that lens, there will be some sort of negotiation and it might be age. Because when you look at this, really what Americans are upset about is the impact this is having on kids. We have a limit for the age of smoking, vaping, et cetera. And when these things happen, I think an easy concession that Zuckerberg and others will make is, hey, these products will be for 16 years old and up. That's my, that's the age I think it's appropriate.

I think that we're going to regret where this all leads because where it's going to lead if they do repeal Section 230 is towards greater censorship. All these companies are going to spend even more resources restricting what we can say and hear online, which is not the right direction.

I feel a lot better about that because Slack got acquired, hasn't really innovated in a few years.

My biggest business loser is Disney. It seems that every aspect of Disney's business s**t the bed in 2023. I mean, all their majors theatrical releases flopped amidst a conservative backlash against its woke social stances. You may recall that the actress who played Snow White in the remake accused Prince Charming of being a stalker. Even their Marvel franchise suddenly had bombs. They had to fire Jonathan Majors, who was doing a fantastic job playing Kang in an entire franchise arc. They're goi

Yeah, no, I agree with that. So first of all, these app stores are absolutely monopolies within their ecosystem, and Apple and Google Android are absolutely a duopoly within the mobile space. My experience with these types of monopolies or gatekeepers is that they exercise more and more control and extract more and more of the value over time. It's an iterative process in which they just keep, you know, extracting, keep taxing, keep imposing more rules on the ecosystem for their benefit and to t

these app stores are absolutely monopolies within their ecosystem, and Apple and Google Android are absolutely a duopoly within the mobile space. My experience with these types of monopolies or gatekeepers is that they exercise more and more control and extract more and more of the value over time.

now there's a new government investigation of elon they're investigating him for supposedly tesla was going to build him a glass house which he has basically said it's ridiculous it's not true ... if you're going to investigate tesla over this ... they wouldn't invite him to the ev summit because they're not a union shop ... biden introduced the ceo of gm giving her credit for launching the whole ev revolution

well i think clearly the legal strategy that lena khan has been pursuing is not having much success in the courts i mean she just lost this big decision on the microsoft acquisition of of activision but that being said i'm almost starting to feel bad for her because although some of her legal theories may be flawed i do think that these big tech companies like google and microsoft do need to check on their power and so what i would urge is that lena khan needs to regroup maybe figure out a diffe

The government led by Gensler is in a full assault on crypto. And the goal is basically to either destroy it in the US or drive it offshore.

i don't see how it's a bullseye look at this so i just i just asked it can you give me a complete list of all the articles on sass that sax has written the last three years so now at least it's over the target those five articles and mentions are correct does chat gpt do that well no because the browsing plugin right but i'm just saying like they got a lot of work to do here on quality

so i asked it what has david sacks written about sas and then it says i'm a venture capitalist entrepreneurs written extensively about sas he's the founder of yammer okay that's true but then it says he's also the co-founder of we work not true didn't know that then it says sacks congrats says sacks has written a number of articles about sas including and then all five of those articles were not written by me it's basically like hallucinating like really strongly

the only one that wasn't upbeat was google where the cfo ruth porat said that the outlook remains uncertain

the sec just sent coinbase a wells notice so i think it's hard to argue that there isn't a concerted effort now to crack down on crypto by a wide variety of government agencies and authorities starting with gensler at the sec who seems incredibly hostile to crypto

So that business will get worse if Microsoft takes a few hundred basis points of share. If Meta takes a few hundred basis points of share. If Tencent does, if a few startups do.

