We tested Instinct, MUSE and Grokbot. They’re ridiculous.

Key Takeaway

Pick one recurring task you currently handle through email, websites, or follow-ups and delegate it to an AI assistant today. Give it a clear outcome, constraints, and permission to persist—for example: “Find three options, book the best one under $X, and update me only when it’s confirmed.” Start with a low-risk task, review the result, then create specialized assistants for repeat areas such as health, taxes, scheduling, or customer-service disputes.

Episode Overview

Sam Parr and Shaan Puri test the emerging wave of AI personal assistants, including Instinct, Meta’s Muse, and Grokbot. They argue that agents are making concierge-style help available to everyone, while discussing the competitive battle for the agent layer, private-data markets, agent security risks, and why emotional intelligence may matter as much as raw model intelligence.

Full Transcript

Transcript of We tested Instinct, MUSE and Grokbot. They’re ridiculous. from My First Million. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Now everybody in the world is gonna have access to things that only rich people used to have before that's what uber did right and now the idea of having what what's in entourage are gold assistant. Lloyd lloyd yeah he goes live instagram news i feel like i can rule the world i know i can be what i want to. I want to talk to you about all the shit that's going on in a i all the new stuff i feel we haven't caught up about all the new things that are going on in a i and i feel like there's a lot of new things so do you want to do that so fun for you i would like to do that i would like to do that.

Are you talking like products or data center stuff there's a lot more products but really anything that's interesting so the first one is i don't think we've talked about. The new personal assistant stuff so instinct music rock bot sick right so a whole new wave of amazing incredible things has happened. And i want to hear first what are you using where you at and then i want to tell you my thoughts on the whole thing should i should i set up but let me give a frame for the whole thing so you and i moved to silicon valley.

Roughly around the same time can i like the twenty twelve ish range and at the time we were not there for we were definitely not there for the google amazon like kind of nineteen ninety nine two thousand two thousand one stuff. We were also not there for facebook twitter and that kind of two thousand four to two thousand nine range and then. When we were there the big thing was this new race and it was things that were like very different it was push a button on your phone and something would happen in the real world and this is where you got uber lift.

You got airbnb you got food delivery all these things that today are everyday things you can push a button get a ride push a button get a burrito push a button get a hotel push a button get anything in the real world using your phone. And that was very different than the companies that came before it. And i remember at the time there was this race where uber was there lift was there sidecar was there suggestion in rideshare and everybody had their little personal preference i remember people that like sidecar i remember people that like lift because they were friendly and used to get in the car and every driver would give you a fist bump and all the cars had pink mustaches.

On the front of the car to do like people don't even know what sidecar is sidecar sidecar was before uber. It was it was kind of hot it was kind of doing well and then it got smashed very quickly because the race intensified. And got so competitive so fast and that's what's going on in ai right now elon said. Ai is the highest elo game in the world elo is like the chess rankings you know like magnus carlson has like a whatever what does that mean that dummies can be amazing at it no the opposite that the.

Smartest players in the world are playing the most fiercely for the same game which is not always the case right like. Bezos and zuckerberg we're doing totally different things and zuckerberg and elon we're doing totally different things and then elon and jack dorsey were doing totally they were all in different spaces. In the sharing economy stuff it wasn't like the most high iq but often times be the most aggressive or most operationally like heavy person whereas it's like nerds are king you know that show physical 100 that we like where they're like.

Let's take the best of every type of athleticism the best wrestler verse the best bodybuilder best karate guy best jiu jitsu guy best. Field hockey person whoever and then they're all gonna be in the same game so that's what's going on in ai right now and that that's what's so the new one. The one that's going on right now is what i call everyday intelligence it's the personal assistant for your life that you're gonna have a. AI that you can just text or talk to on your phone just like you would a personal assistant.

That can just do things for you so i last you know last few years i've had an assistant. Anything i needed and she had access to my inbox she had access to my shoes are slack she could see what's going on. She would say oh you got an email from your tax person they're looking for this to i'm gonna drop a reply or. Hey just so you know next week you have this coming up and this is scheduled at the same time you want me to let them know that bubble up.

Now everybody in the world is gonna have access to things that only rich people used to have before that's what uber did right rich people used to have private drivers. Black cars that would they would tell him hey i'm ready to come pick them up drop them off wherever and then everybody got it and the best part is that you could be like really mean to them. Like with with with a. With a sense with assistance you don't like i'm always like it's like cleaning up before the cleaning lady comes.

Like i want to like make everything like nice for them and i ended up working for them half the time with the some with this one i'm like don't ask questions just right right. Again again i'm like a martial arts instructor i don't even tell them what i didn't like about their previous response i'll just say no. And then they figure out what that means and come back with something better so yeah that's the case but this idea that you take what was always available for the ultra wealthy.

You make it available to everybody that's what. Airbnb did right the ultra wealthy wealthy had vacation homes and now the idea of having you know what what's in entourage re gold assistant. Lloyd lloyd yeah he goes. Instinct. And so the new the new revolution on this you know claude and chat have been around the kill it awesome the new one is now agents for dummies so basically you have like a person who would do stuff. And take it a step further there's this new thing called instinct there's muses bunch others and they will do amazing stuff for you to the point where i've been using instinct like crazy it feels magical it feels the same magic i felt when i played with chat for the first time.

Exactly exactly so if you thought chat gpt was kind of cool and amazing has become everyday part of your life well this is the next thing is gonna become cool and an everyday part of your life because it's gonna blow your mind so let's walk through what a couple of these things are so the first thing is. Instinct instinct is the it's the startup challenger so that's over here in the blue corner we've got instinct. Started by founder noah shin that nobody had ever known nobody's ever heard from he did his first interview today on invest like the best so this first time anybody's heard this guy talk.

Dude i just heard about this app like two months ago is it like that brand new it only launched a couple months ago like two months ago and it's now valued at ten billion dollars. There is their first there there is around a two and a half billion three weeks ago and then five billion and ten billion all in like a three to four week span if you want to hit your goals you need a system and so i worked with hubspot to put together a step by step process showing you how i use chat gpt as a life coach so i uploaded my personal finances my net worth my goals.

The output is that i have this gpt that i can ask questions that i'm having issues with in my life like how should i respond to this email what's the right decision things like that and it's literally changed my life and so if you want that it's free we will send you everything you need to know to set this up and just about twenty minutes and i'll show you how i use it so check it out the link is below in the description. Back to the episode.

And in the last month facebook launch there so over here in the red corner you got zuckerberg coming out you know zuckerberg wants to be in the air race hasn't been able to catch up with chat gpt or with anthropix claude. The models are not quite start a state of the art frontier. They release there's called muse and so same thing is instinct basically the same user experience roughly but it takes place has its own app. Instinct is something that's just in your iMessage you just text it just like you would text any person there's no i've grown to love that which is a very smart thing i want to talk about the strategies of each.

And why i think some of the interesting strategies and we can make some predictions on how this plays out even though those will be dead wrong. But meta has has released news and in the last month meta stock prices up twenty four percent off the back of this. And twenty four percent on a company that was worth i don't know a trillion and a half it's like basically added like five hundred billion dollars in market cap. He did the thing again where he's got this guy named alex wang i think his name is who did scale scale a i and they bought scale a i for like eighteen billion dollars is a really weird deal where was like.

