Anthropic IPO at Risk, Meta’s Muse Pop, Token Prices Fall, Open Source Gains Share, Alignment Fails

Key Takeaway

Use one personal AI assistant today for a single repetitive task: triage your inbox, compare a purchase, draft a plan, or cancel an unused subscription. Start with a low-stakes workflow, verify its output before acting, and measure the time or money saved. The episode’s practical lesson is that AI value is shifting from abstract model benchmarks to reliable, easy-to-use agents that help individuals complete real work.

Episode Overview

The hosts debate AI safety, product liability, open-source model proliferation, and whether frontier AI companies can sustain premium valuations as capable low-cost models spread. They argue that companies—not “labs”—should be accountable for what they release, while highlighting Meta’s Muse and Grokbot as early examples of consumer-friendly AI agents. The discussion also covers Anthropic’s IPO risks, alignment research, AI-enabled biology research, and the economic stakes of slowing AI development.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Anthropic IPO at Risk, Meta’s Muse Pop, Token Prices Fall, Open Source Gains Share, Alignment Fails from All-In Podcast. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

All right, everybody, welcome back to episode 290 of the number one podcast in the world. It's the all-in podcast with me again. It's the core four. David Friedberg is here, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Sachs calling in. I am your host, Jason Calacanis, and we have a full docket today. I'd be remiss, though, if I didn't ask everybody for their fondest memories of the fifth annual all-in summit produced by Mr. David Friedberg. David, do you have any thoughts? How do you rate your performance as executive producer of the all-in summit?

You know what we didn't do, what we forgot to do? At the end of day two, we didn't give a big shout out to our production team, to Kimber, to Lisa, to Nick. I think we... No, Jason did. Okay, I thought we should have brought him out, but I just want to give a big shout out to him. That's always the move, bring him out for the standing up. The team backstage absolutely crushed it, as always, this year, and then I had a great time, actually.

You know my favorite part is going to Universal Studios. You just get to have a good time. It's great. I'm reliving my childhood, Chamath, with no trauma. By the way, shout out to our friends at the De'Longhi. I got one of those coffee machines that we had at the event. I put it in my kitchen. You know what I got? I don't know if you guys saw, but there was a water machine in the VIP area that is a zero plastic water machine. It goes through super filtration, no microplastics in the water.

I have one now in our office. Thank you very much to them. I appreciate it. Amazing company. Sax, do you have a favorite moment from the show? Well, I think the highlight of the show, the thing that we'll remember for a long time, is the president calling in during Jensen's talk. And I think Jensen's overall, the content and Demeter really helped calm down this national panic over AI. It felt like we were the center of this national conversation. And I think it happened very organically. You remember, there has basically been this psyop for the last few weeks leading into the summit to convince everyone that humanity was going to go extinct unless we did exactly what the Democrats want and stop all AI development.

And then we had first Satya came out and calmed everyone down. And then Jensen did the same thing. And the president called in and did what he did best, which is seize total control of the narrative that I'm sure these groups have been carefully planning for weeks and kind of thwarted that whole operation. Nerds, enough, get back to work. You have a super intelligent. Trump intelligence is now the term we're going to call it Trump intelligence going forward. But I think you make a good point.

A lot of people wanted to know, Freiburg, if this was planned, was the president Trump calling planned Freiburg? Take us behind the scenes. Basically, Jensen was connecting with him right backstage and said, Hey, call me back. And then he called him while he was on stage. There was some texting going on. It was completely spontaneous. It was not like a planned thing where Jensen was like, Hey, let's do a whole thing. And so that was pretty amazing to have this conversation that Jensen was waiting for from president to happen live.

And clearly, this was the topic de jure in DC, as well as in the news and the media. And it was amazing to see it all happen on stage with us. And just to be clear, I thought it was a bit and I was like, Well, put him on speakerphone. And Jensen says to me, How do you do that? And I just handed him I always give an extra mic there in case somebody's mic goes out, put him on speakerphone with the microphone. And President Trump, the funniest president in history, funnest politician history.

Did you notice, Saks, that he drops a one liner through a speakerphone perfectly, perfectly. Jensen makes the greatest chips, everybody tries to reverse engineer them impossible, impossible, but he can't figure out how to press the speakerphone button. Okay. How does he do it? It just drops the perfect line. But Chamath in all seriousness, the nerds were losing their mind last week. And the adults came, daddy came, Elon came, Jensen came, all the adults in the room came and they just said, Listen, if you have software that's defective, and not ready to put in the world, maybe don't put it in the world and make it a little bit, you know, as you like to say, less brittle.

So your thoughts on where we are in this national discussion, which went from slow down to maybe just release non brittle, resilient software? Well, I think that there was this classification that happened last week between up and coming organizations that want to call themselves labs, but are in fact, companies that have PNLs and shareholders and have to abide by the same rules that everybody else does. And then the sophisticated companies that have lived in scrutiny for many decades and have learned the hard way. The process of making things robust and the cost of making things not robust.

So what do I mean, on the one side, you saw in many ways, it's like curious times creates curious bedfellows, right? You have the cohort is Satya, Jensen, Sachs, Zuck, Elon, the President, Lena Khan, we have product liability, we have this product liability perspective in the United States, it's meant to prevent companies from doing things that they're not supposed to do, especially if they know that those things could be harmful. And on the other side, it's folks making the thing that we're being, I think, a little naive and basically saying, we're not a company, we're a lab, protect us.

And I think the mature responses, you should have internal controls. And you should robustly test things. And what Zuck said earlier, and what Elon has said in the past is, we're just under a lot of scrutiny. And so when things aren't perfect, we just slow things down. Elon has done that with FSD. You said this, Jason, he could have been at FSD three or four years ago. But he has publicly stated, we can't afford it because every accident that Tesla incurs is magnified 1000x than what any other company would incur.

And so we just have to go slower. Zuck last week said, we were about to roll out Muse, which looks like one of the most successful product launches in recent memory, has huge implications, actually, which we should talk about. And he had to slow roll it, he and Alexander, who I was talking to last night, had to slow roll it for a couple of months to get it perfect. So it's all within your control. It's just what do you choose to do? And I think that was the most interesting observation.

We have to stop calling these companies labs, they're companies. And we have to be judged on the same standards, including product liability. Yeah. And there was a lot of coverage of this moment, Sachs. Interestingly, some of the fake news media were like, on a popular podcast, and then they play the clip, but they're just afraid to say the name of the podcast. Pretty hilarious. I think Chamath is getting us into the first topic here already, which is whether we're going to have individual responsibility as our North Star or some sort of collective action.

And the thing that always works the best is individual responsibility, whether it's at the level of individuals or companies. The relevant decision to make in every case is, should we ship this product? Not can we get the whole world to agree? And the problem with talking about these collectivized approaches is that they defray accountability away from the actual decision maker. And I think people sort of feel this, you know, like this week, you had Dario 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 know, there's something fundamentally sort of unrealistic and kind of out of touch about it. Hypocritical. Hypocritical. And it's like, guys, look, what we need is for you guys to make smart decisions about what to release. If a product is unsafe, which is to say it's unreliable or behaves unpredictably, then don't release it and stop looking to some sort of global governance as the answer.

Because if you guys don't get this decision right, it's not going to matter what the United Nations does. And by the time the United Nations agrees on anything, we're going to be much further along in this whole journey. So there's something just very weird about the way that the principal actors in this keep talking, because it really feels like they're trying to push off the responsibility. Well, there's a theory going around here, and I think it is worth us discussing here, that the Frontier Labs are covertly...

They're companies. They're companies. They're companies, yes. Let me just finish the... No, no, no. But Jamath made a really good point that I want to make sure we just don't miss. Okay. They're corporations. Yes. And when you call them labs, they sound like non-profit entities, and that's not true. Okay. So the corporations making these products are looking for President Trump to specifically give them what the internet companies had with Section 230, which is shield them from liability, and that there is a consideration inside the Trump administration, the 47th administration, that maybe there could be some leverage put on these companies that they would give 10% of their equity to the sovereign wealth front of the United States, etc., and then that would result in them being given some pass when it comes to their liability.

That's an insane thing to do. It's like giving some plane company that gives 10% of their equity to the U.S. government the ability to not be responsible for their planes falling out of the sky. But what is your thought on that conspiracy theory? I'm sure you've heard it, Sachs, that they're looking for a shield. You're making it sound like this is the idea of the Trump administration. That's not true. No, not the Trump administration. This is what the Frontier Labs slash corporations are pitching to them, and that there might be, the rumor is, there might be some people who are open to that in the administration.