And this is why when Google did the demo of Bard, the first thing that happened was a stock went off 500 basis points. They lopped off $100 billion of the market cap, mostly in reaction to, oh, my God, this is not good for the long term business.

if Microsoft, can basically clone the sort of the breakthrough innovative product, you know, let's say they do one every year and then they put a crappy version of that in their bundle. Yeah, 10% or 50% worse, but they give it away effectively for free as part of the bundle. And then they basically pull the legs out from under that other company. So it can't be a vibrant competitor. And then the next year, they'll just raise the price of the bundle. Right. And they've done that with Slack. They'

i do think that microsoft is a little bit unique uh in its ability to bundle so what so tamath is right about the power of the bundling uh what they do is i think it's called the e5 bundle they have all these products that virtually all enterprises use from office to you know active directory to you know there's like a whole long list of them and so what they've done is they've created one price for all of those products they sell as a bundle under a wall-to-wall enterprise license and what they

when they see a new competitor come along whether it's slack or zoom or or okta is they'll basically just clone it create a worse version of that product and throw it into the bundle and so now every single enterprise is getting the slack clone or the zoom clone or whatever for free and that has a huge material impact on you know it pulls the rug out from under those startups

when they see a new competitor come along whether it's slack or zoom or uh or okta is they'll basically just clone it create a worse version of that product and throw it into the bundle and so now every single enterprise is getting the slack clone or the zoom clone or whatever for free and that has a huge material impact on you know it pulls the rug out from under those startups

well you kind of mentioned this uh i picked bob jpeck who's the former disney ceo he was eiger's handpicked successor three years ago then the pandemic hit which shut down the theme parks but then i think the big mistake was allowing himself to be malmout by woke employees into picking a fight with desantis over the so-called don't say gay bill uh that caused desantis to retaliate by threatening the special privileges that disney enjoys in the state and then he had eiger undermining him behind t

Saw net new ARR decreased by two thirds in the most recent quarter. That's a huge slowdown. But it implies the need to cut over $2 billion of sales and marketing if it wants to maintain CAC payback at reasonable levels, i.e., you know, the customer cost, customer acquisition costs. And then he points out that over time, this could become a vicious cycle. Layoffs lead to seat contraction, lead to sales slowdown, lead to cost cutting, lead to layoffs and repeat.

Like, it's like... Well, look, I mean, if you define what Elon is, you know, doing there as, you know, acting as a judge arbitrating on every little content moderation decision, is that a great use of his time relative to what he could be building at Tesla and SpaceX and doing on behalf of humanity?

I think this policy with regard to planes specifically is going to be futile. Yeah. It's going to be at best harm reduction, because as long as there's many ways to publish this information... No, it's on Reddit. It's pointless. It's on Facebook. It's on Facebook. So listen, I think this whole policy on Twitter is a little bit of a red herring. I think the real issue, the real underlying issue is that the FAA is publishing these ICAL numbers, thereby making every plane personally identifiable. I

jack dorsey denied that shadow banning was happening including at a congressional hearing i believe under oath so either he lied or he was lied to by his subordinates i actually believe that the latter is possible i think i don't think it's true with sbf it might be true with jack because he's so checked out furthermore you had people again like vijia gatti again tweeting and repeatedly stating we do not shadow ban and we certainly don't shadow ban on the basis of political viewpoints so these p

suppress libs of tip talk based on our hate policy libs of tick tock hasn't violated it we're going to

then they also said we certainly this is their emphasis do not shadow ban on the basis of political viewpoint and what the twitter files show is that is exactly what they were doing they in the same way

what's been discovered here let me boil it down for you this is an ftx level fraud except that what was stolen here was not customer funds it was their free speech rights not just the rights of people like jay bonacharia and dan bongino to speak but the right of the

i think they're doing all the right things below the line but there's this one major big red flag above the line that has to be probably better explained by them if they want to have long-term shareholders ... the problem is that this above the line thing though has become so big it could sink the business you know it's very very hard to see an investment case for a quarter of a trillion dollars of money in the door before you really start to see something magical

if you look at the light purple bar facebook in the last two years have spent 25 billion dollars on reality dabs and they said that they're going to spend you know meaningfully more in 2023 and then sustain that investment for a while so if you do a little bit of math if they spent you know they spend around 4 billion a quarter right now so 16 billion a year that'll go to 25 billion in 2023 and then they'll sustain that what that means is that over this you know 12 or 13 year life of reality lab