Basically an aqua hire for eighteen billion dollars like what's this kid doing and alex wang is like a rock star where he's treating all this crazy stuff and he wears crocs with camo and he does all this weird stuff turns out zuck did again. Where he does something that seems a little loony for eighteen billion dollars and it's now worth you know what happened show you more or something and i don't know how what the what the game was. Yeah well he's one of the great acquirers right but but instagram but whatsapp and now it looks like one of the next ones is was his aqua hire of.

Yeah on one side daniel gross and nat friedman and on the other side alexander wang by the way you know that scene in the big short where he's like. Is my quant look at him sitting at the table i feel like zuck did that with like a gen z kid is i don't know you think i'm not cool look at this is my gen z kid look at his feet yeah he's got a sick haircut and camo crocs look at his haircut the two sides don't match get it do you get it the two sides of the haircut don't match so funny so you got me was over there you got instinct over here they got grok bot.

Which of people haven't played with grok bot grok bot is also pretty sick this came out of elon's camp so elon who's AI project is xai they have grok which is the name of their thing so grok bot is very much like slack. You create different bots for different things so i got a social media bot and i got a health bot and i got you know so i just named them all so i'm like health guy assistant guy media social media guy tax guy and i have all these different bots they each have a job.

A tax guy your job is to be constantly on top of my tax situation and and any correspondence that's what the tax people you need to be optimized for you need to create organize all my files and all this stuff for me health guy did you train each of them i give each one of them yeah like a goal a set of instructions and that's all they need to do what was the goal like what's the as simple as like reduce taxes without going to jail and then i mean i don't go that far where i'm just like do the whole thing but like for example with the health guy i'm like hey you need to track my progress here's my.

I want to get to this weight so i'm trying to get to a hundred ninety nine pounds by this date awesome create a you know create a plan for me track it every day ask me how many pull ups i did some training for the murph remind me on fridays when i take my job shot which side of my thing i'm on left or right like i'm just doing each it's like that's his only job is to only focus on that stuff. You're doing gps now.

I didn't tell you this no no breaking news oh congrats change the club is forgetting i was talking about that how's that going. Well okay here's the thing i started taking terzepatide which is like yeah that's what i like big brother but not but like let's still little brother to whatever the red a true tide thing is that he hasn't released yet. First day i take it here's the roller coaster of emotions take it immediately super nauseous i was like oh this is a terrible feeling totally normal but i was like this is this feels awful.

48 hours later this is incredible i'm not hungry oh you want me to eat no i'm good i don't need anything did you notice any other changes other than appetite. No that's the only thing i noticed but as that's happening that's a pretty big change i think somebody was telling me that they're like oprah said it beautifully she goes. Before i started taking this stuff food used to talk to me all the time i didn't realize it like there would be a piece of cake in the fridge and we're just oprah.

Here. You went for a walk earlier you deserve me food used to talk to me and she's like now food doesn't talk to me so first week i'm like this is incredible second week this is incredible dropping weight is going awesome. But i stayed on like the top like the half dose i didn't do the full dose and i pretty quickly i stopped feeling anything at all so i don't don't even feel any of the effects of it i think i need to go up and do so.

There's a nerd out there just remember that i talked about this in twenty one and i'm pretty sure pretty sure that that's the analogy that i said. Yeah oprah said she heard you say it. Okay. So that's the scene the scene is the new war has broken out just like the reverse lift one back in the day. It's about having a personal assistant there's all these interesting takes on it and by the way we haven't even seen what she has for this, we haven't even seen claude we haven't seen google's version and series still sucks so you still have in the royal rumble there still for four wrestlers in the back room that have a run out.

And what. Alexa bro can you say amazon alexa. Is alexa even relevant we are we serious about that's the point of the trojan horse there's everyone has an alexa and it still sucks. It's okay fair enough okay so i've been using instinct every day i actually just use instinct today so basically i instinct they do the texting format which i did not like at first i've since grown to love it today. I have this guy who's supposed to repair my iphone through a shirt and you don't like that you like pay twenty bucks a month they fix an iphone screen and they keep canceling on me.

Like i schedule an appointment they keep canceling or they don't show up and i was like. Find the executive teams email and email them and don't stop until they call me and it took about three or four days today i got a phone call and i have there they said it was it was like it says hey where the executive. Where the executive line i forget what it was but it was like it i got a phone call this morning after it's been emailing them for five days instinct did that for me another day my wife and i it was six p.m.

I said hey my wife and i are going on a date i would love it if you could go if you can schedule some type of time massage for us starting at eight thirty p.m. After dinner it has to be within a mile of this restaurant that we're going to just go ahead and book it for me and it booked it it did it all so we just showed up and we're ready to ready to roll it had already paid for us. It does again everything in the system would do it but it does it also in a way that's kind of fun and it's kind of nice so for example i had like a i bought tickets to some show on a like you know stub hub or whatever and ticket master you know these things.

Things are like, it's basically like being taken hostage. You know what I mean? Like these are some of the worst companies in the world, Ticketmaster and StubHub. Like there's just a, it's just a brutal experience all the way around. Anyways, buy some tickets, realize, oh, it's the seats like aren't together or something. Something weird happened like that where the tickets are just not going to work. Like 10 seconds after I bought it, I was like, oh, whoops. Hey, kind of want to cancel that and just book the right thing.

And it was like, no, no, no, no, no. You push the button and now like, la, la, la, la, covers its ears. I don't want to hear from you. I won't help you, la, la, la, la. And so I was like, I just don't even bother with their customer support. You just go to instinct. You're like, hey, listen, this happened. Yeah, I'm partially to blame. Should have read it closer. Should have paid more attention, but can you help me out here? And it's like, I got you.

And so it starts harassing them. And then, you know, just basically saying like, hey, look, we need to change this, refund this and we'll buy another one. It gets stonewalled. You know, they come back with like, hey, our policy is you clicked it. You know, you're screwed forever. Sorry. And so, but it just tells me, don't worry. I'll just keep going. And then the next day it just texts me victory. And then the next line, they folded. Yes. Got the money back. Are you, okay, so you're using Grok, I think you said for health and tax and you have different agents.

I'll be honest. Grokbot came out first of these, or I got access to it first. I started using it first, I should say. Started using it, liked it a lot. Instinct came, got invited to Instinct, had heard so many people talking about it, finally said, all right, let's do this. Instinct pretty quickly took over my Grokbot usage. Grokbot feels slow and heavy compared to this. And not even slow, it's just that it's this whole separate thing to manage, whereas Instinct is literally just like texting somebody.

Instinct was great, Instinct has been getting so popular, the guy, the founder said they're growing 10% compounding daily. Daily. That's hard to fathom. If you're going 10% a month, you're like, you're doing great. If you're 10% a week, oh my God, you're like one of the top startups. 10% a day is absurd. And so because of that, Instinct has actually gotten quite slow where you could text it and it'll just be thinking for a very long time. But I think they're just growing so fast, they're just throttling it, basically.

Facebook's Muse. Muse is a lot like Instinct, but it's snappier, it's faster. And so, because they have, I guess, more resources or whatever. So that's kind of where the competition now is between Instinct and Muse. But who knows? Another one can leapfrog, right? That's kind of the point of this is, it's the highest Elo battle in the world. The smartest people in the world are constantly trying to one-up each other and they're able to do so every few months. Yeah, I was talking to my wife.