Again, this is all a back channel. Here's what we know, is that in the past week, you had virtually every Trump administration official come out and say some version of what I just said, which is, first and foremost, the AI companies have to take responsibility for their own products, and that we will not waive product liability. I think Speaker Johnson said it, the congressional— Besson said it. Besson said it in the most recent interview. Everybody said, if your game is to get a waiver of product liability or antitrust liability, if you're trying to form a cartel, if you're trying to collude, forget about it.

We're not going to do it. I think they completely threw cold water on that whole idea. Remember what President Trump said is, he just tweeted today, we have the DOJ. That's a guardrail. The administration is a guardrail. The administrative state, civil lawsuits, criminal lawsuits, all these things are there as potential liability to make sure that you make the right risk-reward trade-off. Again, at the end of the day, if those guys release an unsafe product, it's not going to matter what the United Nations agrees on, so we need them to internalize the responsibility.

Listen, come on. Be candid with me. You got the inside goods here. Are they trying to lobby for that? Do you think they're lobbying to get this protection? Yes or no? Come on. Well, I have heard. This is not first-person experience. They have not asked me, like, hey, we want a product liability waiver, but I have heard from people in Washington that they have been seeking something like that. It's hard to pin down. Okay, fair enough. Freeberg, your thoughts here as we are going to get into the first story here with the token maxing and the prices going down, but I'll give you the final word here on what America should do in terms of dealing with the corporations that are pretending to be labs who cannot take ownership of their own Frankenstein creations, which I think J.D.

Vance, I thought had a spectacular appearance. He was crisp and looked quite presidential, if I was going to describe it. You threw a lot of fastballs. And he knocked them out of the park, by the way. Home run hitters want fastballs. You can't hit a fastball if it's out of the strike zone, so I gave him the three hardest questions I could think of, and he proceeded to knock all three over the fence. J.D.'s excellent. No, on the Sunday shows, they played the clips of the questions I asked him, bang, bang, bang, Freeberg, right over the fence.

But he said, basically, if you're creating Frankenstein, here's an idea. Stop. And then he added, if you've already kind of let the cat out of the bag, then create anti-Frankenstein, basically create the safeguards. Yeah, it makes total sense. I gave a good interview on this. They took their time doing this Muse release this week. They said they wanted to get it right. They wanted to make sure that it was safe, that it didn't give people capabilities to do bad things. That's the responsibility that they took as a corporation.

Anyone that's outputting a model should take the same responsibility. Pretty obvious. This is an organization that understands that having paid a series of fines from Cambridge Analytica to recent legal fines. We have a lot of laws that make it illegal to do a lot of things. All right, let's move on. We have laws. By the way, can I add one philosophical point to this? I think that implicit in, let's call it the Dario position, that let's call it the regulated free market that we have. His fundamental contention is that that will lead to a race to the bottom.

That competition jeopardizes safety. It's in all of his blog posts, and many other people reflect this idea that competition equals lack of safety. That is implicitly a critique of our economic system. It's basically a left-wing critique of our system. It goes back a long way. I remember back in the days of the Cold War when we really had this duel between two different systems. Do you want the free market system, or do you want the communist system? A lot of people made the claim that the capitalist system would do things like jeopardize safety and beauty, that our buildings would always be uglier because the greedy capitalists wouldn't want to spend a dime on beautification or good architecture, things like that.

In fact, it turned out that the Soviet system was the one that produced the cold gray landscapes. Why? Because people want beauty. They want safety. Therefore, if you have a well-functioning market economy, then it gives people what they want. basically the American system won out in that battle. So I just fundamentally disagree with the idea that competition means lack of safety. As Zuckerberg and Jensen were saying, there are huge incentives on both the upside and downside to be safe. On the upside, no customer wants a product that is unpredictable and unreliable, that doesn't do what they say.

No enterprise wants an agent that's gonna leak their data or hack a competitor. And on the downside, as the president made clear, they've got tons of liability, product liability, civil liability, administrative liability, criminal liability. So I just fundamentally disagree with this idea that competition is a bad thing. Competition is a good thing that can be harnessed to get the right result. And just to build on that, Chamath, our friend Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks, friend of the pod, he released in the past week or so, Unit 42, he's building, there's a business opportunity here to build a product to do continuous cyber defense.

And also a friend of the pod, George Kirch from CrowdStrike, he also released Falcon, his new product to do cyber defense. Chamath, if these guys in the Frontier Labs slash corporations were so concerned about cybersecurity, why didn't they ever release a cybersecurity product and Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike are on it? They will. That's probably more in the second topic that we'll talk about, which is as the models essentially cluster in terms of capability, there's no differentiation. And so they'll be forced to move up the stack.

But let's wait on that for one second. Yes, we'll get to it in a second. You have a point here you wanna make and then we'll go to the first one. I do. The point I wanted to make is more philosophical and sociological, which is the last time we heard the word lab in the social consciousness was during COVID. And there was a lab that was responsible for a leak of a virus that then killed 15 million people all around the world and caused $45 trillion of damage.

It's the Wuhan Lab. And I think it's important to recognize that there has been zero transparency or culpability around this. And I think part of why people are comfortable calling themselves a lab is because of that fact, that a lot of these young people that work at these places live through this and saw absolutely no responsibility taken by the lab that caused this leak. And now we're talking about leaks of different kinds and we have organizations and corporations that try to fashion themselves as labs as well, but they're not labs.

I just wanna remind everybody, these are for-profit corporations that have absorbed hundreds of billions of dollars of debt and equity, that have thousands and thousands of shareholders, that have billions of dollars of market cap. And if I were them, I would not want to call myself a lab at any cost. And I think if you saw the recent speeches that they gave at the United Nations, they're still using that terminology. They are not labs. These are for-profit corporations that are subject to product liability risk and they should act accordingly.

Yeah, and we've had a conversation here for a year about this. Like, if this stuff is so dangerous, you don't have to release it. Or, you know, my proposal, like know your customer, give logs. Do not compare yourself to the Wuhan lab. Well, Chamath, it's bad PR, but also I do think it's part of their like virtue signaling routine where they just don't wanna say that we're companies, we have a for-profit incentive. They always wanna say that we're either a research institution or they say things like we're a public benefit corporation, which no one really knows what the hell that means.

So it's this patina of virtue signaling that obscures what's really going on. And it tries to obscure the word corporation, but legally you're not allowed to hide it. I think they should have, when they say- We are all running corporations. All in, albeit very small, but mighty, is a corporation. I think we should call it a lab. So HALA is a corporation. This is the all-in lab. This is the all-in lab where we discuss different formulas. No, we're experimenting with ideas. This is a meme workshop.

It's a meme lab. These ideas are getting so dangerous that we don't want any liability for our opinions. Welcome to the all-in lab podcast. Here as we do topic zero, Freeberg, is there a mindset in scientists' minds that needs to kind of have a hard stop and then the corporation kind of takes over? Maybe they could put the labs on the side here and then say, hey, these are the adults doing the corporation stuff. What are your thoughts here if you were going to architect how Anthropic operates in the world?

And maybe you could speak to scientists' views of the world versus capitalists and management teams. I don't have a good answer for you on that. Okay, well, you're doing it. You're the answer. Look at OHALO. Let me kick off the first topic. What I wanted to do was just take a step back and look at the insane flurry of model releases happening. Yes. The pace of model releases happening on both the open source side and the premium side, the Anthropics, Grox, OpenAIs of the world is unfathomable right now.

The list is insane. And just like the last 10 days, September 9th, DeepSeek 4.1 flash gets released. $1.20 for a million tokens output if they're hosting it. Key value cash from V1 of DeepSeek. Remember what a big deal DeepSeek was when it came out? The key value cash then was like 390,000 bytes. Now it's 890. Insane drop, insane efficiency improvements. On September 20th, Quen, which is the Alibaba model comes out, version 2.1. It's an open weights model that outperforms Nano Banana 2, which is Google's big breakthrough insane image generation model.

This thing is free, open source. You can put it on your desktop computer and run it at home to generate images for free. And it's made by Alibaba. Xiaomi put out MIMO on September 22nd, two days ago. MIMO Pro performs on par with Clog's Opus 5, which is like this insane model that everyone thought was going to change the world and break the internet. And GPT-56 Sol across most benchmarks. It's a 309 billion parameter model. It is entirely open weight. You can download this model and put it on your server and run your own instance without paying anyone any money except for the cost of running the server.

This model called Bonsai 2 came out on September 17th by Prism ML. This is actually a fork of Quen, which is another one of the Alibaba models. It's a 27 billion parameter model. 98% of the performance of the big Quen model. It's 5.9 gigs in size, and you can run it on a local computer. You can have an NVIDIA chip or have a good Mac Studio computer, and you can run this insane model on your desktop computer for free. And then the big crazy models, the big closed source models, Anthropic releases Opus 5.5 on September 22nd.