facebook's stock have reacted in the same way and for a very long time it actually looked like it was right until about september 21 and then obviously this thing fell off a cliff and the reason why it started to fall off a cliff was somebody started to notice that hold on a second even though you're buying back all these shares the bottom of the funnel right you're leaking all of these shares to all of these new employees why are you hiring so many people and this is when people started to unco

when they see a new competitor come along whether it's slack or zoom or okta is they'll basically just clone it create a worse version of that product and throw it into the bundle and so now every single enterprise is getting the slack clone or the zoom clone or whatever for free and that has a huge material impact on you know it pulls the rug out from under those startups

they promise the founder that you'll be left alone that usually lasts two years that coincidentally that's usually the length of the the earn out or the the golden handcuffs

i don't think that figma should do that here now that i've had a chance to think about it the reason is this that you have to think of pricing as not an element by itself but as sort of the most important element of a go-to-market strategy and there's no way that you can basically reprice figma completely as part of some other bundle and expect not to create massive disruption to your go-to-market organization

but jason you should also ask the next one which is if they did it to twitter which is kind of small what about the big honeypots of users google apple facebook tick tock snap and what about countries outside of just india what about the united states

the claims he's making are far broader than the bot issue um and far broader than the issues that elon's raised so i agree with you about that however i don't agree that what he's saying isn't specifically helpful to elon's case so what he said is... zacko's disclosure argues that by reporting bots only as a percentage of mdao rather than as a percentage of total number of accounts on the platform twitter obscures the true scale of fake and spam accounts on the service a move zacko alleges

these are very serious allegations

as a result of this he's basically saying that twitter executives committed securities law violations by making material misrepresentations and omissions and sec filings

he also alleges that they went behind his back to have a third-party consulting firm uh their report scrubbed to hide the true extent of the company's problems

he also says that the company's executives ordered him to knowingly present cherry picked and misrepresented data to create the false perception of progress on urgent cyber security issues

he's saying that parag and his lieutenants repeatedly discourage him from providing a full accounting of twitter security problems to the company's board of directors they basically prevented him from producing a written report

he said that twitter executives don't have the resources to fully understand the true number of bots on the platform and their executives are disincentivized to count them properly because doing so would negatively affect their bonuses

what he's basically saying is not only is there a bot problem there is a cover-up of the bot problem he's accusing the company of positively nixonian tactics

the fact that they're citing my tweets in which i criticize twitter's management it's just petty and vindictive

these guys are totally chasing at straws and it leads me to believe they're they're wasting my time and twitter's money

randomly sampling 100 accounts a day is not a serious effort

new twitter ceo checklist includes eliminate all bots and fire useless employees

these nitwits have walked tell lifton billing them probably two thousand dollars an hour to subpoena tweets that are public brilliant brilliant strategy

There are more unicorns founded by ex-PayPal people than ex-Google people. Even though at sort of the PayPal mafia, if you define it as the pre-IPO group of people who worked at PayPal, there were only a couple of hundred in the Bay Area.

You're going to have to be Coinbase or be Disney. You're either going to have to give in to the mob and suffer the consequences, or you take the short-term pain of doing what Brian did and you basically realign everyone around the mission.

I don't think he's going to survive the year after what just happened at Disney. And it's because he gave in to the employees, took sides against the governor in Florida and the legislature, and they just ripped away Disney special privileges in Florida.

