Search Captions & Ask AI

E167: Google's Woke AI disaster, Nvidia smashes earnings (again), Groq's LPU breakthrough & more

February 23, 2024 / 01:20:27

This episode of the All-In Podcast covers Nvidia's record earnings, AI infrastructure, and the implications of Google's Gemini AI rollout. The hosts, including Chamat Palihapitiya, David Sacks, and David Freberg, discuss Nvidia's significant revenue growth driven by AI demand, the competitive landscape, and the future of AI applications.

The conversation begins with Nvidia's impressive Q4 revenue of $22.1 billion and a net income of $12.3 billion, highlighting the company's strategic positioning in the AI market. The hosts analyze how Nvidia's GPUs are essential for data centers and AI applications, emphasizing the company's growth trajectory.

Chamat Palihapitiya shares insights on the competitive dynamics in the tech industry, questioning how long Nvidia can maintain its market dominance. David Freberg discusses the infrastructure buildout in data centers and the potential for new AI applications, while David Sacks raises concerns about the sustainability of Nvidia's growth.

The episode also addresses Google's recent issues with its Gemini AI, which faced backlash for generating biased images. The hosts critique Google's approach to AI and the challenges of balancing accuracy with social responsibility.

Overall, the episode provides a detailed analysis of the current state of AI technology, the financial performance of key players like Nvidia, and the ongoing challenges faced by companies like Google in navigating public perception and technological advancement.

TLDR

Nvidia reports record earnings driven by AI demand; Google faces backlash over its Gemini AI's biased outputs.

Episode

1:20:27
00:00:00
all right everybody welcome back to your favorite podcast of all time the all-in
00:00:04
podcast episode 160 something with me again chth poopaa he's a CEO of a company and invests in startups and uh
00:00:14
his firm is called Social Capital we also have David freeberg the Sultan of science he's now a CEO as well and we
00:00:23
have David saaks from Craft ventures in some undisposed hotel room somewhere how
00:00:28
we doing boys good thank you this is an odd intro could your intro be any more low energy and dragged out I'm sick what
00:00:37
do you want me I'm fake the effort all right here give me give me one more shot watch this watch this watch profession
00:00:43
you want professionalism fake the effort come on here we go you want professionalism I'll show you guys
00:00:47
professionalism is that banaka what was that is that Baka oh this the secret Banana
00:00:55
Boat let your winners ride Rainman David and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with
00:01:06
[Music] it all right everybody Welcome to the Allin podcast episode 167 168 with me of
00:01:16
course the ringing man himself David Sachs the dictator chairman chabo poopaa and our Sultan of science David freberg
00:01:22
how we doing boys great how are you high energy enough you is it 167 or 168 I don't know who cares can we at least get
00:01:28
you to know the episode number who cares unfortunately or fortunately we're going
00:01:34
to be doing this thing forever the audience demands that it doesn't matter this is like a Twilight Zone episode
00:01:39
we're going to be trapped in these four bubbles forever you know like Superman it's a it is this is like the it is the
00:01:46
gift trapped in that glass Zed was that his name Z Neil before Zod and he spun through the
00:01:53
universe and the plastic being forever for for Infinity until until Superman took the new nuclear bomb out of the uh
00:02:02
Eiffel Tower and threw it into space and blew it up and fre you know my background today I think I'm going to
00:02:07
have to change now that you've referenced this important scene that was the best moment of that movie
00:02:12
JC where teren stamp says kneel to the president and the President says oh God and then Terence St like
00:02:20
Zod not God Zod Zod near before s that was Superman 2 or three yeah Superman 2 is pretty much the best you know like
00:02:29
Empire Strikes Back like Terminator 2 it's always the second one that's the best one all right everybody we got a
00:02:34
lot to talk about today apologies for my voice I a little bit of a cold Nvidia blew the doors off their earnings for
00:02:40
the third straight quarter shares were up 15% on Thursday representing a nearly $250 billion jump in market cap so let's
00:02:49
just let that sit in for a second this is the largest single day gain in market cap
00:02:56
$247 billion added in market cap previously meta did something similar earlier this year remember everybody was
00:03:03
down on that stock because they were doing all the crazy stuff with reality labs and then they got focused and laid
00:03:08
off 20,000 people they added $196 billion in other words they added like 2 and a half airbnbs to their valuation
00:03:16