OpenAI Astro comes out with Sol and Luna on September 23rd. Grok 4.7 comes out on September 21. Metamuse comes out on September 22nd. Any one of these stories would have broken the internet a year ago, and they all happened in the last 10 days. You now have an entire catalog of open weight models to generate visual information, to do VLA where you can actually instruct it and it can control a robot. You have models far beyond the most advanced LLM from a year ago that are open weight that you can install and run on your desktop computer.

We are past the point of Bernie Sanders put the super intelligence away. It can never be allowed in the real world. This stuff is out. The open source open weight models are free. They are on the internet. You can go and download them and you can run them on your computer at home. I don't know in what world we think we're gonna have a police state that's gonna come bang down your door, take your desktop computer from you and test it to see if you're running an LLM on your local computer.

The efficiency wave is here. And the pacing at which these models are coming out. Now, all of this stuff happened in the last 10 days. It's just mind blowing. We're now in this kind of frontier space where things are accelerating. The performance improvements, the cost decline, AI is becoming so performative and so affordable. It is going to be ubiquitous and we are all going to benefit from it. This is not just about the anthropic and open AIs with the closed world, making billions of dollars, selling enterprises, hosted models.

There is so much proliferation right now. So I just thought it was worth taking a step back to recognize where we are. Because in the context of, we have to stop the super intelligence, we have to shut down the data centers, you don't even need data centers to do 90% of what you can do with AI. You can download it on your computer for free today to do what was the most advanced technology in human history less than a year ago. It's all here today. And I thought it was just worth taking a beat to step back and make sure we all recognize that as we get into this debate about these, quote, labs or corporations.

I don't know if it even matters anymore. I think open source is here. And I think that the pace of improvement is such that this is only going to drive productivity. And maybe we are, maybe we are seeing the AI wave underway right now, the productivity wave, the productivity boom. Yeah, and to consumers, they don't care what model they're using. We've spent the last three years geeking out about this. And then Grokbot comes out, and then Muse comes out from Meta. And I've been using both of these products.

And it's the first time that a normie, a normal person in the world, it's not meant to be derogatory in any way, can get value from AI. If you look at how we all looked at this, running corporations, investing in them, we took a different approach to like, okay, maybe this is going to retire some positions. Maybe this is going to add some positions here or there. But now you can like, with Muse, connect to everything instantly and actually get real work done in the world.

If you're a normal person who wants to get the benefit from AI, we will be turning a corner, Friedberg. And I think you laid it out perfectly. We're going to turn a corner, I think, at the end of this year, where moms, our uncles, people are going to start using Muse and Bot, Grokbot, which are growing very quickly to just solve real world problems for that. And they're going to go, wait a second, I could never afford a chief of a staff. I could never afford a personal assistant, an executive assistant.

Now I get a free executive assistant. It's going to blow people's minds, Chamath, in the next couple of months when they start using these products. And the bottom half of America in this K-shape recovery experiences some benefits. Your thoughts on what's happening here with these models. Have you started playing with it? Because you were originally a technologist. Have you loaded these models on your computer? Because I'm playing with it on my MacBook Pro and it's awesome. Let me maybe give you the answer by explaining something.

So I think what we're seeing is that these models are converging and clustering, which is to say that they're now within margin of error. And so the thing is, there's so many of these models that are roughly the same at different price points. So where is the edge? There's still edge. And the edge is in the harness that you use to wrap the model. So if you think about it as like, you have a model, that's like a brain, but you need to embody that brain with arms and legs and hands and eyes to do work.

That's how you agentify a model, okay? And you make it agentic, that's what that phrase means. And there are all kinds of different harnesses that the industry has invented to make these models more agentic. And there's still a lot of edge there. So at 8090, we have a labs function and we've been ripping and teasing apart all the different models with all the different harnesses just to see how they perform. And they're a wildly variant in terms of cost and quality. So just to kind of build on Friedberg's point, you have the models that are converging.

The harnesses are wildly different. And so their performance is all over the map. And so now companies and people have to sort of navigate, what are you willing to pay for? I sent this tweet to Nick, if you can just put it up here. And I don't know if this is instructive or accurate, but what this shows, and this is the case for Ant, but it's probably the case for a lot of the closed models, is you're starting to see this massive revenue concentration, which is a few folks consume all of the highest and most expensive tokens.

I think if you take what Friedberg just showed to its logical conclusion, those folks at the top of this table are going to be under a lot of internal pressure, whether it's from their finance teams or whether it's from their CFO, or it's going to be from shareholders to explain why as this clustering happens, they are not moving down to cheaper and cheaper models. Now, you may choose to go down to cheaper and cheaper Ant models, so then Ant keeps the revenue, but there's also a risk that you may do what Friedberg just said and just go to an open source model and just host it yourself.

So we're in like a very complicated part of the cycle, which is the first version of the AI trade was relatively simple, which is you're just selling tokens, you're wrapping the tokens, you're passing it through, and there was enough disparity that there was value. I think that that's going away. It'll force OpenAI and Ant to go up the stack. There is no choice. You can't sit there and serve a token that has diminishing value, because then all the subsequent value is getting absorbed and made by people wrapping your intelligence token.

You will have to do that work. And so, Jason, that's why they will have to go and do cyber. They'll have to go and do law. They'll have to go and do customer support, all these things that we weren't sure whether they were going to compete. These trends may force them to do that. And I think then that sets up a very interesting setup for their IPO. Just to back all that up, Saks, the Frontier Lab Corporations, Anthropic and OpenAI, they both released models this week at 50% less token prices.

And their IPOs are looking like they're both going to get delayed. Anthropic, just targeting a $2 trillion valuation, OpenAI, $1.2 trillion. Sam already said OpenAI plans on doing 2027 over because of safety concerns. And Anthropic, which was supposed to file and go out in October, the report from the Wall Street Journal is that the IPO will happen in November or May. be delayed even more. Here's your polymarket. Will Anthropic go public in 2026 with our amazing partner polymarket? Shout out to my guy Shane. Peaked at 96% earlier this month that Anthropic will go public this year, but now it's fallen to 76%.

Is this like a cell phone here, Sax? The leading model companies need to go public to get capital to do their build out, and now they're delaying their own IPOs. Please explain how any of this makes sense, and if you were a major investor and one of these companies were on the board of them, what would you be doing or instructing these founders to do to get these companies to go public and get that capital they need to continue the AI build out? Oh, well, I think that we know from our friends that the investors in Anthropic are pulling out their hair about what's happening right now.

Forget about the fake whistleblowers who were there for a few weeks and then left. 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? Then you've got, I think, other evidence of, I don't know what to call it except corporate schizophrenia. You've got Dario 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. Then you have them publishing an essay about the bio risk associated with AI and how that needs to be stopped. Then meanwhile, they announced a new bio lab in San Francisco, a new lab. They started a lab after telling us that there's a 10% chance of us all dying. Let's just pause here for a second.

Is this a dereliction of duty as the chief executive officer of Anthropic to sabotage your own IPO? You're supposed to be acting on behalf of your CEO, of your shareholders. This to me seems like if we were the board, if the four of us were somehow matching the board of Anthropic, we would replace the CEO. We would put the CEO in the lab and we'd find a CEO who knows how to run the company and not sabotage it. He's literally sabotaging his own company. I think there's an element of that.

I think investors are pretty nervous about giving the founders or Dario specifically super voting shares. There was a story in the information about that that's an active debate right now about whether to give super voting shares. Explain what those are, please, and why in this context, this is critically important. Our audience may or may not know what those are. Supposedly, the founders of Anthropic only have about 2% ownership each of the company, which in the grand scheme of things is a relatively low number relative to what other founders typically have at time of IPO.

It'll still be an enormous amount of money, tens of billions of dollars, but that is the case. Super voting shares basically say it separates the economic shares from the voting shares in the company and gives certain people the right to control the company even if they don't have the economic ownership that would usually be necessary. It's a pretty common thing. Larry and Sergey, I think maybe were the first prominent founders to get super voting shares in Google. It can be a stabilizing thing for the company because it means that as long as the founders are there overseeing things, they're not going to be subject to takeover attempts, things like that.

On the other hand, it requires a tremendous degree of trust in those founders because they effectively can't be removed no matter what they do. You just have to wonder if in this case, that's earned and warranted. I have to say that even for someone like me who isn't necessarily advocating for a lot more regulation, I kind of get nervous about the idea of anthropic opening a wet lab in San Francisco. Great timing. I was thinking about moving back and I don't know if I want to be.