you could fire half those people or more that'd be absolutely no impact to the business in fact they probably run better because right now they probably got too many meetings happening with too many people

these people on the board what skin in the game do they have most of them are these directors who are just appointed and it is it's like a club these guys it's all big back scratching club

these are guys who love the power they derive from being on this board we know twitter has enormous cultural power these guys they enjoy all the benefits they get... they enjoy being in this very exclusive club that wields enormous power over our culture and they have no incentive to give that up

parag knows that if elon buys this company he is out of a job his head is on the chopping block he is fired right away... so he is incentivized to fight this thing whether it's in the interest of shareholders or not

we need some some of the transparency that jack dorsey repeatedly promised at all the congressional hearings remember when he got hauled up there he promised that they would give more transparency about the way that their algorithms worked where is that and it hasn't been delivered up they promised it now jack dorsey's skipped out of town and there's a new guy in charge

is it a way is it sort of a passive aggressive way for snowflakes at twitter to like label people they don't like and sort of suggest they're vaguely disreputable

i think there's something analogous happening with apple and google and the app stores we had a congressional hearing pretty recently in which you had spotify on other apps complaining about what apple was doing to them saying they are making our service non-viable with the 30 percent rate that they're charging you remember bill gurley had a great post about this saying just because you can charge a 30 rate doesn't mean you should right now we're seeing this blowback from this massive 30 rate an

especially in the case of amazon is look you've got this company amazon that controls essential infrastructure aws the whole distribution supply chain going all the way from the port to warehouses to uh to logistics and distribution that is going to be owned by a scaled monopoly player you have a con massive economies of scale it's pretty clear they're going to dominate that and what they're doing is systematically going category by category and using the monopoly monopoly profits they make by o

the bosses of apple caved into this pressure they were total cowards they never even gave agm the chance to explain himself they never asked him what did you intend by this passage what were you trying to do and by the way they knew about this book when they hired to say it's even worse they knew about the book

I think that look, I think I don't think Vlad's a bad guy. I think he's a good guy. I think Robin Hood wanted to do the right thing. I don't think they had any reason to want to freeze their own users out of their accounts. I don't think they wanted to do what they did. I think that there was a little bit of a blind spot there on his part in terms of understanding the consequences of that freeze out, right? Because it did break the buy side of the trade for Wall Street bets. And then that that b

No, because he'd be throwing his own company under the bus. He'd have to say, Robinhood securities is telling Robinhood, the broker to post this money because Robinhood securities is being told by their downstream clearing. So it's like, you're, you're, you're saying it now. So better to say it, uh, at the time it all happened and it would have diffused the whole crisis, right?

if you go back like 50 years ago, you had Walter Cronkite saying, and that's the way it is, everyone believed him. And then the New York Times was the paper of record and people believe that's fit to print, right? Exactly. And so but that's been steadily eroding for decades. And now the internet is the final erosion of that. And, and look, I think that's, it's not an alter, it's not a bad thing. Because in order for journalism to work, you need all the journalists to buy into a certain code of j

i actually think that if the choice is simply between you losing money you the company or your customers or lose your users losing money i think that's an easy choice i think the company eats it look what airbnb did during covet right when they had a whole ton of cancellations because of covet they ate that the they ate all those deposits they

the fact they didn't do that and the fact that they didn't post a blog explaining the reasons behind the choice and in fact vlad's now had to go back three times to explain it i think that's created a world of problems for them

I mean, right, that the trades are, the order flow is going from Robin Hood to Citadel. They're not going to be caught flat footed. They're on the other side of this trade. And so, you know, I just think the house always wins. I'd be real careful about getting into it at this point.

But the thing that I think kind of stinks about it is the point that Chamath is making about who is doing the trade execution for Robinhood. Those trades are flowing to Citadel. Well, that's part of it. That's part of it, but 47%. But who is now on the short side of the trade? Citadel went in and bailed out Melvin and Citron. And so they're on both sides of this trade. Now, how does that make sense? Well, Citadel.