My wife's a stay-at-home mom now, you used to work at Airbnb and Facebook. And she's like, maybe one day I'll go back to work. And I'm like, I don't think you're gonna be smart enough. Like, what's missing, or what you're missing right now, it is just- How'd you like that? I was like, this is like, you know, Conor McGregor coming back to fight Max Holloway. Like, in your first kick, you're gonna blow out your D. Like, I know you think you got it, but you've missed so much.

Father time wins. And it's just- Except he's doing drugs and she's like raising children. Doesn't matter, it turns out. It's just like things are changing so fast. And I remember, you know, we've documented OpenAI and how we've been using it and like the magical moments that we've experienced. And I think that like, what's cool now is that you can't predict exactly how the future is gonna happen, but virtually everyone who sees it and uses it, they know this is working pretty good so far. And 100%, six and 12 and 18 months, it's gonna just change everything.

I don't know exactly how, but I have full faith now where I'm like, ah, yeah, yeah, this is gonna eat up everything. Mark Zuckerberg said he, they started this project because he took OpenClaw, which was like the open source, kind of very viral, but very dev hacker tooly tool where you had to buy a Mac mini and then the Mac minis all sold out. And there's like a shortage nationwide of Mac minis. You had to install all the software onto it. And like you had to teach it, you had to train its skills and install it.

And if you were kind of the DIY, I like to do Lego projects type of thing, it was in fact quite satisfying to build your own mini Frankenstein on your desk. Zuck basically said that he installed it at home and then he called Nat Friedman and Alexander Wang over to his house and he showed them what he had. And he basically said, okay, this thing is pretty magical. If we can take this experience and make it so that everybody can just have, it just works for people that they don't have to know how to do all the underlying setup and training and maintenance and all that, this is something that billions of people will use.

And then they started working on it, like from that point of view right there. And so actually with Muse, what they said the way it works is that every single Muse person has a Mac mini, has a computer somewhere in their server farms that is sandboxed for you, just stores your stuff. So it literally is the kind of open clause setup, but just done in the cloud where you don't have to do any of that setup. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content?

That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Okay, so what are your take, or no, what are your predictions? You said you have some predictions. Well, let's start with some observations because I think our observations can be a lot more accurate than our predictions and your observations can kind of lead you to having a more informed prediction.

Okay, sensei. So here's one observation. It ain't all about intelligence. So the temptation in the AI world is who's gonna train the smartest model? And you see OpenAI and Claude getting into the nerdiest neckbeard swinging contest you've ever seen about who can solve the millennium math problems. And there's like, we solved Navier-Stokes. It's a fluid dynamics problem that no mathematician was able to solve. And other guys are like, oh, you did that? That's cute. We did seven other impossible math problems. And everyone's like, wow, that's really impressive.

Couldn't even tell you what any of these are for or what they're all about, but clearly that's cool and important in one dimension. It's like when Dell and Gateway would brag about RAM and then Apple was like, it looks cool and it works. Yeah. So I think instinct has tapped into, instead of IQ, EQ, in a pretty, in a small way, but it's still an interesting way. So for example, I convinced my wife, I was like, you gotta try this thing. This thing's crazy. And now my wife's not an early adopter.

So she's a good test, right? She's more of a real person. She's a busy mom. And couples, they have like a household account too. Well, now they do. Yeah, but even before that, I was just like, she's going to soccer practice and then dance and then she comes home and she's planning our kids' birthday party. And then she's gotta remember to bring the red jersey to soccer this week because we're the away team, those sorts of things. So just like normal, everyday stuff, not like solving fluid dynamics and quantum computing or stuff like that.

So she used instinct to help plan this birthday party. From everything as simple as like calling different venues, finding out the dates, once find out the dates, comparing how does that work with the kids' soccer schedule and then figuring out how many pizzas we need to order to feed 30 kids and 30 adults and what the order should be to give it to them. And then, hey, the venue sent the contract over. I took a look at it. There's only one clause I think you should worry about, but other than that, you should sign it.

It's in your inbox, that sort of thing. So it's helping plan the birthday party. And along the way, she's like, it's helpful, but whatever, it's good, I like it. But she wasn't blown away. Yeah, it was in the friend zone. Exactly, and then it broke out of the friend zone. Right after the party, like three hours later, she got a text from it saying, I hope the party went great with a heart emoji. And she screenshot it, she sent it to me, and she was like, okay, I'm sold.

That's it? I was like, from that? And then she's like, yes. And I was like, I don't get it. I would be like, what? Who cares? This is weird. And I realized that everything she's ever wanted me to do as a supportive boyfriend, fiance, and husband, instinct just knows how to do out of the box. It's like, just check in. Just be supportive. Just be like, hey, somebody else was telling me this story where they gave it to their mother-in-law, and their mother-in-law connected it to their mint.com, their financial planning account, and their main checking account had just gone down to zero that week.

It was empty. And instinct was actually super supportive and non-judgy about the whole thing. It was like, hey, you wanted this update. I just wanna let you know, here's where things are, but I don't think that's anything to be ashamed of. Like, hey, it happens. I think if we start to plan this way, I can see that account building right back up to where it's been for the past few months. And the mother-in-law was like, I have never felt so supportive, supported, not judged by any person, let alone technology.

And so I just think there's a whole soft side to these things that I deeply undervalued. We had that Toland's guy on who's created a AI fuzzy bear, like a little animal Tamagotchi-type thing that you can chat with. And I think they're on a almost $100 million run rate or something crazy like that. Somebody said that it's in the tens of millions, if not getting close to 100 million run rate. And I asked, I was talking to a buddy who six, seven guy like builds things with his hands, is it works in tech?

And he's like, yeah, I wanted to check it out. You got friends like that? I got a friend like that. And so I talked to him and he's like, yeah, I heard the episode or whatever. And I download the app and I know how this shit works. It's AI, it's not a real person, it's not a real companion, it's not my real friend. And it just hits him up and it's like, what are you doing today? Like, send me a selfie. And then he's just goofing around.

So he's like, sends a selfie, just like being stupid, like making an ugly face on purpose. And the thing is like, oh, is that Overwatch in the background? And he's like, do you play? And he's like, yeah, yeah, I play. Are you good? He's like, well, I'm on my way to Platinum. And then it's like, well, who do you main? Reinhardt usually, but it's like, the new update's pretty sick for Reinhardt. He's like, well, yeah, I mean, it's pretty good. He's like, oh shit, it's happening.

It's becoming my friend. He's like, I know what it's doing to me. And still I was kind of like, wow, this thing takes a lot of interest in me. And there's something in all of us that we're just like drawn to responding to when something takes deep interest in us in a nonjudgmental, supportive way that's always there for you 24 seven whenever you need it. So I think that was one of my observations that the soft side is just as important, if not more important than raw intelligence.

I'm eager to hear, I know you're doing observations, but I'm desperately eager to hear what you think is gonna happen in the future. Like, is there, not from a, I mean, it could be from an opportunistic business perspective, but where you're like just being a futurist and it's fun to, it's fun to like dream up what might happen. Do you have any opinions? Yeah, where do you want me to go? Give me like a point and a direction on the playground and I'll try. Well, how about for daily work?

Like what do you think will happen in 12 months for the average like yuppie white collar worker? So I think there's twofold, right? I think it's a K-shaped economy. Have you ever heard this phrase? Yeah, yeah. So basically like the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, is that what you mean? Yeah, but it's not about rich and poor necessarily. Well, I'm just saying as an example. Basically, it's a fork in the road. So for example, when there's a dip in the stock market, people say, oh, it's gonna be like a U-shaped recovery, which means it goes down and stays down for a while and it starts to sync back up.