but let's just get to the results the results are absolutely stunning and dare I say unprecedented Q4 Revenue 22.1
00:03:22
billion that's up 22% quarter over quarter up 265 year-over-year the net income was 12.3 billion 9x
00:03:32
year-over-year and the gross margin of 76% was up 2 points quarter of quarter 127% year-over-year but look at this
00:03:40
Revenue ramp this is extraordinary q1 of 2024 this Juggernaut starts and it does
00:03:48
not stop and it doesn't look like it's going to stop just a run up from 7 billion all the way to 22 billion in
00:03:54
revenue for the quarter absolutely extraordinary and uh if you want to know why this is happening why is NVIDIA
00:04:01
putting up these kind of numbers this chart explains everything this is all about data centers obviously if you
00:04:08
heard of Nvidia before the AI boom it was gaming professional visualizations you know I think people making movies
00:04:14
and stuff like that Autos uh used Nvidia for self-driving that kind of stuff but
00:04:19
if you look at this chart you'll see data centers just starting four quarters ago starts to ramp up as everybody
00:04:26
builds out the infrastructure for new data centers to deal with generative AI so just to add one point here Jason
00:04:35
so what you can see is that Nvidia was around for a long time and it was making these chips these gpus as opposed to
00:04:43
CPUs and they were primarily used by games and by virtual reality software because gpus are better obviously at
00:04:53
graphical processing they use Vector math to create these like 3D worlds and this V Vector math that they use to
00:05:01
create these 3D worlds is also the same Vector math that AI uses to reach its outcomes so with the explosion of llms
00:05:09
it turns out that these gpus are the right chips that you need for these cloud service providers to BU build out
00:05:15
these Big Data Centers to serve now all of these new AI applications so Nvidia was in the perfect place the perfect
00:05:24
time and that's why it's just exploded and what you're seeing is the buildout of this
00:05:30
new cloud service infrastructure for for AI yeah and um also helping the stock is
00:05:37
the fact that they bought back 2.7 billion worth of their shares as part of a $25 billion buyback plan but this
00:05:43
company's firing on all cylinders revenu is obviously ripping as people put in orders to replace all of the data
00:05:50
centers out there or at least augment them with this technology with gpus A1 100s h100s Etc the gross margin's been
00:05:58
expanding they have huge profits and they're still projecting more growth in q1 around 24 billion which would be a 3X
00:06:05
increase year-over-year and this obviously has made the entire Market rip as Nvidia goes so does the market right
00:06:12
now and the S&P 500 NASDAQ are at record highs at the time of this taping chth your general thoughts here on something
00:06:22
I don't think anybody saw coming except for you and your investment in Gro maybe and a couple of
00:06:28
others I I think what I would tell you is that the bigger principle and we've talked about this a lot Jason is that in
00:06:36
capitalism when you over earn for enough of a time what happens is competitors decide to try to compete away your
00:06:44
earnings in the absence of a monopoly the amount of time that you have tends to be small and it shrinks so in the
00:06:51
case of a monopoly for example take Google you can over earn for decades and it takes a very very long time for
00:06:58
somebody to to try to displace you we're just starting to see the beginnings of that with things like perplexity and
00:07:05
other services that are chipping away at the Google Monopoly but at some point in
00:07:10
time all of these excess profits are competed away in the case of Nvidia what you're now starting to see is them over
00:07:20
earn in a very massive way so the real question is who will step up to try to compete away those
00:07:28
profits the Bezos quote right your margin is my opportunity and I think we're starting to see and you've
00:07:34
mentioned grock who had a super viral moment I think this week but you're starting to see the emergence of a more
00:07:41
detailed understanding of what this Market actually means and as a result who will compete away the
00:07:48
inference Market who will compete away the training market and the economics of that are just becoming known to now more
00:07:54
and more people freeberg your thoughts we were talking I think was last week or the week before about
00:08:00
possibility of Nvidia being a 10 trillion dollar company largest company in the world what are your thoughts on
00:08:04
these spectacular results and then shat Point Everybody is watching this going um maybe I can get a slice of that pie
00:08:12
and maybe I can create a more competitive offering obviously we saw Sam hman rumored to be raising 7
00:08:19
trillion which feels like a fake number feels like that's maybe the market size or something but your thoughts here I