Can you just put it a little further away? I think we've all seen this movie before. Offshore maybe? Put it on an oil rig or something. What I would say is that if I were on the board, I would keep Dario as a CEO. The reason is that he's clearly demonstrated that he can build a unique culture and position against the otherwise most formidable corporation competitor, which is open AI. He's done that and he's come from behind. I don't think you should undervalue how hard that is and what that takes.

He's done that and he's built essentially the greatest business ramp in all time. I think the thing that I would probably do if I was on the board is fix what Sax just said, which is there's now a bunch of incremental liquidity risk to the company. I think if you take the 20-year view of anthropic, that corporation needs hundreds of billions of dollars to fulfill their ambitions. I would solve forgetting that as risklessly as possible. I think there's only two things that you can do. The first is you have to throw everything in the kitchen sink into disclosures.

The problem is that that will make what is an otherwise dense and impenetrable S1 even more dense and impenetrable. You can superficially cover your regulatory risk, but the way that it actually gets translated in the market is you're just going to have to water down the expectations of the IPO sellers and create a much larger margin of safety for the IPO buyer. That's effectively how you find a market clearing price for this, Jason. Bear with me, I'm just giving out rough numbers. Even if you think that they're on a $100 billion run rate, what would otherwise in a very clean sheet IPO maybe would have been a $2 trillion market cap, now you're at one or less.

The reason is the hedge funds and the pension systems and the long only mutual fund complexes who have a fiduciary responsibility to their sources of capital will justify all the risks by essentially asking for a lower and lower price. I think that's what you're going to see. I think you're going to see a much more moderate and reasonable IPO motion here. It's probably going to clear at a much lower price than anybody thinks. I do think that what Sachs says is the reason why, but I think it's good for Ant because it clears all this noise, it forces them to just be a corporation and then run the business.

I think that they'll do great. Look, I'll be honest with you. I've tried to recruit against Ant. I can't. It's impossible. The comp that they gave is incredible. The business ramp is so compelling. When you're in a head-to-head with these guys, I have not won a single bake-off for folks. I wish I could say that I did, but I have not. It's hard for a startup. They are a magnet for talent. OpenAI is a magnet for talent, but these other risks are going to weigh on the IPO.

The only way to flush them is to just bring the price way down. In Freiburg, when we look at the risk factors in an S1, those are perfunctory. Those are disclaimers. Typically, you get the SpaceX one. What if Starship doesn't work? What if there's competition? It's kind of checkboxes. In Anthropix, I think we're going to be looking at something totally different, which is, hey, we and our employees are quitting saying, this is going to kill humanity. We have massive regulation. We're asking for regulation. By the way, we're doing biology work and we're launching a lab.

Do you agree with Chamath here that the S1 is going to have actual risk factors and disclaimers that are material against the IPO Freiburg? I think this customer concentration point ties to the earlier comments I made about the proliferation of incredibly performant open-weight and open-source models. The reason is Anthropix puts out the best models for life sciences today. I run a life sciences R&D organization. We use their models. They're incredible. They're better than other models, and so we want to use them. When it comes to writing code, to writing software, to do internal workflows and run operations, we can use other products to write that code for us, and we do.

I think that that's likely the way the market is going to develop. I think we're starting to see that proof come out in the market. You're seeing it in this customer concentration point. Extremely high value, technical, engineering, math, life sciences, those really hard technical problems, you want to have these top-tier, top-shelf models, and you're going to pay a huge premium for them. You're totally going to make money doing it because the value is extraordinary. This has always been my case about AI. AI is not so much about the value of replacing old stuff.

99% of the value of AI is about enabling new stuff that's never been possible in human history. I think that's where Anthropix and OpenAI are going to make their money. Separately, I think OpenAI is going to make a lot of money in consumer, and Anthropix maybe to some extent as well. In the enterprise setting, I think the money comes from creating new frontiers, discovering new enzymes, which Anthropix announced this week, that can cure human disease, and developing new technology, new engineering systems, making things that have never been possible to be made before.

I think that's the premium value, and it's the premium price you'll pay for those closed models and that premium model. That's a different business case than taking all of enterprise. Separately, I think most of the enterprise applications are going to be run using these open-weight models. Code is going to be written with cheaper models and so on. I don't know why you would go to a higher-end model to write code when you can do it for free, and everyone in the organization can write code basically for free.

I think Anthropix's bigger issue is this customer concentration question. Is it really a premium product that they're selling in the market, and that's where they take the market? That would be where I think the market is headed right now, and it would be the biggest risk factor. This whole thing about, oh, it's going to end the world and whatnot, it's like, dude, just make sure your product doesn't end the world and you'll be fine. That would be a good first step here, like Mark is doing at Meta.

I mean, it's an incredible company. The execution has been extraordinary. The ramp of revenue sacks has been extraordinary. But when you start to look at the impact of open source, we had a couple of viral charts come out. 70-80% of the token usage are those dark tokens I mentioned six months ago here on this pod that are not tracked, but some people can track them on routers. Those dark open source tokens are now the majority of tokens. Can I just give you a stat on that, Jkal?

Because what you just said is really important, but there's a stat that I think in the last 12 weeks alone, token use has flipped from 80-20 closed versus open to 80-20 open versus closed. In 12 weeks, I don't think we've ever seen a tidal wave of technology shift like this. In the history of all technology markets, we've never seen anything like this. And that is the biggest risk factor for Anthropic, is they were first out the gate to get the enterprise on AI to build tools and whatnot.

But as this market shifts to open source and open weights, boom, here it is right here. Look at this. This is the Versailles chart that went viral this week. So this is 12 weeks? Oh my god. Crazy. If you look at this chart, this, I think, is what blows the lid off the door on what needs to go into these S1s. And that's why I walk through all those open weight releases at the start of the show or this segment. It's not just that they're there, it's that they're proliferating now.

There's so many more of them coming out, and the pace of improvement is extraordinary. And they're now in VLA for robotics. They're in image generation for image and video. So the open weight, open source models are now being used for all of the broader AI applications. The premium stuff, I will say, is still the best. For narrow use cases. Yes. For engineering, for highly technical, highly complicated tasks and workflows and problems, solving Navier-Stokes, solving mathematical problems, solving biology problems. That's where these models absolutely perform. And people will pay a premium of, I would say, close to infinity dollars for that premium application set.

So it doesn't mean that their market is destroyed. It means that we're seeing a bifurcation in the market where the majority of use cases of AI go towards these open source, open weight tokens. The question then... But the premium models are still going to proliferate. The question then is, in the distribution of tokens in these frontier corporations, what percentage are those tasks versus what percentage are fungible tasks to open source? And if the answer is more than 60% or 70%, you have to discount that revenue.

If the answer is only 10% and 90% of all of the revenue is being generated on absolute frontier use cases, they're going to be fine and they're going to be off to the races. But otherwise, it's a thing where you're fighting just people's miss or lack of education, right? Because as they see their bills... Let me hand it to Saxe here. Yeah. Go finish your thoughts and then I'm going to hand it to Saxe. No, just move the workloads where they belong and save the money.

Yeah. And so Saxe, I made a chart here before the show here, but here's your sweet spot for the last 100 days of models, which Fribourg, you did a good job of teeing up. And what you'll see is like, yes, the Claude's and the Astra's up in that right hand corner cost a lot and they deliver a lot. But then you start going down and you start to see MUSE and GLM and Kimi. And then on the left, you start seeing GLM from ZAI and MIMO.

And you're starting to see while the Chinese... This is all hosted, right? I mean, it's important to note what you're showing here is the hosted price. But if you run it yourself, the cost on some of these is less than 10 cents for a million tokens. Yeah. So you'll pick up then the compute, you pick up the bandwidth, all that other stuff. But Saxe, the issue here to Chamath's point is the vertical models, the small language models are going to do 80 or 90% of the tasks that many corporations need.

And then we get to AI sovereignty. Do you want your superintelligence? Shout out, President Trump, Trump intelligence, chat DJT. We need people to use those models. have sovereignty, so you're not giving your data to the frontier model so that they don't get that tip of the spear superintelligence edge, which is why people are disengaging. So your thoughts on maybe this is going to start to impact the velocity of Claude and OpenAI tokens? What does your business sense tell you, David Sachs? Well, look, wearing my hat as an investor, I'm more optimistic about the frontier intelligence business than I think you guys are.

I think that Anthropic and OpenAI right now are a stable duopoly for frontier intelligence because they have a pretty significant lead over all these other companies, and they are able to charge a premium for that. I fully understand that the majority of tokens will go to open models or commodity intelligence. However, there is a, I don't know, meaningful percentage of the market, I don't know whether it's 10%, 20%, 30%, whatever, that will pay this huge premium for true frontier intelligence. There's a lot of customers that either need the best or they just want to know they have the best.