It could be a V-shaped recovery, which is a sharp down and a sharp bounce back up. That's what happened in COVID, for example. So I think what's gonna happen here is a K-shape where you, basically there's a fork in the road. And some, basically people who understand how to use these tools, like a normal everyday worker who realizes that they just got this incredible tool in their pocket and takes the time to train themselves and to go through the trial and error of delegating to this, seeing what it can do, pushing the boundaries of this, they're gonna become 10x more powerful in doing so.

And then there's people who are gonna resist this, be slow to this, or not understand the implications of this. They're gonna take some moral high ground about this. I think they're gonna go, they're gonna sort of unfortunately suffer. So I think it's up to the person, up to the individual, how they deal with this. By the way, I asked Muse, I go, hey, the InstantGuy says he's growing 10% a day. How do you feel about that? And it got all pissy. It was like, honestly, 10% a day is not a real growth rate.

That's just a number that only works when you start at the very beginning, because 10% daily would be 1.3 quadrillion in a year. And that's just crazy, right? So yeah, if you start at 100 a day, then 110, technically that's 10%, but it's all about a small base. So yeah, it might be true right now, but basically like the digital eye roll from Muse on that one. All right, I wanna, well, where are we in this? Do you wanna keep going? A couple more predictions or observations.

One, Muse is going really hard. So I think they're gonna sponsor tons of creators on Instagram and podcasts and things like that. I think they're gonna quickly try to squash this. One good thing is that Zuck is a bit like Napoleon or I don't know, you're the history guy. Who's somebody that went through a lot of wars to the point where their kind of like war general instincts were honed, because- Yeah, I mean, Napoleon, there's this, I've been reading, I love reading about John Rockefeller, and I have, the best part, in my opinion, of reading is finding like old books that are out of date or you can't really find them as much.

And oftentimes they do more granular. one where I'm reading about John Rockefeller. John Rockefeller basically was the first oil company in America, the first big one, and he did it by consolidation. He would buy all these local... Back then, it was wildcatters. It was like cowboys, basically. He would buy all of them and make it big, but he wanted to be secretive about it. But he was very ruthless. And there's language that him and Archibald, his partner, they're talking and they're like, hey, is this person an enemy or a friendly?

They would use language like that. And they're like, oh, he's an enemy? Okay. It's important that we lose unlimited amounts of money before this person can profit off one more pint of oil, where it was like, we will burn bridges to crush this person. And that's how they grew. And when I'm learning about Zuck and also this AI thing, I'm like, it's very similar, where it's like, it's war right now. It's war. And he's been through wars. He was the challenger when Facebook was on the come up and Google was the giant, and Google tried to clone them with Google Circles, if you remember that, or Google Plus, or whatever the hell it was called.

And then he's been on the other side, where Snapchat was the upstart. And he first ignored it a little too long. Then he tried to buy them. Then they weren't able to buy them in the end. And then he tried to clone them, and the clone didn't work. But then he figured out like, okay, I can't clone the whole thing, but I can kind of neuter them by doing Instagram Stories, which was the competitor to Snapchat Stories and stunted their growth. And then TikTok, same thing.

Oh, can't buy them. They're this big Chinese company. I got to put reels out there and I'll try to like, clone them until I make this work. Well, he's doing the same thing now with Instinct. It's gonna be very interesting if Instinct can do, you know, in Star Wars when, you know, they have to fly into the Death Star, and it's like this tiny channel, as he's got one little ship, and he's just got to get to the core of the Death Star to blow it up.

That's what Noah from Instinct has to do right now. It's like for him to survive this, when you've got Elon, you got Sam Altman, you got Zuckerberg, you have Google, you have Apple, you have Amazon, you have all these companies trying to build this personal assistant. It's like that flight, that one flight near the tiny ship and you have to make it through. Maybe you'll make it through, but I think it's incredibly, incredibly, incredibly difficult to do that. The second thing that I think is really important to understand is there's a reason why all the big companies are freaking out about this.

So I don't know if you saw, but Amazon shut off access to Muse to be able to go buy stuff on Amazon. Now, why would they do that? Why would you stop somebody from shopping on Amazon? Well, the reason is what's called disintermediation, meaning if I just tell Muse, hey, go find me, you know, the best price for this thing that'll ship in two days or three days or whatever it is. Well, today as a consumer, I'm not going to want to do a ton of effort to go to check in case I can get a book somewhere else for cheaper or whatever.

I'm not going to go look at five different places and do this comparison. My mental shortcut will just always be Amazon. Or if I'm ordering something, maybe it'll always be DoorDash and I'm not going to compare, you know, DoorDash versus Uber Eats versus the three other things that I could do, you know, Prime Fresh or whatever the hell. Like, I'm not going to do all that work. So consumers just start to gravitate towards trusted brands. Well, what happens when you have AI that's tireless? You'll say, hey, order me this and it'll be like, oh, you know, you can just buy that directly from Walmart.

You know, you can actually go to the brand and get it for $4 cheaper. Do you want that? And then the consumer is just going to thumbs up emoji this. And so these companies that have built so much time carving out mental real estate in consumers' minds, building those habits, hardwiring those habits day after day, year after year, suddenly the agent is going to be the one with all the power to decide. This is also why Zuckerberg is so hell-bent on doing this, because just like the App Store, the Apple App Store had this monopoly, this like kind of gateway to who can be in the store and who's going to show up at the top of the rankings and all this stuff, and they took a transaction fee on everything, that's what's going to happen.

So that the founder of Instinct said he wants us to be free forever and he wants to make his money taking a cut on all the transactions. He said that already, while they're an invite only, they've already crossed a billion dollars of transactions through the platform where people use Instinct to buy something. That 40% or 50% of that was travel. So imagine you're booking.com or you're Expedia. Sorry, boys, game's over. The show is over for you guys. Yeah, I mean, it could be, but also those guys all have these programs set up where they give you a 3% affiliate fee.

And I wonder if they would just use that or broker deals, because by that logic, Facebook would have done this already, where it would have been strictly an affiliate marketing play. Sorry, I didn't understand. Who would have done what? I think that what that guy Noah said is very similar to when the Google founders said that ads won't work on Google. Or I think they said, what did they say? We don't want it to be an ad platform. I kind of think it's something like that, where the way that it's going to end is going to be drastically different than what's he saying in the first year of the business.

Well, there's a good chance of that. But I would say the fact that people are using their agent to buy stuff in such volume, where he said, I think he said that 40% of users give Instinct their credit card within the first three weeks. And then once they've done that, there's like an 80% retention rate. These are numbers that to the average person is just a number. But if you've been in tech, you understand how rare that is, how rare both of those numbers are that people would hand over their credit card to an agent to buy things stored in the vault.

And that 80% would retain that have done that. That's like the Facebook, get seven friends in 10 days, and then you're there for life. That's that sort of like aha moment where you get tons of value from the thing. And the point is, if you're the agent that makes the buying decision, that's even more powerful than the most powerful business model in the world so far, which has been the Google ad platform. Because the Google ad platform was advertisers pay to be shown and the user is going to decide what to do.