And it was really bad to pull the plug on the- They wish they didn't have to, I'm sure.

i think there was um something in the df dna of snap slack that actually i see really very commonly uh in the dna of of sort of producty sas companies producty sas founders which is they kind of have a reflexive dislike or distaste for sales and they resist the idea of sales

if you were to nitpick just one one little thing that i think they could have uh done faster it would have been embracing enterprise sales

benioff had a bunch of like engineers who wanted to build it in-house and so they they vetoed doing a deal and so they ended up building chatter and they threw the 300 engineers at it and they basically spun their wheels for a few years

he launched his product to be kind of a clone of yammer inside of salesforce but he was initially charging fifteen dollars per seat we were charging like five and so they massively overpriced it and and they event and then they they were on this like slippery slope where they kept lowering the price to compete better with us and then finally they realized that they should just give the thing away for free as a strategic move

it's sort of like a feed inside of the the crm product it didn't really succeed as a standalone collaboration product and so we won that battle

It was a knee jerk reaction on the part of employees at Twitter and Facebook to to protect the Biden campaign from a story that they didn't like.

I fully agree with you that these sites should not be publishers. The reason why the New York Post story should be taken off, they should be platforms and they cross the line. I would say that this New York Post story is the reason why people are up in arms about it is because what Twitter and Facebook have done is basically said they're going to sit in judgment of the media industry. And if a publisher like the New York Post puts out a story that doesn't meet the standards of Twitter and Facebo

if you repeal section 230, you're going to make the situation infinitely worse. Because section two, what is the response to these companies going to be corporate risk aversion is going to cause them to want to hire hundreds of low level employees, basically millennials to sit there making judgments about what content might be defamatory, might cause a lawsuit, they're going to be taking down content all over the place. And you know what will happen? That's gonna be a worse world.

I think that would have been the story today, if it weren't for Facebook and Twitter making censorship the story.

And now I think there's going to be a third mistake, which is that conservatives are looking to repeal section 230.

Twitter and Facebook overreacted.

this compromise solution with larry ellison and oracle that makes no sense to me this idea that you know ellison will own 20 of the company but nothing else really changes it'll still be based in china uh a chinese company it'll still be chinese engineers based in china who you know and they still own 80 of it i mean how does that really address the the data security

this law will have very adverse consequences for their business.

this law will have very adverse consequences for their business.

it's a little bit like uh twitter fact checking uh the politicians they don't like the digital it's it's a it's a form of like soft censorship

Yeah, I mean, call me old-fashioned, but I'm very much in favor of free speech. And I'm against censorship. And, you know, fact-checking your politicians you don't like is basically bias. It's soft censorship. I mean, they're being very selective in who they decide to fact-check. And, you know, there's no good way to do it, right? I mean, there is no truth API that they can just plug in to fact-check people. The way that you deal with bad speech is more speech. I think it's a line from Justice B

I mean, it's kind of gotten a little bit buried inside of Microsoft, but you can certainly still get it and, uh, no, we love it.

this is YouTube's like this is a stupid move on YouTube YouTube should have just said you know here's some Google affairs permission and made it work they should have just made it work

do I think it's part of the cost of doing business today yeah unfortunately Google I think tech companies need to behave just a little bit better just like 5% better would go a long way like this feels too sharp elbowed Google I'm just looking at Google sundar like you know this is probably winds up being two percent of their revenue or maybe like under 1% doing this like little trick of like making you buy your name it just feels lame

isn't this infuriating that they make you buy your ad slot above your organic result ... this is what's gonna get Google into antitrust trouble is this overreaching thing where you type in one person and they put the competitor up there

And actually, I remember emailing David, David Sachs. Yeah. At the time, he was at Microsoft now. He's like, hey, David, have you heard of this thing called Slack? He's like, no, it won't work.

it's kind of embarrassing that Twitter can't figure this out on their own

Twitter is an exception important platform but it's struggling massively in the past couple years because he can't figure out how to be an open and honest platform or controlling harassment

that's but that's when Trump could actually hurt him because he you know with regulations he could hurt his ability to use drones or autonomous cars and things like that