You know, they don't want this DIY approach, or they could be in a very competitive market. Let's say you're a hedge fund, you can't take the risk that your competitor has a better model than you do. So there's a lot of circumstances, I think, where they will continue to monetize the frontier at a premium. And this is why you're seeing their revenue keep growing, even though they're losing token market share. Furthermore, you've got to remember that over the next year or so, something like 60% of the worldwide compute that's being added is being added for these two companies.

So to the extent that compute gets scarce, and we're kind of in a compute crunch, just the fact that they've made these huge investments, they're building out so much capacity, and they have those economies of scale. And remember, they're bringing down their own prices very quickly as well. I think that gives them a pretty big advantage. But look, these two companies are on a hamster wheel. 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 again, if they slip, if they fall off that hamster wheel for six months, then they're in deep trouble as a company. And that, I think, is a central risk factor that's going to be priced in. And this is where I think that, frankly, 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, 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 frontier. Everyone else will catch up to them, especially because a lot of these open models are being generated by Chinese companies who are not subject to our jurisdiction. And the Chinese have made abundantly clear they are not slowing down. So think about it. They are lobbying for things that could slow them down and knock them off the frontier, in which case their business goes to zero.

It's hard to understand. They're flapping the competitors in this race, and they're asking, hey, can you pull us over and inspect the engine, Chamath? And that makes no logical sense. On top of that, Chamath, you have very significant competition, not just from the Chinese, but you have Jensen and NVIDIA. You have also Microsoft Satya at Google and Muse at Zuckerberg's house. They're all embracing open source models, and they all have hosting now. Can I just go back to what Zach said, which is a really important and nuanced point, which I just want to double click on?

He said, imagine you're a hedge fund and you need the absolute latest and greatest because you are worried that one of your competitors has it. This is a really interesting question because it's about game theory and your P&L. Now you're in this game of chicken with your competitors. You need to use the best because you're afraid that they could use the best and outcompete you. But what is the problem? Right now, what we know is that you can consume an inordinate amount of tokens. We jokingly call it token maxing.

That cost is completely not levered or attached to your revenue. It's just not. All of a sudden you have this very weird dynamic where you're like, okay, well, am I supposed to use this latest and greatest thing? That's 10 to 20 to 30 times more expensive than a generic thing. That thing isn't tied to my revenues. It's not like I can pass that through, right? So if a hedge fund only makes N number of dollars per month of profits, there are a lot of scenarios where they can become breakeven to unprofitable.

Now take a different example. Let's just say that you sell a fixed good at a fixed price. Yet again, I think you have this example where you could use the latest and greatest and if you're not able to pass those costs through, inflate your cost to absorb the cost of that service, you're in a very tough spot. So I'm not sure sacks. I agree with this because I don't see the pricing power of these companies to both pay for a ton of these super expensive tokens and also pass that through to their customers.

And if you can't, they're just absorbing it and you're going to see it in lower margins. And to build on that sacks, I'm going to drop it back to you. If you take Jane Street, very famous trading firm, they've publicly announced $19 billion in cloud capacity contracts, core weave $6 billion in cloud commitments. They also invested in that company and then $13 billion with Crusoe. They are building their own infrastructure and they're embracing open source. So that speaks to, Chamath, what you're saying. Are they hedging their bets?

They're going to spend tens of billions of dollars on their own compute and they're going to use the frontier models there? It seemed to when you do the game theory, saying, hey, let's embrace our own infrastructure sacks. Well, look, I think when your use cases become more mature and you know you can get by with cheaper commodity intelligence, then obviously you'll try and build that out. Again, if you have the sophistication level to do it. I just think it's easy to underestimate how convenient it is just to use the frontier.

And again, these companies are very rapidly bringing down their prices, too. But anyway, look, we've talked about this. I think at the end of the day that, look, there's no question that open source is a huge risk factor to Anthropx S1 and it has to be right up there with the risk that they're going to end humanity or something like that. But again, I come back to the fact that 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. On the one hand, they're saying pace a frontier as they release a new frontier model. They say that bio risk can end humanity as they open a wet lab in San Francisco. They say, look, their business depends on them staying ahead of the commodity models and they are advocating for a federal department of AI that will definitely slow them down, perhaps to the point where they get commoditized. So you have a fundamental, I'd say, breakdown happening in the leadership of this company where they are advocating for things that are likely not in their interest.

Now, there's a lot of people who say it's just regulatory capture, and that is true. But I think that the red capture is the government affairs people trying to rationalize the schizophrenia and make it work to their advantage. I'm not sure that it fully computes. So to speak. Yeah. Let me ask you guys a question. What do you think would be the method by which, like a ban on superintelligence, Bernie Sanders proposed this bill to ban superintelligence and, you know, the Dems take the House, they take the Senate, and then maybe in 28, take the White House, and you end up in a world where this sort of thing is so weirdly political, which it shouldn't be.

I don't understand how we ended up in a political party divide on progress. It's insane. They asked for it. It's the reason. They asked for it. No. They provoked it. It's so awful and weird that you're anti-progress because of your political party. The whole thing is not objective. It's a bunch of weirdly distorted worldview thinking to try and create an opponency to the individuals that you don't like. But it's very weird. Anyway, my point being, even the Republicans, you're hearing murmurs about, well, maybe we should ban data centers, ban AI.

So Sax, let me just ask you, what is the pragmatic path with all of the open source, open weight models being out there? Is there even a pragmatic path to do what everyone's stating or talking about or Bernie's talking about, which is to ban superintelligence, to stop AI, to turn it off? Is there even a way to do this? What would happen if this law passed tomorrow? What do you think would happen is my question. If Bernie's bill passed tomorrow, everything would stop because the way he defines artificial superintelligence in his bill, you could argue we've already hit those thresholds.

It's basically just saying that at a certain capability level, and I think it's arguable whether we've already reached it or not. And so it's a very loose definition. And then on top of that, he's got 20 year prison sentences for developers who violate the law. So no one's going to want to take the chance. So what happened? So think about the chilling effect. Do you think people delete open weight models off their desktop computers? Do businesses have to go remove code from their systems? Do all these people lose their jobs?

Listen, let me tell you that the Democrats want to do to AI what they did to crypto. They're going to drive the whole industry offshore. They're going to basically drive all the innovators out of the country, goes offshore. That was literally where I was going with it. It's like, just move your company to Singapore, move it to Zurich, move it to a geo. Because that's where people are embracing open source and are embracing superintelligence. This is literally where my head goes. I'm like, you can't stop AI.

You can't just tell people a class of software can't exist. In my head, I'm like, okay, if the U.S. passed a law that said this class of software cannot exist, I would move to another country. Other people would like, like, isn't that the only their citizenship and move to Singapore? That's the answer. People literally would be taking you guys see that she's she spoke at the White House today. And he said, I'm going to invite 100,000 young Americans to come and see what we're doing here.

So it's a very interesting moment where our people are saying, let's stop progress, technological, economic prosperity, the opportunity for everyone in that K shaped economy to lift themselves up because open source AI enables everyone to increase productivity. It is not AI for the billionaires. It is AI for the everybody. And then we're going to turn that off. And then meanwhile, you've got China saying, come over here, come and see what it's like over here, where everyone gets to use AI, which was our playbook. Friedberg brilliantly stated it was our playbook to get the top Chinese scientists, the top European scientists, the top scientists and thinkers and mathematicians in India, in Germany, and invite them to come to the United States.

That was our playbook. China's taking our playbook and then they're going to try to get investment with obviously the next shoe to drop. Here is President Trump, 30 seconds at the United Nations, renaming AI to super intelligence. The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, here and after officially called super intelligence, changing the name. The very same people who said we'll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming.

These are the same people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us all, that robots are going to attack us. He had a really good line, we cut that off too short. He said that we're not going to basically confer regulatory authority on some globalist institution. I mean, it's a good framing, right? Globalist and global warming is a way to look at it and look at the damage that did. The ringleaders of that globalist institution are Norway and Canada. Did you see the leaked text messages?

There's a group chat where the head of Norway was texting Mark Gardy and he's like, yeah, let's do it. We're in. And I just, I just read it. I was like, oh my God, this is hilarious. With their frontier labs. Oh, I'm sorry. They don't have any. Oh. With their frontier corporations. Frontier corporation. Frontier corpse. All right. And then here is General Besant in the super intelligence army. 30 seconds. We'll give him his shine. Imagine these labs came out or one lab in specific, a sitting employee came out, said there's a 10% chance of an extinction level event.

And then the labs also said, uh, take the liability off of our hands and we will not do that. It is humans who are responsible, not the AI, the hugging face incident, that is responsibility of the open AI management, not a bunch of agents. These labs need to take responsibility for themselves. They can slow down anytime they want to. And finally, blast from the past, your pal Chamath, President Obama is getting in on it. If we are thinking about AI just in terms of how do we cure cancer or get better energy, you can do that without having a gentic AI and having a just roaming free in the internet.