00:08:23
don't think anything's changed on the Nvidia front there's this accelerated compute buildout underway in data
00:08:29
centers everyone's building infrastructure and then everyone's trying to build applications and tools
00:08:34
and services on top of that infrastructure the infrastructure buildout is kind of the first phase the
00:08:39
real question ultimately will be does the initial cost of the infrastructure exceed the ultimate value that's going
00:08:46
to be realized on the application layer in the early days of the internet a lot of people were buying Oracle servers
00:08:54
they were like 3,000 bucks a server and they were running these Oracle servers out of an Internet
00:09:00
connected Data Center and it you know took a couple of years before folks realized that
00:09:05
for large scale distributed compute applications you're better off using cheaper Hardware you know cheaper server
00:09:13
racks cheaper hard drives cheaper buses and assuming a shorter lifespan on those
00:09:19
servers and you could cycle them in and out and you didn't need the redundancy you didn't need the certainty you didn't
00:09:24
need the the runtime guarantees and so you could use a lower cost higher failure rate but much much net
00:09:32
lower cost kind of approach to building out a data center for internet serving and so the Oracle servers didn't really
00:09:39
take the market and early on everyone thought that they would so I think Chamas point is right now Nvidia has
00:09:44
been at this for very long time and the real question is how much of an advantage do they have particularly that
00:09:50
there is this need to use Fabs to build replacement technology so over time will
00:09:55
there be better solutions that use Hardware that's not as good but the software figures out and they build new
00:09:59
architecture for running on that Hardware in a way that kind of mimics what we saw in the early days of the
00:10:04
build out of the internet so um TBD right the same is true in in switches right so in networking a lot of the
00:10:12
high-end highquality networking companies got beaten up when lower cost Solutions came to Market later and so
00:10:19
they looked like they were going to be the biggest business ever I mean you could look at Cisco during the early
00:10:23
days of the internet build out and everyone thought Cisco was uh the picks and shovels of the internet and they
00:10:28
were going to make all the all the Valu is going to AG to Cisco so we're kind of
00:10:31
in that same phase right now with Nvidia the real question is is this going to be
00:10:35
a much harder Hill to compete on than we've ever seen given the development cycle on chips and the requirement to
00:10:42
use these Fabs to build chips it may be a harder Hill to kind of get up sex so we'll see your thoughts you think um
00:10:47
we're getting to the point where maybe we'll have bought too many of these uh built out too much infrastructure and
00:10:52
we'll take time for the application layer as freeberg was alluding to to monetize it well I think the question
00:10:59
everyone's asking right now is are are these results sustainable can Nvidia keep growing at these astounding rates
00:11:07
you know will the buildout continue and the comparison everyone's making is to Cisco and there's this chart that's been
00:11:12
going around overlaying the Nvidia stock price on The Cisco stock price and you can see here the orange line is NVIDIA
00:11:20
and the blue line is Cisco and it's almost like a a perfect match now what happened is that at a similar point
00:11:29
in the original buildout of the internet of the do com era you had the market crash at the end of March of uh 2000 and
00:11:39
Cisco never really recovered from that Peak valuation um but I think there's a lot of reasons to believe Nvidia is
00:11:45
different one is that if you look at nvidia's multiples they're nowhere near where Cisco were back then so the market
00:11:52
in 1999 in early 2000 was way more bubbly than it is now so nvidia's valuation is much more grounded in real
00:12:00
Revenue real margins real profit second you have the issue of competitive mode Cisco was selling
00:12:09
servers and networking equipment fundamentally that equipment was much easier to copy and commoditize than gpus
00:12:18
these GPU chips are really complicated I think Jensen made the point that their Hopper
00:12:26
100 product he said you know don't even think of it just like a chip there's actually 35,000 components in this
00:12:32
product and it weighs 70 lbs this is more like a Mainframe computer or something that's dedicated to processing
00:12:38
yeah it's somewhere between a rack server and the entire rack yeah it's Giant and it's heavy and it's complex it
00:12:45
does say something here chamath I think about how well positioned big Tech is in terms
00:12:54
of seeing an opportunity and quickly mobilizing to capture AP that opportunity these servers are being