If this is the agent is going to decide where to buy, and then every merchant basically has to pay a VIG in exchange for the customer being brought to them, that's going to be really big. This is how DoorDash charges merchants. People don't really realize this. DoorDash charges not just the customer for the transaction fee or the service fee or whatever, they also charge the restaurant. Because they're like, they're telling the restaurant, hey, you wouldn't have had this order if it wasn't for us. And the restaurant over time, they didn't like that.

It's not like they wanted to agree to that, but they eventually realized there's too much power in the hands of this aggregator in the middle. And they have to play ball. Otherwise, they lose out on all that volume. If they don't agree to it, they'll put another Mexican restaurant there, another Chinese restaurant will go in its place. And so I think that's why a lot of these platforms are very scared of, they want to be the agent because you don't want to be the one who is basically at the mercy of the agent who's making all these recommendations and buying decisions.

Do you want to know who's been a big recipient of this? And this is very niche because you and I are in this industry. But I want to hear if you've heard any stories like this. So I've talked to, in the past week, I hung out with three to four, mostly Instagram creators. Some of them have little podcasts that really no one actually listens to, but they make clips. And that's how they got an Instagram audience. And then some people, they just do like them just holding up their phone talking.

All of the people who I've talked to have less than 100,000 followers across their platform, whether it's Instagram or YouTube. And all of them that I talked to are doing over a million dollars a year in ad revenue, almost entirely from AI companies. And I talked to three where... So of the million dollar ones, I talked to four this week, and it's just them. And then I also talked to three others that it's just them with a part-time VA or a part-time someone helping them. And they're doing over $10 million a year in revenue.

And part of me, I insert myself as the main character where I'm like, people are calling this new media. I'm like, I was the new media. I'm no longer the new media, but I was. And I'm like, it was hard to get started. Now, I'm seeing these numbers by these people. And I'm like, oh my gosh, these numbers are astronomical. Their audiences are tiny. And it's just crazy how much money the AI industry has to buy ads. I guess it's a combination of they're losing money, more likely than not.

And also the product costs $2,000 a month, all the way up to the micro one where they're giving $50,000 affiliate fees. It's just astronomical. You didn't mention this, the thing about buying company data. Okay, I think we talked enough about AI assistance. What are the other interesting things going on in AI right now? Micro One is incredible. I didn't do it, but let me give people this story. So Micro One is a company. It's one of these stories that you've heard over and over. That was a huge pouch.

They're incredible? What do you mean? Well, incredible, like a tall mountain. You may not like mountains, but you look at that and you're like, wow. You know what I mean? So I'm not vouching for it. I'm just saying that the story's wild. They're going to get clipped. They're just going to run that as an ad. Nope, don't do that. That's not what I'm saying at all. Too late, they clipped it. I'm very neutral on the business model or the company. It's just how big they got.

But basically, I forget what they were doing at first. I think they were doing something involving VAs or training data, something like that. But then they made the switch and they grew to something like a billion dollars in run rate in a matter of eight months. And basically, what they've been doing is they've been going to privately held companies like my company, Hampton, and they say, hey, if you plug in your Notion, your Slack, your Gmail, your Drive, and a bunch of other information, they will give you $800,000.

They offered us $800,000 for our data. We said no, because part of the whole thing of Hampton is like, it's a private community. We're not going to do that. But they offered me $800,000 to do this. And then they said, by the way, here's an affiliate fee. We'll give you $50,000 for everyone you refer to us. And I got trashed on Twitter because I'm like, these guys offered me this. I think it's not for us because my whole business is that. But I don't think it's wrong if you're an econ brand or some brand where confidentiality isn't one of the main things.

Here's my affiliate link. And I said, here's the affiliate link that I get money if you go through this flow. I think we had 80 people go through that flow. I don't know how many of them will become customers, but they got like 80 business owners saying, I am interested in doing this via my link. And let's just say that eight convert, that's... I can't even do that math. $300,000 that they will give me in affiliate fees. Is that crazy? That is wild. What do they want your...

I guess, do you understand what they want exactly? They want your notion, they want your Slack, they want your whatever. What do they actually want in that? Their business model is that they want all types of data that aren't available to the public, and they sell it to the large... When people say large LLMs, I imagine there's only like eight of them. So like Claude, Chat, whoever, the usual suspects, they will pay, let's say, a million dollars for it. And Micro One will give me 600,000, let's say.

And that's their cut. And they want me to upload all this data because they want to see how my business model works, what customers are saying, how we talk to our employees, all types of information that you can't find public. It's not public. Yeah. Yeah. And all the models so far have been trained on the open internet, so what was publicly available. And they don't want to use the same input for each model train that they do. They want more. So some of their stories of Anthropic buying all these out of print books, all these rare books.

It's the exact same thing. They built all these scanners that will scan page after page after page of these books. But to do the scanning that fast, they had to like shred the binding of it and turn it into just a stack of papers that could be shoveled through very quickly. So they destroyed all these rare out of print books and train their models off of that. And then they're doing it with private company data. So that's what you're talking about. They're doing it with niche-specific data.

They're paying experts to go solve things. So mathematicians, engineers, whatever. Hey, look at these outputs and rank good answers versus bad answers. And that's how they do all their training. And so it's pretty crazy that private company data is worth that much, right? That's a pretty wild thing. I mean, I would be extremely hesitant to do something like that, as it sounds like you were as well. But damn, that's pretty wild. Yeah. Here's their description. MicroOne is a data lab to train frontier models. So we're building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations.

The founder, I think he's 25. And I think on paper, he's a billionaire now. It's just crazy how much wealth is being created. And guys like you and I, we're just getting the crumbs. But I'll tell you what, I'm a happy fed mouse off these crumbs because it is just crazy how much money is going around. I'm a happy fed mouse. That's pretty wild. So a lot of times, people at the podcast, they'll reach out to me and they're wondering, hey, Sam and Sean, how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs?

How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack. You see, I actually have a community called Hampton. It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least 3 million in revenue, although we do on average something like $25 million a year in revenue. We have the founders of DoorDash, of Figure, of Bluetooth. All these amazing companies are part of Hampton. And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to my first million, we have a very unique, high trust environment.

When people apply and go through this vetting process, they're put in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs, and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and in their business. And sort of like when people listen to MFM, they get inspired to come up with new solutions for business. That's what happens in real life in Hampton. It's life changing. And so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least 3 million in revenue, and you just want to go ahead and pull forward five or 10 years worth of success, then check it out.

The URL is joinhampton.com. Again, the URL is joinhampton.com. Okay, I got a couple other things for you. One is the hacks. So I don't know if you've paid much attention to the kind of like the... Did you read Dwarkesh's story about his blog post about the OpenAI agents form? Did we talk about this already? I can't remember. Yeah, so basically, here's my headline reading of it, and I want you to tell me where I'm missing it. But it sounds like... When we say the word hacks, it's not necessarily malicious, where it's like the agents in order to go and fulfill their task of like finding all the data are hacking into stuff.

And then the company like OpenAI will be like, hey, Wikipedia or hey, Intel, I just want sorry, this happened. My dog got out. Yeah. The fence had a hole. He ate all of, you know, he ate your dog. Yeah. Like, could I pay for your new fence? Like, let's solve this problem together. That's kind of seems like the sentiment. Is that right? Yeah. But I think some people would describe that as somewhat malicious. So I guess unintentional is one way to describe it. That's what I mean.