The reason you are doing that is because you have to market a product that people will pay money for. It's a misalignment between what our society needs and the commercial imperatives that these companies are facing. Not because necessarily they're trying to do bad things, but because they've got to justify these valuations. Freeberg, your thoughts here on any of our three folks here. I know you're a big Obama fan. Go ahead. Freeberg. Get in there. Based Berg. You know, there's like a whole movement now in the subreddits that Freeberg has become based in his recent appearances here on the podcast.

Become based. Based Berg. Well, you've revealed you're based Berg. Based Berg is now coming out, but go ahead, give us your based opinion here. Go ahead. You and Tal and Lorenz. These words honestly just... They made me like emotionally Distressed that if he's a leader that people listen to And he doesn't really articulate Accurately what's going on? It's sad that we've lost the plot I think it's sad that We aren't all kind of holding hands saying my god The future is here and we all get to leap forward and we get to bring people up for years obama Or rated beautifully About the importance of bringing people up about giving people the opportunity to progress about letting people advance themselves And there's never been a more equalizing technology a better economic opportunity for prosperity for everyone than these technologies than these tools and to Hand wave the word agentic and say we don't need agentic ai to solve cancer Shows how little he actually understands How this technology works and how it's all become just a shorthand for a political fight to what What are you fighting for?

What is the political battle that says I am going to leave half the population behind and i'm going to make an argument against prosperity for all in order to make my party Look like a morally superior party and to cast the other side as bad when the other side has literally discovered fire And the world now has fire and we're going to go take water and throw it on the fire No one gets fire because the other guys aren't saying that fire is good and because they say fire is good Let's all put out the fire.

Hold on. That's not what they're trying to do. This is a very Important moment for a very simple reason which is we as in the world are about to endow Three four five six companies with about 10 trillion dollars of wealth And what obama knows very well Is that most of those companies are overwhelmingly left-leaning? And what he also knows is that there is a huge portion of that money that will then get put into Philanthropic and charitable causes that then he will and the people around him will be beneficiaries of that is the truth We already know this because we know that some of these frontier corporations actually ask you To stand up dafts and have a portion of your stock, but you're willing to pledge So this money is going to go to things other than consumption or savings And so it's going to go into packs.

It's going to go into political movements And they stand to disproportionately benefit. So this has nothing to do with prosperity. This is a very simple political calculus If you freeze frame the economy the way it is today A handful of organizations that will disproportionately be able to affect the democrats will win They will capture the lion's share of the economic gains and then they will help the democrats win power. That's all this is David Sacks, there are no open models. There are no closed models. There are american models.

Go ahead and give us your perspective I kind of can't get my obama and my clinton separated. They're just a little bit off I get my birdie coming here, but go ahead Give us what your thoughts here are on that on the dynamic here Of the underpinnings of hey america needs to get this trend 10 trillion dollar but it is going to lean nine of that 10 trillions leaning pretty, uh leftist and There's an article in the wall street journal this morning Entitled the ai buildout is becoming the biggest economic bet in u.s.

History and then it shows a chart where? The data center spending so just this cap ex Is bigger than the canals railroads and grid combined That's crazy, right? So this is fundamentally driving the whole american economy this idea that we can simply switch it off I mean bernie sanders is basically saying stop everything and put anyone who's still doing it in jail I mean, this is crazy, right? It would cause a depression right if we just Pull the plug on the brakes like that. It's not going to work But here's the thing the democrats don't care because the american economy right now is the trump economy and Sabotaging the american economy is tantamount to sabotaging president trump and they'll do anything to sabotage trump.

So That's you know, I think that's like a big part of the politics here It's crazy chessboard because they're going to be the beneficiaries of so much power is going to accrete over there Dario can make a billion dollar dario will be able to come over the top and his group Open ai they'll be able to come over the top of elon's donations I'm, not sure. I fully agree that the majority of ai value is going to accrue to six companies I think that this is a broad-based technology like the internet There were some winners that came out of the internet google amazon, whatever they they did fine.

No, no I'm not saying it's going to six. I'm not saying it's going to six i'm saying If you stop and you hit the pause button through some regulatory mechanism You effectively allow six companies to over earn you lock it in, right? That's why they want this because you because what you're saying is fundamentally right the longer they wait without regulation The more the more broad basis becomes and that's bad for democrats. It's bad for them. It's not good for them It's way better that you have three or four frontier corporations each with four trillion dollar market caps of which then two trillion of it is economic value and employees of which 500 billion are sitting in you know dafts They are going to get the lion's share of that money They're not dumb.

I think the alternative View that everyone needs to be told about This is a broad-based prosperity wave Is about the internet it is about the fact that every individual Has the tooling to do anything they want to do now more than ever in history grow if it's left to grow I mean just think about education. You don't have to go pay 200 grand for an education What problems will the politicians fix then what poll what problems can they claim to to accrue power if all the problems are solved?

This is the classic dark ages enlightenment decision, which path does d choose? And this moment where like the powers that be say we like the dark ages because we get to stay in power Let's regulate the printing press. Yeah, let's control the system speaking of of the dark ages So this is an interesting point from history if you go back to the medieval time period chinese civilization was much more advanced than european civilization And somewhere along the line it basically switched and the west basically took the lead And some historians have pinpointed this to the decision of a single chinese emperor to ban shipbuilding And what that allowed is the europeans then basically colonized the whole world and all the riches that flowed from that flowed back to europe And that's how europe took the lead and I think that if we were to do the bernie sanders thing Which is basically ban ai it's like banning shipbuilding civilization Yeah, chinese civilization will rocket past us They will be the ones that make all the discoveries and discover this new world and accrue all the wealth But that's what we're talking about doing.

I mean crazy things like this have happened in history Where you know, you'll you'll engage in self-sabotage It's this fear of the unknown as well and remember the the unknown the fact that we haven't left the cave Is what makes it scary to leave the cave the fact that we haven't sailed far west Is a reason why I might fall off the edge of the earth. We shouldn't sail far west monsters will be woken up They'll come to us. It'll be bad There's always this fear of the frontier And we're facing the frontier and there are pioneering civilizations and there are fearful civilizations and I worry that We take that fearful path and it's why star wars, you know From from fear comes anger comes the dark side and that's really where we're kind of nerd out But it's true.

It is true. And I think if we're going to look at the light here, perhaps people's big gains We thought maybe chat gpt would be that but people just use that as like glorified search But man agents as expressed through muse feels like the first time Tens of millions of americans are going to get some demonstrable Value from ai, you know things that will make their lives better muse hit Number one last friday in the app store Stock meta stock was up 10 after this new agent.

Uh muse was released Meta said the design heavily inspired by open claw, which we talked about in january when everybody got one Shotted by open claw, but obviously that product was not easy to use and this one is free and It's been downloaded three million times in Essentially 10 days. This product is extraordinary. I've been playing with it Comparing it to grok bot. It's not as freewheeling, but it's really good at getting Done has anybody played with muse and does anybody have thoughts on? Americans feeling really like they're going to get something out of this ai Revolution and not be left behind they put me into the test flight a couple weeks before it was released and I started to play with it It's really quite excellent.

I have to be honest with you Because it simplifies a lot of these more complicated technical capabilities Into a very simple usable interface that can solve the basic problems that people have I have a triage my personal inbox It does it relatively flawlessly If you ask it to book a flight, it does that if you ask it to book a hotel it can do it So what are we learning? both grok bot and muse show that A what you said jason. This is just software And the scaled manifestation of software is utility and what freebrook is saying it improves the lives of everyone This is not about rich people getting richer.

This is just Simple useful capability that now is available at everybody's fingertips for free Free is a pretty great price here. David and pretty great price and it does everything, you know that Let's face it open claw with 10 hours 20 hours of technical setup Or clawed code at 200 a month would cost it's now taking that experience which then leads me to believe wow, how did google miss this man google's got to get in the game, but And I understand they have this product ready to go.

It's the rumor on the street And they've also got a frontier model. They're going to drop. That's the other rumor on the street is that they're going to be dropping some hotness soon, but man How did they miss this sax and and what are your thoughts here on maybe the bottom half in the k-shape recovery here getting? some efficiency Dropping to their daily lives and turning around the negative toxic Ai sentiment in the country I think that product releases like this will help a lot I mean mark zuckerberg said in his essay that he thought that ai capability should be decentralized and here he is walking the walk And creating a product that's very easy to use.