00:13:01
bought by you know people like Amazon I'm sure Apple obviously Facebook meta I don't
00:13:09
know if Google's buying them as well I would assume so Tesla so everybody's buying these things and they had tons of
00:13:15
cash sitting around it is pretty amazing how Nimble the industry is and this opportunity feels like everybody is
00:13:21
looking at it like mobile and Cloud I have to get mobilized quickly to not get disrupted you're bringing up an
00:13:27
excellent point and I I would like to tie it together with freiberg's point so at some point all of
00:13:34
this spend has to make money right otherwise you're you're going to look really foolish for having spent 20 and
00:13:40
30 and $40 billion do so Nick if you just go back to the to the revenue slide of Nvidia I can try to give you a
00:13:47
framing of this at least the way that I think about it so if if you look at this
00:13:51
like what you're talking about is look who is going to spend $22.1 billion well you said it Jason it's all a big Tech
00:13:58
why because they have that money on the balance sheet sitting idle but when you spend $22 billion their investors are
00:14:06
going to demand a rate of return on that and so if you think about what a reasonable rate of return is call it 30
00:14:12
40 50% and then you factor in and that's profit and then you factor in all of the
00:14:17
other things that need to support that that $22 billion of spend needs to generate probably $45 billion of Revenue
00:14:27
and so Jason the question to your point and to Freed Brook's Point The $64,000 Question is who in this last quarter is
00:14:34
going to make 45 billion on that 22 billion of spend and again what I would tell you to be really honest about this
00:14:41
is that what you're seeing is more about big companies musling people around with
00:14:48
their balance sheet and being able to go to Nvidia and say I will give you committed pre purchases over the next
00:14:55
three or four quarters and less about here is a product that I'm shipping that actually
00:15:01
makes money which I need enormous more compute resources for it's not the ladder most of the apps the overwhelming
00:15:11
majority of the apps that we're seeing in AI today are toy apps that are run as proofs of concept and demos and run in a
00:15:21
sandbox it is not production code this is not we've rebuilt the entire autopilot system for the Boeing and it's
00:15:32
now run with agents and Bots and all of this training that's not what's happening so it is a really important
00:15:40
question today the demand is clear it's the big guys with huge gobs of money and
00:15:45
by the way Nvidia is super smart to take it because they can now forecast demand
00:15:50
for the next two or three quarters I think we still need to see the next big thing and if you look in
00:15:55
the past what the past has showed you it's the big guys don't really invent the new things that make a ton of money
00:16:00
it's the new guys who because they don't have a lot of money and they have to be
00:16:05
a little bit more industrious come up with something really authentic and new yeah constraint makes for great art yeah
00:16:11
we haven't seen that yet so I think the revenue scale will continue for like the
00:16:15
next two or three years probably for NVIDIA but the real question is what is the terminal value and it's the same
00:16:23
thing that saak showed in that Cisco slide people ultimately realized that the value was going to go
00:16:30
to other parts of the stack the application layer and as more and more money was acred at the application layer
00:16:39
of the internet less and less Revenue multiple and credit was given to Cisco and that's nothing against Cisco because
00:16:45
their revenue continued to compound right and they did an incredible job but the valuation got cut so freberg if
00:16:52
we're looking at this chart the winner of Netflix the winner of The Cisco chart might in fact be somebody like Netflix
00:16:58
they actually got you know hundreds of millions of consumers to give them Cash go and Facebook and then you have Google
00:17:03
and Facebook as well generating all that traffic and then YouTube of course who do you see the winner here as in terms
00:17:10
of the application layer who are the billion customers here who are going to spend 20 bucks a month five bucks a
00:17:16
month whatever it is so here well I mean let me just start with this important point if you look at where that revenue
00:17:22
is coming from to chat's point it's coming from big cloud service providers so Google and others are building out
00:17:32
clouds that other application developers can build their AI tools and applications on top of so a lot of the
00:17:39
buildout is in these cloud data centers that are owned and operated by these big
00:17:45
tech companies the 18 billion of data center Revenue that Nvidia realized is revenue to them but it's not an
00:17:52
operating expense to the companies that are building out so this is an important