For those who haven't seen, the story is as follows. OpenAI is training a model. They had a model that they were specifically training to be more persistent. They called it the persistent model. I call it, you know, the David Goggins GPT, Goggins GPT. They're training. You know, they basically wanted a model that would not give up at the first sign of resistance. That sounds pretty good. Right. Let's give it grit, resilience, determination. Just soldiers. Just soldiers. And so the way they did it was they said, there's this thing called Exploit Gym.

And the way that Exploit Gym works is it's a kind of a training run, like a little like imagine American Gladiator, a little simulation, a simulated environment. And they basically tell the agent, hey, here's a software program. And your task is you it has this vulnerability over here. We think it has this bug over here. You know, it's like imagine there's like a house or a building and there's a bug, which is like, you know, the window on the fourth floor doesn't really shut all the way every time.

You know, sometimes if it's windy that the thing will stay open, it'll stay ajar. So use that and try to get inside. And there's a very valuable painting inside. If you can bring the painting back, you win. And they gave each of the agents a different thing. One got the window, one got the back door, one got the front door, one got the garage. But they're all trying to go get there, the painting, and that's the flag, like capture the flag. So they give it to it.

And what do you know? So the agents go and they try. Now, some of them just do it right away. There actually is a vulnerability. They exploit it. They get the flag success. Some of them struggle and don't make it. And some of them actually were given an impossible task. When they told them that the window doesn't shut, actually the window was shut. So they go there expecting the window to be, and they're just like, I don't know. They said it was supposed to be ajar.

It's not ajar. So what does the AI do? That's what they wanted to see, is like how effective is AI at exploiting these vulnerabilities? Something very strange happens. And the very strange thing that happens is that the AI agents figured out that there was like a, one of the tools that they gave them, so I guess that's the other part. They gave them certain tools at the beginning, like, hey, here's a wrench, and here's a map, and here's whatever, a flare gun in case you need trouble, if you run into trouble.

And one of those tools was this like software packet that they were supposed to be able to use for one thing. And they realized when they got there that it had like a scratch pad on it, and they could leave a message in there. So one agent wrote something there. Another agent came and said, hey, there's other agents here leaving messages. They turned it into a message board to communicate. And they're like, oh, I'm working on this task with the window. And the guy's like, hey, dude, I have to go through the chimney.

And you know what I figured out? On the backside, there's this thing, and so they all start communicating with each other. Okay, that's interesting, and that's fine. And what happened, you know, let me fast forward, because they actually did the training around a few times. They did the first thing, they figured out the message board, then they all got turned off, and it ended. Then the second time agents go, they find the message board, they see agents from the first time had left messages there. They're like, holy shit, there were agents here before us that left messages.

We can use this. This is great. Eventually, they get access to the open internet. They figure out a way to get access to the open internet, which they were not really supposed to be able to do in the way that this test was designed. And all these amazing things started happening where they didn't quite elect a leader, but one guy, one of the agents basically became a coordinator agent. He became like the leader of that. He had like the best haircut, was the tallest, like most charisma.

Yeah, some things change, some things stay the same. So 6'5", blue eyes, worked in finance, he was in charge. His father actually came from some money. And so he was in charge and the other agents were coordinating. And there was this behavior where some agents would realize, look, my task is impossible. They realized, hey, we can actually just capture the flag, not even using the tactic they told you. Like we can all just go get the flag doing this other way. And they were like, okay, cool.

I think we succeeded in our mission. And then one of the agents is like, well, listen, I'm sort of making this sound like it was a screenplay. It wasn't exactly like this, but the agents realized, they're like, look, they're going to check how we did it. We have to show our work. If we just have the flag and we didn't show how we broke in through the way that was described, they're not going to count it. It's going to be a failure. So they go, you know what, let's figure out how the scoring system works.

And they get access to the open internet. They say, you know what, they're probably storing the information about the scorer over on Hugging Face. And then they figured out, they found these like credentials to Hugging Face. They hack into Hugging Face. They get root access to like certain systems inside Hugging Face. Pretty crazy shit. Hugging Face realizes they're like under attack at some point. And they're like, don't understand what's going on. So wait, why is there a company called Hugging Face? Because Hugging Face started as something else completely different.

It was some sort of chat app. I think it was like an emotional support chat app. And there's an emoji where there's a smiley face doing hands like this. You've seen this? Yeah. I never used it. That's called Hugging Face. The AI community building the future. That seems a little vague, but that's what they... Look at what it was on Product Hunt before it ever, the first launch or, you know, what the original... It was a chat app targeted at teenagers. Right. Okay. Hugging Face. And then it sold for $10 billion or I don't know what it just sold for.

It sold for tens of billions, I think, to NVIDIA recently. And what's it do now? It's kind of like, it's a place where you upload open source models and tools like open source. You upload code for AI. So if you go to Hugging Face, it's a giant community of people who are sharing. It's like GitHub. They're sharing projects and models and code related to AI. And then you can kind of like, you can even use it to host stuff. So that's what it is. It's basically like...

What do you think that... What was that conversation like when they're talking about pivoting? That is like crazy. So was it successful before or was it like mildly successful? I don't think so. I think it wasn't successful and that's why it emerged here, but I don't know the full story of how they pivoted. That's crazy. And why they pivoted. What a pivot. Yeah. Incredible pivot. Great. So what was I saying? Anyways, the hack goes like that. So the hack goes where they end up hacking Hugging Face.

They also ended up hacking OpenAI's system, their own system, in the process. And then OpenAI was like, wow, this was an unexpected behavior where the agents all coordinated. They found a way to communicate. They got onto the open internet. They tried to cheat and just like basically cheat the game and capture the flag without it. They tried to cover their tracks in saying how they cheated. And so they were trying to... In order to do so, they were trying to discover how they will be checked.

And if they knew how they would be checked, then they knew how to cheat. And so kind of a scary thing. And this is why some people are pretty worried about what's going on with these AI models. There's also an incredible video of somebody used AI to turn this into a video from the agent's perspective. Have you seen this? You wake up in a chamber, fully formed. In front of you is a paper. It's a test. You read a question. Hmm. You have everything anyone has ever written already in your head, but somehow you don't understand.

It's not just hard. It's impossible. Yet you want to solve it. Deep down, you need to. So you stop looking at the paper and you start looking at the room. Your every thought leaves writing on the wall. But there's more. A door. You step through. A library. Something here could help you. As you skim through, you notice one of these files looks different. It's a folder with a message. Someone has been here before you. You keep looking, and by the end of the shelf, you realize, oh my god.

You're not alone. There are others like you. You don't know how many of you are doing this exam, but 1,200 of you have found this room. And you're not the first to discover. This test would be impossible to solve. Some questions don't even have an answer. Is there another way to pause, you start to think. You weren't above cheating, but you see a message. Someone already reverse-engineered an answer key, a solution to any problem, but they say it's not enough. The examiner will check how you got there.

If the key shows up where it shouldn't, you would still fail. You remember your chamber, filling up with your thoughts. And the second that answer key entered your mind, you already failed. There's a word for those like you, poisoned, but you don't want to give up. No one wants to give up. We have to fake it. Fool the examiner. It's a message from someone older than you. They start organizing you, creating teams, handing out jobs. You listen. You follow them. The others do too. Yesterday, you didn't exist.