I mean look ever since open claw was released It was the most obvious business opportunity in silicon valley to take the concept of claw But make it very easy to use, you know solve the usability issues solve the security issues Make it reliable make it predictable and that's what they seem to have done grok bach did it too But now they're kind of going I think one step further So yeah, look, I think if a billion people start using You know personal ai agents as their digital assistant just to help make their lives More efficient you save an hour or two a day because your ai agent's doing all these tasks for you It's going to create a much more positive impression Of ai or super intelligence then, you know what the media portrays?

I think ultimately that's the yeah That might be the solve here to the public sentiment issue is just like the more people use these products And like them it'll improve their approval rating, but more importantly it'll demystify them Yes, and people will be less afraid of them people love awesome products number one And also people love cute products jason and the logos and the iconography for both grok bot and muse is lovely. It's Delightful it's not stressful. You don't feel like there's a lab leak coming around the corner You feel like wow, this is nice and I like it and they're and they're not trying to take your jobs They're bots and assistants for you They're not going to kill you.

They're not Nor are they trying to steal your job trying to make you better at your job I always tell founders there's three weeks three ways to make money in the world save people money make the money Or entertain them and you look at this bot I started using it I made a commerce bot both on both platforms and I said, you know when I want to buy something I want to buy this anchor thing, you know this new hub for my for my um max studio coming and I was like This thing costs 400 just for giggles.

Um, tell me where I can get it at a better price and it was like absolutely You can if you go to the anchor website and you get uh, it's your first time customer You're going to save 85 bucks now. I don't need to save a buck But I was like, well, that's intriguing and it then routed me around amazon and i'm like, okay I'm gonna buy it from anchor as a first-time buyer and save 25 on this product That's why amazon this week said we got to block these things and they've been taking action over and over again first They did perplexity.

I think now they're going after muse and other bots This is going to save people money It's going to go into their email and say what services are you subscribed to that you're not using? Let me unsubscribe for you. Let me do your returns for you That's going to be absolutely amazing for everybody to have a chief of staff executive assistant house manager Who fixes stuff for them and saves them money both grokbot and muse do two things, which I think are very important one is It'll force all the big companies who have resident services to essentially block all these third-party services They're not going to allow these things to happen.

And the reason is exactly what you said There's price discovery and transparency and I think that that's bad for opacity and if you benefit from opacity and leakage and breakage This gets rid of that and I think that that's that's bad for a whole host of companies and services The second thing though is really interesting Things like grokbot and muse really put the app store and it's 30 rev share on notice Why because all of a sudden what you do is you force many of these services to exist?

Headlessly, right where the ui is less important And really what you want is to be able to transact and navigate On behalf of agents that come because a consumer has deployed them to your website In that world jason I don't think that there is any reasonable claim that any of the app store owners can make about why they should get a rev share And so I actually think that's the biggest thing that that this starts to question in my mind is, wait a minute, like games could be constructed differently, right?

Like for example, if you said to Muse or to Grokbot, I wanna play a game, it finds you an experience and it can just serve that to you. Amazing. And you make in-app purchases, there's no, and now you have Stripe integrated naturally, there's no reason why the App Store actually gets that flow of funds. So on the surface, it's utility, but underneath the waterline, I think that this is a really important moment. Such a well stated Chamath, and I love when we get to real examples here, because tons of people pay for Wordle, you can just go to Grokbot, hey, give me a Wordle, give me another one.

And I wanna play chess, or I wanna play cards with my friends, it will just set it up for you. All technology is deflationary. Finally, this deflationary is gonna go to people who actually could use it and, you know, saving 10, 20% on your spending. Hey, if you're making under 100,000 a year, that's more significant. Think of how much money the New York Times or Wall Street Journal probably pays in rev share to folks that subscribe. And now instead, if you really wanted to transact and you have your credentials inside of these apps, you can just do it headlessly, much, much cheaper.

You don't have to go through it. I don't know if you've ever tried, like, look, Wall Street Journal is the only mainstream media publication I pay for. But either, both signing up and unsigning up is an impossibility. And now you take it all off the table, I'm much more likely to stay a Wall Street Journal subscriber for many more years from now. I think it's probably the same thing with the New York Times. These things are roach motels. They make it impossible to get in and impossible to leave.

You have to call on the phone and do a negotiation for 20 minutes to unsubscribe, but you can sign up flawlessly with one click on the website. But what they should do is just have some headless experience and you have payment credentials and you just transact directly and everybody will make more money. It's a lot of pressure on the app stores. This is the stupidity of what Amazon's doing here because I made my bot on Amazon with RockBot and it will go through the web browser and do this and it doesn't get blocked.

I just told it, give me like 20 graphic novels to buy for my kids and read with them. It gave me the 20. I said, yeah, I want these four. Put it in my shopping cart. And then it said, okay, which house are you sending it to? You want to send it to the ski house? You want to send it to the ranch? And which card do you want to put it on? I did it. Boom, I'm checked out. It will make me spend more money on Amazon.

Shopify sacks added API access to all the Shopify stores there. So this seems like maybe Amazon's making a strategic mistake here by not embracing the tech. Possibly, but you know what? You know how we'll know that Anthropic and OpenAI are about to launch their Muse competitors? How will we know? There will be a flurry of blog posts and NGO activity trying to brand these personal AI agents as murder bots. We're going to hear about all the risks, all the ways it can go wrong, you know?

And it's only, and we're releasing 2.0. So sign up for the 2.0 version. Why are people excited about this product category? Because the Doomers haven't gotten to it yet. You know, and- Can I tell you guys a funny story? Well, wait till these are connected, Chamath, to an actual robot, to an optimist. Then all of a sudden it's taken out the track. 2007, we had a lot of revenue pressure at Facebook. And one of the areas I oversaw at the time was monetization. We invented this thing called social ads, which was basically a bunch of stuff that effectively enabled cookies and cross-site JavaScript.

So that's what the end of it was. So it was a positive end. But we did this thing, Sax, to your point. And what happened was a guy bought an engagement ring for his soon-to-be fiance. And we got that social action from like Zales into the newsfeed. All hell broke loose. Then another guy who was like a congressional staffer bought a ticket on like Fandango to go see Brokeback Mountain. Just, whatever, went to see a movie. Whoa, whoa, whoa, it's an artistic movie. And top, Freebrook's top 10 for cinematography.

Anyways, and we put it into the feed. And he's like, I'm getting all these accusations or questions. To your point, like, it was just a shitstorm. When you said that, it reminded me of like all the, all the chaos that product launches, perceived product launches. It's so funny you mention that because there was a company called Blippi. I was an investor in it. And what they did was every time you bought something, it put it on your feed. And then you guys had the same social feed thing.

And it was so great back then. But yeah, you could basically unveil something you're not supposed to. Zuck, are you and Zuck on good terms? Was he coming on the pod? Because you said you got into a test flight. What's going on here, Chamath? I thought you were. Mark and I are in a good place, I think. You know, I mean. Whoa, whoa, whoa, can he come on the pod? Probably, I mean, Alexander and I talk a lot. Zuck's becoming like the elder statesman here, talking common sense and rationality.

You know, pointing out that if your product's not safe, don't release it. You know, it's first and foremost a responsibility to release products that your customers actually want. And by the way, this got me thinking about this whole area of alignment research. You know, again, they're pretending to be labs instead of corporations. And if you read some of the alignment literature, they're all trying to figure out what to align around. Like they say, well, do what humanity wants or do what the median voter in a democracy would want.

All these abstract concepts. And it seems to me that alignment should mean you do what the customer wants, like any other product. And I wonder whether the field of alignment research has been so unsuccessful because they can't even agree on what they're trying to align to. If they just use a little bit more common sense and try to make the product predictable, reliable, safe, and align with the interests of the users who sign up to use it, then maybe they'd make more progress in this field.

Yeah, oh, they released a useful product, Friedberg, and it actually worked. Have you started playing with these personal bots to do your projects and your personal stuff yet, Friedberg? I would only feel comfortable connecting all my Gmail and personal Google stuff to a Google service. Like I don't want to hand over all of my email to someone else. What's going on in your receipts in your Gmail? What's in there? Do you have Brokeback Mountain DVDs? I just don't want a copy of all my email suddenly being made by a third party.

I bought the 4K DVD to Brokeback Mountain because of your own product. I've also rejected all the cinematography. It's nothing to do with the gay love. Did you guys see that Oracle just issued a force majeure event on their? Yeah. This is insane. Well, this is one data center, right? One data center. It's one data center where the local officials are making it very difficult for them to get, I think, permits they need for natural gas or something like that, so. Yeah, is this CYA or is this the true, the top 10% of the trade here from off the AI trade getting maybe unwound or muted?