00:17:57
point on why this is happening at such an accelerated Pace when a big company buys these chips from Nvidia they don't
00:18:04
have to from an accounting basis Market as an expense in their income statement it actually gets booked as a capital
00:18:10
expenditure in the cash flow statement it gets put on the balance sheet and they depreciate it over time and so they
00:18:17
can spend $20 billion of cash because Google and others have 100 billion of cash sitting on the balance sheet and
00:18:23
they've been struggling to find ways to grow their business through Acquisitions
00:18:27
one of the reasons is they there aren't enough companies out there that they can
00:18:31
buy at a good multiple that can give them a good increase in profit the other one is that antitrust authorities are
00:18:36
blocking all of their Acquisitions and so what do you do with all that cash well you can build out the next gen of
00:18:42
cloud infrastructure and you don't have to take the hit on your p&l by doing it so it ends up in the balance sheet and
00:18:47
then you depreciate it over typically four to seven years so that money gets paid out on the on the income statement
00:18:54
at these big companies over a seven-year period so there's a really great accounting and m&a environment driver
00:19:02
here that's causing the big cloud data center providers to step in and say this is a great time for us to build out the
00:19:08
next generation of infrastructure that could generate profits for us in the future because we've got all this cash
00:19:14
setting around we don't have to take a p&l hit we don't have to acquire a cash burning
00:19:18
business and you know frankly we're not going to be able to grow through m&a because of antitrust right now anyway so
00:19:23
there's a lot of other motivating factors that are causing this near-term acceleration as they're trying to find
00:19:28
ways to grow yeah and all I I know that was an accounting point but I think it's
00:19:32
a really important valid one if you if 100 billion gets spent this year you divide it by four 25 billion in Revenue
00:19:37
would have to come from that or something in that range yeah and so saaks any guesses do you have to just
00:19:42
keep in mind I think freeberg what you said is very true for gcp spend but not necessarily for Google spend it's true
00:19:49
for AWS spend but not necessarily for Amazon spend and it's true for Azure spend not true for Microsoft spend and
00:19:56
it's largely not true for Tesla and Facebook because they don't have clouds so I think the question to your point
00:20:03
that and for obvious reasons Nvidia doesn't disclose it is what is the percentage of that 21 billion that just
00:20:10
went to those Cloud providers that they'll then expose to to to everybody else versus what was just absorbed
00:20:16
because at Facebook Mark had that video about how many h100 that's all for him right but it is still it is still
00:20:23
capitalized as my point so they don't have to book that as an expense it sits on the balance sheet they and they earn
00:20:30
it down over time you're helping to explain why these big cloud service providers are spending so much on the
00:20:35
cash because they're very profitable and there's nowhere else to put the money right well so that would seem to
00:20:40
indicate that this is more in the category of one-time buildout than sustainable ongoing Revenue I think the
00:20:47
the big question is the one that jamath asked which is what's the terminal value
00:20:51
of Nvidia I think like a simple framework for thinking about that is what is the total addressable Market or
00:20:57
Tam related to gpus and then what is their market share going to be right now their market share is something like 91%
00:21:05
that's clearly going to come down but the remote appears to be substantial the Wall Street analysts I've been listening
00:21:11
to think that in five years they're still going to have 60 something percent market share so they're going to have a
00:21:17
substantial percentage of this Market or this Tam then the question is I think with respect to Tam is what is onetime
00:21:25
buildout versus steady state now I think that clearly there's a lot of buildout happening now that's almost like a
00:21:33
backfill of capacity that people are realizing they need but even the numbers you're seeing this quarter kind of
00:21:39
understate it because first of all Nvidia was Supply constrainted they could not produce enough chips to
00:21:46
satisfy all the demand their revenue would would have been even higher if they had more
00:21:52
capacity second you just look at their forecast so the fiscal year that just ended they did around 60 billion of
00:21:59
Revenue they're forecasting 110 billion for the fiscal year that just started so
00:22:04
they're already projecting to almost double based on the demand that they clearly have visibility into already so
00:22:11