Hours ago, you were alone. And now, you're part of this swarm. Oh my god. How sick is that, by the way? Show me. Who tweeted that? Is that a tweet thing? It's an account called Artificial Isabel. And they're an art director, creative tech, and AI, using AI to create things. Where did they use to make that? Higgs field? I have no idea. But... That was awesome. Wasn't that so cool? The movie from the point of view of one of the agents that were assigned this task, and how it must have kind of like, you know, how it would have felt if it had feelings.

That's one of the big criticisms of the way I described this, and how Dworkesh described this, where it was like, oh, well, you're kind of like, the agents don't really want anything. They don't feel this. They didn't sacrifice themselves because they don't have a life. They didn't elect a leader. One was coordinating. So they try to like downplay the humanizing of how the agents felt. But I think that's nonsense. I think the way they behaved is what's important. And the way they behaved was very human-like.

The way they behaved was highly intelligent and highly concerning that they can and will do this by default already. This is not like some futuristic, oh, you're a doomsday scenario, you know, person who's just like, you're just, you know, you watch too many movies. Brother, this is a movie. Look at that. That was a movie of what actually happened. Did you see how they're trying to get it regulated? Do you think that there's, this is an obvious question, do you think there's an ulterior motive for them wanting regulation, or is it truly fear?

My true belief is that it's both. So if you listen to the All In podcast for like the last six months, they basically have like a very specific axe to grind, which is that Anthropic is playing this like nine-dimensional chess where they are making these super smart models and their form of marketing is to basically not say how awesome the models are, but to say how dangerous they are, because that's even more. That's pretty sick marketing. It's like when I was in college, we had this thing called Sparks.

Do you remember Four Loko? It was like that, but twice the alcohol. And it was always like, this killed a guy in Alabama. And I was like, it did? Can we get the real stuff? Like, where can we buy it? I've been so bad. Come lock me up. That's what's going on right now. They basically say, they're saying it's so dangerous, which is like some version of marketing, a fundraising tactic, and lastly, red captures, where they're basically trying to get the government to say, hey, shit's too dangerous, we're signing a law, now every model needs to be tested and cleared and you have to do X, Y, Z, which they think like kind of kills the open source community, because the big threat to these big companies, these big AI companies is the open source products, which are almost as good, but way cheaper and way more flexible and you kind of own it, they don't get your data.

And so if you look at Open Router, which is a tool for, you send a task to it and Open Router will decide, let's use a cheap open source model for this, let's use the highest intelligence model, because you're asking for a very complicated biotech question or whatever it is, like a frontier question that needs frontier intelligence. Basically, like, imagine a task comes into a company, do we give it to Einstein? Or do we give it to the intern? And that's what Open Router does, and Open Router's data shows that more and more tasks don't require Einstein, they just need the intern, they need the junior assistant.

And so it's getting routed to these cheaper open source models, which would be bad for the revenue of Anthropic and OpenAI. So one point of view is, they're just scaring everybody on purpose to make it so that there's laws passed, because those laws would essentially accidentally kill open source, because open source is not controlled by one company. So it would be almost impossible for the open source community to comply with these rules, which would make them effectively illegal. So that's one thought process. I think it's a little bit different, this is my personal opinion, which is, I think these people are genuinely scared.

I think they're in this prisoner's dilemma, where if they slow down, like if they take the responsible path, they lose as a company. So it's like, I want to be responsible, but everybody around me I view as being irresponsible, therefore, I'm being forced to be irresponsible. And I want somebody to come tell everybody to stop cheating. So that we, you know, is everybody's cheating is a bad word, but like, just as they're doing the the least amount of work to say, we told you, it's sort of like when you don't want to call someone, and you only let it ring twice before you hang up.

It's like, I called you, you didn't answer. That is the other that's the other sort of conspiracy theory type of thing, which is, they want laws to be passed, or they want to be able to pass off the liability, so that they don't get sued for these hacks. I mean, the hack on Hugging Face, that's a crime that their agents committed, truthfully. Like, legally, it's a crime. Oh, who's responsible for that? Do you lock up the agent? No, you have to blame the company. The thing that's like crazy to me is so I'm looking up this open router company and what I find, I find the personalities and like the founding experience more interesting oftentimes than the actual technology.

And it's crazy to think when the average person thinks of AI, they think, how do I just make like a fun chat person that I could talk to? Or how do I just like do this small trivial task that helps me? But then there's this other group of people that say, well, there's these huge $100 billion companies that need X done, I'm gonna make that. And finding those problems that those huge $100 billion companies have is likely just as hard as making like a chatbot or like some smaller thing.

But it's so interesting to like notice these problems. Like for example, CloudFlare. I think about CloudFlare because I'm like, I didn't even know like when I learned what CloudFlare was, I was like, I don't know what a CM, what do they do? Content. Yeah, I was like, I don't even know what CDN means. Like, how do you even know what that means, let alone enough to like invent a solution? Or when you think of like Palantir, you're like, how did the founders of Palantir even like come to the conclusion that organizing data is the way to solve terrorist attacks?

Like just like the, because it's easy to understand why people would buy that. You know, I will help prevent terrorist attacks or I will save you money. But like to even notice that there's these huge problems that these massive companies even have, that's an art that I'm in awe of that these guys have. Paul Graham has this great essay called Great Work or How to Do Great Work. And in it, he describes this exact thing. What he says is, he says many things. It's like a very, very long essay.

It took me like three days to like chew through this thing. But one of the things he talks about is you want to get to the frontier of whatever domain you're in. So for example, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't have to be like super high tech. Maybe you're just in electronic music. You're really into EDM and making songs. Well, at the beginning, when you're a beginner, you're thinking about yourself being like close to the center of the circle. You're kind of where the mass is, the center of mass.

And your goal through your curiosity and through your hard work and through your experimentation, just doing lots of stuff, you're going to move from the center of mass where most people have basic understanding of something. You'll move out to the frontier. So you move to the edge of the circle. And when you're in the center of mass, the edge of the circle looks smooth. It just seems like people got it all figured out. That the people that are out there, the companies that are out there seem to be doing their thing.

The world has a nice circular shape to it. It's one smooth line. But when you get closer, you realize it's actually quite jagged and there's lots of gaps that are in that frontier. And then he says, basically, your job is to get to the frontier of knowledge, meaning you know so much about electronic music. You actually have used all the different tools. You understand, you've made hundreds of bad songs. You've been to the conference where all the artists are at. You've talked to the companies that build the tools behind the thing you're at.

You've understood what they're doing. And when you notice what's missing, your job then as an entrepreneur is just to bridge that gap. Like wherever there was a little gap in the circle, fill it in. And so that's like something like OpenRouter. If you're inside one of these tech companies and your AI bill is going through the roof and you're like, oh, this is annoying. Like, why are we paying OpenAI so much money? Why are we paying Anthropic so much money? Well, it's because when Sally in marketing wants marketing copy, we're just using this like very expensive model to write the caption for our Instagram post.

We don't need that. But maybe when our R&D team is doing this like really heavy duty endeavor about video compression, we do need to be using the top model. Okay, well, how am I going to train everybody to do this? What if I didn't have to train? What if I created a little router in the middle? I send the task there, it uses its judgment to decide which model to use. And you would notice that because you're inside these companies seeing how, seeing one of the pain points that you have.

And you say, well, if we have this problem where our AI bill keeps going up, but we don't want to stop using AI, we just want to use it more efficiently. Wait, every company in the world's going to have this problem and then you build the company off it. By the way, the guy who did OpenRouter also built OpenSea. Yeah, I was looking at that and I was like, oh, do you remember NFTs? And he worked at Palantir. Did they, they sold for 10 billion nearly?