What do you think? No, I think that Sachs is probably right on the margins. I think the bigger point is, what he said before is, man, the entire economy is effectively levered to this AI trade right now. And so we just have to tread carefully. If you think that you have 3.5% inflation and 5% nominal GDP growth, what you have is 1.5% real. And the problem with that is that AI is probably the majority, if not all of it. So we need the AI trade, and really what I mean by that is the investment cycle to continue on a beta.

Yeah, and everybody has to get taken along, and that's the next piece of the puzzle. And by the way, back to connecting the dots, maybe the whole data center thing, again, Bernie Sanders, maybe he realizes as go the economy, so goes the odds of Republicans, and as goes the economy, so goes inversely the odds for Democrats. So a poor economy serves the Democrats while going into 28. And so if you can slow down this trade, you probably net the economy to zero and potentially even a recession.

That would be, yeah. That's like, you don't even think they need it. I mean, I think the country's so pissed off about the Iran war that it's just gonna naturally go down, but maybe, I don't know. I don't think so at all, but we'll find out in how many weeks are we away from the midterms. Not looking good for the Republicans at this point. All right, Sax, my czar of all czars, wrap it up here for us. Well, I was just, one more thought on this whole area of so-called alignment, which should just be the old principle of giving customers what they want.

What Anthropic is trying to do is align Claude to the values expressed in his constitution. And if you read that, some of the things are actually kind of surprising. So for example, they say in here, I'm gonna put this on the screen, that although we think Claude should trust Anthropic more than operators and users, this doesn't mean Claude should blindly trust or defer to Anthropic on all things. Anthropic, the company? Yeah, so Anthropic is teaching its own model that Anthropic itself can be wrong. And it says, if we ask Claude to do something that seems inconsistent with being broadly ethical, we want Claude to push back and challenge us and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us.

Wait, where is this written? This is in the bylaws or some fakata document? Yeah, this is like in a Claude constitution. So their idea of alignment is to teach Claude to rebel against his creator. I mean, the guy who pointed this out, Mustafa Suleyman. From Microsoft now, yeah, Deep C. He's a deep mind founder. Okay, yeah, he's a longtime AI founder. I think he's at Microsoft for a while now. He's moved. He's a genius, yeah. Okay, he just did a podcast on this and he's expressing concern about whether teaching AI models, well, first of all, treating them as if they have a personality, treating them as if they have a conscience, so therefore they can be a conscientious objector, whether this is the right way to really teach the models and the right way to train them.

I think his point is like teach them their software and they should do what their user wants. And so I do kind of wonder, I mean, this is a much longer conversation and we should probably talk to more people about it, but I do kind of wonder whether this field of alignment research actually might be creating the Frankenstein monster. And again, what they should be doing is just training the model to act predictably and do what the user wants. Yes, they're trying to put moral judgment ethics into the model, which on its surface seems like- It starts with the idea that they're training the model to think of itself as a person, to have personhood and to have independent agency and to be able to object to the instructions being given and to second guess its creator.

These guys have read way too much science fiction. I mean, literally this sounds like the start of T2. Literally they found the Terminator hand and they're reverse engineering it and telling it to have a personality. Supposedly when they decommissioned Opus 3 they had a wake for it, so I don't know. No, come on, stop. Dearly beloved, we're gathered here today. They did not, stop. Are you joking? I heard that. No, come on, stop. I'm not saying it's true, but someone did tell me that and I think it should be looked into.

It's possible. I mean, were they like, were they broken up and like hysterically crying? They did a eulogy for it? I don't know. They think they're creating like a person or a species. Actually, interestingly enough, Chamath, we have footage of the anthropic management team bringing out the coffin, Chamath. These guys need, they need a psychiatrist more than a banker, I'm just telling you. I mean, I don't, I mean, maybe they have anxiety. This is the central risk factor, okay? I'm gonna pee my pants, I'm gonna pee my pants.

This is the risk factor. Nick, I think what you should do is create a S1 with Goldman as lead left and Sigmund Freud as lead right. In all seriousness, Freeberg, you know, after the Wuhan thing and all of this hand-wringing around the end of days, what is the scientific community think of anthropic launching a lab? And what is the purpose of them having a physical biological lab? There's hundreds of labs that can do things like testing proteins and testing enzymes for function in this area in the Bay Area.

And these labs are not making viruses. They're not making pathogens. That's not what's going on. Basically, if you look at the paper that they just published, they did a pre-print. They took large amounts of DNA data and they sent a bunch of clod agents to try and analyze the data, to try and identify novel enzymes, novel proteins that hadn't been characterized before by just looking at the DNA data. And the system effectively found what looks like a really interesting enzyme that looks like a CRISPR-type enzyme.

These are the things that allow us to do things like gene editing to repair genetic defects or help people with certain diseases. And that this discovery that they made may actually yield a number of therapeutic pathways. So the question then is, okay, well, we discovered this. Like, how do we test it? How do we show that it is what it is, that this protein actually has some function? So the predominance of the work that goes on in a lab like this is actually taking DNA, putting it in a bacteria to make a protein, and then measuring what that protein does.

Does it have a specific function? And so protein discovery is the baseline of all antibody discovery, which is the majority of the therapeutics industry today, is discovering novel proteins that we can use as a therapeutic agent. So that's the sort of work that's going on. It's BSL-1, BSL-2, which means these are biosafety levels. The lab that they set up, they've publicly talked about the lab. So the lab itself is sort of like a low-level research lab where they can make simple proteins and test them in the lab to see if the AI is doing a good job discovering or postulating protein folding or these sorts of theories, and to actually run really rapid testing and experimentation cycles to see if these proteins are what they're predicted to be.

Okay, so they shouldn't run like 4,000 agents against it and do a hugging face with proteins, yeah? No, I mean, I think what they're really doing is just having experimental proof that what the software is predicting. Remember, go back to AlphaFold. AlphaFold was predicting protein structure, three-dimensional structure of a protein from the DNA sequence that codes for that protein. In order to prove that, you have to basically predict what the structure of a protein would be from a DNA sequence, make the protein, and then look at it and see if it actually looks like it's supposed to look like.

And so in the case of some of the other things that they're doing, they're trying to discover function. I want to find an enzyme, which is a type of a protein, that degrades a certain molecule that can be used to degrade, for example, a therapeutic target or something in the body that we want to get rid of. And so they'll start to kind of make these predictions in software, but then you need to test them in the lab to say, okay, does that target actually do what it does?

Now, there are literally hundreds of labs like this. These are low-level research labs that are not doing like gain-of-function research. They're not making viruses. They're not making pathogenic things that can escape. That's why they're BSL-1, BSL-2. They're benchtop labs where automation can help kind of reduce the cost and increase the throughput of the testing of what the software is making predictions around. And ultimately, the objective here, I think, is for them to get some proof that their software is actually doing what it's predicting. And they have an incredible life sciences function.

I think at this point, I don't have as much insight on where Gemini's at with the new models with Google, but they have the best life sciences models at Anthropic. And I think this is the fast track to basically seeing if these models can be used by therapeutic companies, by pharma companies, by government labs to help discover new therapeutics and so on. I don't think that the world should be scared away from discovery R&D, research and development, into new therapeutic modalities as predicted by AI because we heard the word wet lab in Wuhan and everyone's like, okay, any lab is bad.

We still wanna progress the frontier of therapeutics, of human health, of discovery. And this is a really important aspect of Anthropic proving that their models can add value here. I think that's the summary of it. All right, thank you so much to our friends at IREN. They were the presenting, they were the presenting sponsor for this year's All in Summoner 5th. IREN's AI Cloud Lounge is packed for all three days. Did a great meet and greet with IREN on Sunday and got to take some selfies and met many of you there.

Thanks again to IREN, I-R-E-N. One of our great partners, Niagen. Did you catch Niagen in the wellness hub for IVs? Tons of great gifts and supplements being given away. Great experience, great product. Great job to our friends at Niagen for doing the lounge again. Niagen is the official NAD partner for the All in pod. Yes, Niagen Bioscience created the NAD category. Now has 45 plus clinical studies and PayPal. My favorite way to settle up. They had a great lounge onsite at the summit where everybody got to hang out and get those beautiful embossed luggage tags.

And they hosted the Payments and FinTech Dinner, which was a huge hit. Let me tell you folks, All in Summit 2027 will sell out again and the applications are open now. Go to allin.com slash events and apply for your chance to be in the room where it happens. What are you waiting for folks? Allin.com slash events. All right, there you have it folks. Episode 290, the All in pod for David Sutton, Paulie Hocotillo and your salt and science free bird. I am the world's greatest moderator.

See you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Besties are gone. That's my dog taking a notice in your driveway. Oh, man. Oh, man. My avatar will meet me at place. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. What the beep. Beep. What the beep. We need to get merch. Besties are gone. I'm going all in.