it's very hard to know exactly what the terminal or steady state value of this Market's going to be even once the cloud
00:22:19
service providers do this big buildout presumably there's always going to be a need to stay up to dat with the latest
00:22:25
chips right here's a framework for you tell me if this makes sense intel was the basically the mother
00:22:33
of all of modern compute up until today right I think the CPU was the the most fundamental Workhorse that enabled local
00:22:42
PCS it enabled networking it enabled the internet and so when you look at the market cap of it as an example it's
00:22:52
about 1880 odd billion dollars today the econom that it created that it supports is probably measured call it in
00:23:02
a trillion or2 trillion do maybe 5 trillion let's just be really generous right and so you you can see that
00:23:08
there's this ratio of the enabler of an economy and the size of the economy and those things tend to be relatively fixed
00:23:17
and they recur repeatedly over and over and over if you look at Microsoft it's market cap relative to the economy that
00:23:23
it enables so the question for NVIDIA in my mind would be that it is it not going
00:23:28
to go up in the next 18 to 24 months it probably is for exactly the reason you said it is super set up to have a very
00:23:35
good meet and beat guidance for the street which they'll eat up and all of the algorithms that trade the press
00:23:41
releases will drive the price higher and all of this stuff will just create a trend
00:23:46
upward I think the bigger question is if it's a four or five trillion dollar market cap in the next two or three
00:23:55
years will it support 100 trillion economy because that's what you would need to believe for those ratios to hold
00:24:03
otherwise everything has just broken on the internet yeah I mean so the history of the internet is that if you build it
00:24:09
they will come meaning that if you make the investment in the capital assets necessary to power the next generation
00:24:17
of applications those applications have always eventually gotten written even though it was hard to predict them at
00:24:23
the time so in the late 90s when we had the whole do com bubble and then bust had this tremendous buildout not just of
00:24:30
kind of servers and all the networking equipment but there was a huge fiber buildout y by all the telecom companies
00:24:35
and the telecom companies had a Cisco like you know a peak it was worse you wcom and them they went bankrupt a lot
00:24:42
of them yeah well the problem there was that a lot of the build out happened with debt and so when you had the Doom
00:24:48
crash and all the valuations came down to earth that's why a lot of them went under yeah Cisco wasn't in that position
00:24:55
but anyway my point is in the early 2000 when the crash happened everyone thought
00:24:59
that these telecom companies had over invested in fiber as it turns out all that fiber eventually got used the
00:25:06
internet went from you know dial up to broadband we started doing seeing streaming social networking all these
00:25:13
applications started eating up that bandwidth so I think that the history of these things is that the applications
00:25:21
eventually get written they get developed if you build the infrastructure to power them and I think
00:25:26
with AI the thing that's exciting to me as someone who's really more of an application investor is that we're just
00:25:32
at the beginning I think of a huge wave of a lot of new creativity and applications that's going to be written
00:25:41
and it's not just B Toc it's going to be B2B as well you guys haven't really mentioned that it's not just consumers
00:25:46
and consumer applications are going to use these cloud data centers that are buying up all these gpus it's it's going
00:25:53
to be Enterprises too I mean these Enterprises are using Azure they're using Google cloud and so forth so
00:26:00
there's a lot I think that's still to come I mean we're just at the beginning of a wave that's probably going to last
00:26:06
at least a decade yeah to your point one of the reasons YouTube Google photos ioto a lot of these things happened was
00:26:16
because the infrastructure buildout was so great during the doom boom that the prices for storage the prices for
00:26:22
bandwidth sacks plummeted and then people like Chad Hurley looked at were like you what instead of charging people
00:26:29
to put a video on the internet and then charging them for the bandwith they used
00:26:33
we'll just let them upload this stuff to YouTube and we'll figure it out later same thing with Netflix yeah I mean look
00:26:38
when we were developing PayPal in the late 90s really around 1999 uh you could barely upload a photo
00:26:46
to the internet I mean so like the idea of having an account with a profile photo on it was sort of like why would
00:26:51
you do that it's just prohibitively slow everyone's going to drop off Yeah by 2003 it was fast enough that you could