PayPal was just horrific to deal with like every time I tried to get into my account it didn't work every time we tried to accept money from people it didn't work and then they would everybody would tell me the same thing do you have PayPal account I have one oh can can I tell you it's locked and I can't get anybody on the customer support line and I have $2,000 in there but I can't get into my anybody have customer support problems with power

do you think apple is setting itself up to try to seek revenge on Google because the Android stuff which I speculated or do you think it's they just want to make a clear Line in the Sand hey if you use Google's operating system Chrome or um Android you're basically giving up your privacy and if you use ours you're going to have privacy and a faster better browsing experience

people who are inevitably going to leave such a a terrible company

I don't think that becoming a patent troll should be seen as a turnaround strategy I think it's just a horrible if that's the strategy or one of them that's bad

so yes I'm trying to put some and fill some engineering positions from the people who are inevitably going to leave such a a terrible company that thinks that their best option is to sue people instead of

they're really only valuable to companies with huge legal departments like Yahoo which are kind of circling the drain and you know trying to invent a new business model or to these patent trolls

it's starting to create a path which if we keep going down if Silicon Valley keeps going down this path it will result in in what you're saying which is it'll just be way too hard to innovate in in any area where there are established patents and should all the companies in Silicon Valley get together and have a patent treaty yes and just say like Yahoo Yahoo Google Apple and these mid-tier companies we we'll bring our software patents together yes put them in a bucket yes create a new organizat

any employee who leaves yaho to join Yammer the next 60 days will give a $25,000 signing bonus too wow so I'm trying to create a little bit of motivation for employees at Yahoo to reassess whether they want to work at a patent troll

if these large established tech companies with these huge patent portfolios of thousands and thousands of patents now see this as a line of business I think it's really going to crimp innovation in Silicon Valley

they're basically saying that this is an acceptable line of business right that that we're going to get a revenue line

they basically by suing Facebook on the eve of their IPO this very opportunistic type of lawsuit a Shakedown it's a Shakedown like a patent troll would

Yahoo is become a patent troll

i think if paypal was a standalone company with its metrics it'd probably be worth over 20 billion dollars i mean it's it's probably more valuable than ebay at this point

i think the thing to realize about chatter is it's basically an activity feed for what's happening in salesforce right so it's it's useful for getting a record of you know when people change an opportunity from open to closed or change a dollar you see those record changes but that's pretty much all it is like those those um sort of system generated messages are coming at such a fast velocity that it actually drowns out when humans want to just talk into the feed right so yammer is more about co

paypal has not exactly been at the forefront of innovation

google talk all these free services they never work they never work

it's a better google docs in a way

i don't think that becoming a tr patent troll should be seen as a turnaround strategy i think it's just a horrible if that's the strategy or one of them that's bad

they're really only valuable to companies with huge legal departments like yahoo which are kind of circling the drain and you know trying to invent a new business model

and i mean that in a way is what yahoo has said isn't it well they've said we suck yeah

salesforce is salesforce is copying us

but you know but we don't we don't think that every enterprise tool should be should build a social network into itself right

i think the thing to realize about chatter is it's basically an activity feed for what's happening in salesforce right so it's useful for getting a record of you know when people change an opportunity from open to closed or change a dollar you see those record changes but that's pretty much all it is like those those um sort of system generated messages are coming at such a fast velocity that it actually drowns out when humans want to just talk into the feed right so yammer is more about collabo

Yammer CEO David saak was particularly critical of the move uh he called on other Silicon Valley companies to take a stand against Yahoo he also vowed on Twitter that Yammer won't hire anyone who remains at Yahoo for more than 60 days after this and he's offering a $25,000 signing bonus to Yahoo employees who defect

that to me is just a sign that you need to sell every share of Twitter you own in the secondary Market as quick as possible if Fred Wilson and bean leave that to me I mean that must have taken a lot for them to lose faith in Twitter

I I've been waiting for some kind of tools from them but in the meantime Cloud's come out all these other tools have come out and it just feels like Twitter is incapable of releasing products when the consumers want them you know like they get their um uh their mobile apps out Years After People Want it they get their analytics out years after people are demanding it they get uh inbound photo support years after it's requested

this is why their growth is not spectacular listen I don't want take anything away from them but I do feel like they would be a lot further along if they could release product on a much more consistent basis