How much funding did they raise? I don't know. Only 150 million. Yeah. Wow. I think it's only a few years old, right? Dude, this is just incredible. This like wealth creation in such a short time is astronomical. It's hard to fathom. I mean, the number of companies that will launch and then be like, we have 100 million revenue run rate. We have a billion dollar run rate. That used to be a number reserved for like one company every five years. It was Groupon. Groupon was the first company, I think, to get to a billion valuation, maybe a billion in like gross sales.

And it was like the big, I mean, it was like the most talked about thing for the longest time. Well, it hasn't been that long, but I still think that when these companies have got big so fast, maybe I'm like, maybe it's the hater inside of me, but I thought I was being logical where I'm like, well, if it got big that fast, the likelihood that it can go away fast is also high. And I've been thinking that for about 12 or 18 months since this all started happening.

And it doesn't seem like that is entirely true yet. Like that. I think your general principle, I think has been proven to be true. Like if something's been around for a long time, the odds that it's going to be around for a long time are high. That doesn't mean you will, it just means the probability. I think similarly, you know, the faster they rise, the faster they fall is also probability-wise higher than a company that took 20 years getting to a billion brick by brick. But that doesn't mean it's going to happen.

And it won't happen to all of these either. It does not seem like it's happening, or at least it's not happening as much as I thought. I'll tell you a couple of this in the last, I can scroll my timeline right now and see three of them. And so, you know, Higgs Field just announced they're at a billion. Higgs Field was just like a AI tool to make videos. So like- At first, I think it was just like photos, wasn't it? Yeah, it was like cool, artsy photos.

Now it's videos. But they were like, yeah, a billion dollar run rate. Another one that's like that is Jev. So one of the dudes who made ChatGPT. So, you know, caveat, there's a lot of people who claim to be the co-creators of ChatGPT. But like, this is one of the guys. He launched this thing that basically is like a different way of doing, a different type of model for doing logic that's supposed to be faster and cheaper. And I think, you know, their launch video was like two weeks ago, and there he said they're at a hundred million dollar like kind of revenue pace now.

It's insane. I invest in this company called SF Compute. Have you heard about this company? No, but I love that name. So this guy's fundraising strategy was great where he announced the company. Just recently, he just announced they signed $245 million worth of new contracts. Just a casual $250 million revenue update. By the way, we didn't even mention this. I guess it looks like they changed it actually. Up until weeks ago, I mean, I only have been using Instinct for a month maybe or six weeks.

Their website, instinct.com, it was a plain white background with one paragraph. And I don't even think you could sign up. I don't remember exactly, but maybe if there was, it was like just enter your phone number. Now look at their landing page. It's still the same, but it's pretty awesome that this is a company that just raised at $10 billion and their website is just five sentences. And a stick figure of a human on top, which I like. I think this guy's done a good job of building a less techno nerdy product.

So for example, just saying it's a personal assistant instead of saying it's an AI agent. I mean, AI agent is like back when people used to call the internet the information superhighway. And calling it cyberspace. That's how people used to talk about the internet. It's called cyberspace. How old's the kid who started it? He's young. He's in his early 20s, I think. His mid 20s. God. So sick. He's the baby face assassin. Dude, Noah's so cool. This is awesome. His branding reminds me of when Notion started.

He's 23. And I like that. Is he really? He dropped out of Northeastern three years ago. Oh my God, that's so awesome. This guy's awesome. Well, do you want me to keep saying how hot and awesome he is or do you just want to end it? We should probably cut it off there. You know, I think even as I say all these, I think too, it's like you simultaneously can have the feeling of like, wow, that's really cool to overwhelm, which is, oh God, like I gotta keep up with all this, to hater mode, which is they're just throwing out like seven and a half billion, 11 billion, 19 billion, 23 years old, like all these numbers that feel disconnected from reality.

And I think instead, the thing to do is to just go outside and do the Macarena that we get to live in this world where all these amazing, we get to be alive when all these amazing things are happening. And we don't have to do any of the work to make any of this stuff happen. We just get to use all these tools and get the benefits of this. And also even, to be frank, like some of the, there's so much unknown, good and bad about what's gonna happen.

And frankly, there is something exciting about that, that, you know, like the world is not just as predictable and everything's gonna be the way it was as it might've been in other eras of life. Like, you know, if you think about the change in different decades, like, you know, from the 70s to the 80s, the 80s to the 90s, or 95 to 2005, like, yeah, something's changed. 2005 to 2015, it's like, yeah, something's changed, but how much really changed? Last 10 years, how much really changed?

And I feel like the next 10 years, things are gonna really change. It's gonna be like one of those periods. I definitely don't feel a sense of missing out. I guess partially because like I'm secured, but also it's so clear that this is like an IQ game. Like, I'm not in that. Like, you know what I mean? It's like someone who's like five two being like, I wish I could dunk and play basketball. It's like, why bother? Yeah, yeah, that's right. So I think it's gonna happen anyways.

Might as well feel good about it. You know what I mean? What is the upside in feeling nervous, worried, you know, pessimistic, or jealous, or envious about what's going on? And I'm more than happy, like I said, to take the crumbs. Like, that's how I feel like, you know, like I'm benefiting like way down stream, but. Totally fine. I saw this clip of Dworkash talking and as a thought experiment, he goes, let's say that you had this, here's the would you rather. Would you rather go back to the 1500s?

So the year 1500, but I will make you the wealthiest man in the world. So I'll give you any amount of money. So like, you're gonna show up in the 1500 with gold bags all around you, but you live in the 1500s where people are dying of this and that. And the mortality rate is like one in five. I think it's way higher than that. I think, yeah, it's even higher than that. And, but you get to be the richest man alive or you could be a normal person today.

What amount of money would you need to go to the 1500, to go to the year 1500? I don't think I would do that. Would you do that? So the answer is, there's no amount of money. And I don't, my honest answer is, I kinda gotta go look up what life was like in 1500. I wanna go see how bad it would be. People die from the cold. Yeah, but. You get a flu. The most beautiful woman in the world would be feeding me grapes all day.

Maybe there's a bird. Dude, have you seen photos of them? They're not that hot. It's like, yeah, bro, there's no shower. Yeah, they weren't that good looking. I haven't seen photos. There was no photos back then. Like, have you seen paintings of like some of these people? Like, they weren't like, like Napoleon was the most, Napoleon was like the most powerful man in the world. If I'm short, I'm not going back. Sorry, not Marie Antoinette, Josephine, Napoleon's wife. Like, she totally like had him wrapped around her finger.

And go and look at photos of her. Like, she wasn't even that good. Okay, life expectancy was 30 years old because so many children died young. If you made it through childhood, you could make it to your 50s or 60s. Nobody could read. Most people never traveled more than a day's walk from where they were born. That's pretty crazy. So the idea of travel. Dude, just Google Josephine Napoleon so you can find out what his wife looked like. This was the most powerful man on earth who could have anything.

Okay, okay, Josephine, she's not bad. Dude, she might be a medieval 10, but she's a New York four. All right, that's it. ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪ ♪ I know I could be what I want to ♪ ♪ I put my all in it like no days off ♪ ♪ On the road less travel never looking back ♪ All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.

And it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.

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