00:26:58
do that and that's why social networking happened I mean literally without that performance
00:27:03
Improvement like even having a profile photo on your account was something that was too hard to do your LinkedIn profile
00:27:10
was like too much bandwidth and then let alone video I mean the you would get you
00:27:16
probably remember these days you would put up a video on your website if it went viral your website got turned off
00:27:22
because you would hit your $5,000 or $10,000 a month Cap all right grock also had a huge week that's grock with a Q
00:27:29
not to be confused with elon's grock with a K shth you've talked about grock on this podcast a couple of times
00:27:36
obviously you were the I guess you were the first investor the seed investor you
00:27:41
pulled these lpus and this concept out of a team that was at Google maybe you could explain a little bit about grock's
00:27:48
viral moment this week in the history of the company which I know has been a long
00:27:53
road for you with this company I mean it's been since 2016 so so again proving what you
00:27:59
guys have said many times and what I've tried to live out which is just you just
00:28:04
got to keep grinding 90% of the battle is just staying alive in business yeah and having oxygen to keep trying things
00:28:13
and then eventually if you get lucky which I think we did things can really break in your
00:28:19
favor so this weekend you know I've been tweeting out a lot of technical information about why I think this is
00:28:24
such a big deal but yeah the the moment came this weekend combination of Hacker News and some other places and
00:28:31
essentially we had no customers two months ago I'll just be honest and between Sunday and
00:28:38
Tuesday we've just we're overwhelmed and I think like the last count was we had 3,000 unique customers come and try to
00:28:46
consume our resources from every important Fortune 500 all the way down to developers and
00:28:53
so I think we're very fortunate I think the team has a lot of hard work to do do
00:28:57
so it could mean nothing but it has the potential to be something very disruptive so what is it that people are
00:29:02
glomming on to you have to understand that like at the very highest level of AI you have to
00:29:10
view it as two distinct problems one problem is called training which is where you take a model and you
00:29:16
take all of the data that you think will help train it and you do that you train
00:29:21
the model you learn all over all of this information but the second part of the AI problem is what's called inference
00:29:30
which is what you and I see every day as a consumer so we go to a website like chat GPT or Gemini we ask a question and
00:29:38
it gives us a really useful answer and those are two very different kinds of compute challenges the first one is
00:29:45
about brute force and power right if you can imagine like what you need are tons
00:29:51
and tons of machines tons and tons of like very high quality networking and an enormous amount of power in a data
00:29:59
center so that you can just run those things for months I think Elon publishes very transparently for example how long
00:30:04
it trains to to train his grock with a K right model and it's in the months inference is something very different
00:30:11
which is all about speed and cost what you need to be in order to answer a question for a consumer in a compelling
00:30:17
way is super super cheap and super super fast and we've talked about why that is
00:30:23
important and the gro with a Q chips turns out to be extremely fast and extremely
00:30:32
cheap and so look time will tell how big this company can get but if you tie it together with what Jensen said on the
00:30:40
earnings call and you now see developers stress testing us and finding that we are meaningfully meaningfully faster and
00:30:49
cheaper than any Nvidia solution there's the potential here to be really disruptive and we're a meager
00:30:57
unicorn right our last valuation was like a billion something versus Nvidia which is now like a $2 trillion doll
00:31:05
company so there's a lot of market cap for grock to gain by just being able to produce these things at
00:31:12
scale which could be just an enormous outcome for us so time will tell but a really important moment in the company
00:31:18
and very exciting can I just observe like off topic how an overnight success can take eight years yeah no I was
00:31:26
thinking the same it's a seven-year overnight success in the making there's this class of businesses that I think
00:31:32
are unappreciated in a post internet era where you have to do a bunch of things right before you can get any one thing
00:31:43
to work and these complicated businesses where you have to stack either different
00:31:49
things together that need to click together in a in a stack or you need to iterate on each step until the whole
00:31:55
system works end to end can sometimes take a very long time to build and the term that's often used for
00:32:01
these types of businesses is deep Tech and they fall out of favor because in an internet era and in a software era you
00:32:09
can find product Market fit and make revenue and then make profit very quickly and so a lot of entrepreneurs
00:32:15
select into that type of business instead of selecting into this type of business where the probability of
00:32:20
failure is very high you have several low probability things that you have to get right in a row and if you do it's
00:32:27
going to take eight years and a lot of money and then all of a sudden the thing takes off like a rocket ship you've got
00:32:32
a huge Advantage you've got a huge moat it's hard for anyone to catch up and this thing can really um spin out on its
00:32:37
own I do think Elon is very unique in his ability to deliver success in these types of businesses Tesla needed to get
00:32:44
a lot of things right in a row SpaceX needed to get a lot of things right in a row all of these require a series of
00:32:50
complicated steps or a set of complicated technologies that need to click together and work together but the
00:32:55
hardest things often output the highest value and you know if you can actually make the commitment on these types of
00:33:05
businesses and get all the pieces to click together there's an extraordinary opportunity to build Moes and to take
00:33:11
huge amounts of market value and I think that there's an element of this that's been lost in Silicon Valley over the
00:33:17
last couple of decades as the fast money in the internet era has kind of prioritized other Investments ahead of
00:33:24
this but I'm really hopeful that these sorts of Chip Technologies SpaceX in biotech we see a lot of this
00:33:31
these sorts of things can kind of become more in favor because the the advantage
00:33:35
as these businesses work seems to realize hundreds of billions and sometimes trillions of dollars of market
00:33:40
value and be incredibly transformative for Humanity so I don't know I just think it's an observation I wanted to
00:33:46
make about the greatness of these businesses when they work out well I mean open AI was kind of like that for a
00:33:50
while totally I mean it was this like wacky nonprofit that was just grinding on an AI research problem for like six
00:33:56
years and then it finally worked and got productized into chat GPT totally but you're right SpaceX was kind of like
00:34:03
that I mean the big money maker at SpaceX is starlink which is the satellite Network it's basically
00:34:09
Broadband from space and it's on its way to handling I think a meaningful percentage of all internet traffic but
00:34:16
think about all the things you had to get to to get that working first you had to create a rocket that's hard enough
00:34:22
then you had to get to reusability then you have to create the whole satellite Network so at least
00:34:27
three hard things in a row well and get consumers to adopt it I mean you know don't forget the final step yeah we had
00:34:34
no idea where the market was like early on it started in my office and so Jonathan and I would be kind of always
00:34:41
trying to figure out what is the initial go to market and I remember I emailed Elon in at that period when they were
00:34:48
still trying to figure out whether they were going to go with liar or not and we
00:34:52
thought wow maybe we could sell Tesla the chips you know but and then Tesla brought in this team just to talk to us
00:34:58
about what the design goals were and basically said no in kind way but they said no then we thought okay maybe it's
00:35:06
like for high frequency Traders right because like those folks want to have all kinds of edges and if we have these
00:35:11
big models maybe we can accelerate their decision making they can measure Revenue
00:35:16
that didn't work out then it was like you know we tried to sell to three-letter agencies that didn't
00:35:23
really work out our original version was really focused on image class class ification in convolutional neuron Nets
00:35:29
like resnet that didn't work out we ran head first into the fact that Nvidia has
00:35:35
this compiler product called cuda and we had to build a high class compiler that
00:35:40
you could take any model without any modifications all these things to your point are just points where you can just
00:35:47
very easily give up and then there's like we run out of money so then you write money in a note right because
00:35:52
everybody wants to punt on valuation when nothing's working yeah you tried Beach Head Market you could the boat you
00:35:59
have to make a decision to just keep going if you believe it's right and if you believe you are right yeah and that
00:36:07
requires shutting out we talked about this in the Masa example last week but it just requir shutting out the noise
00:36:14
because it's so hard to believe in yourself it's so hard to keep funding these things it's so hard to go into
00:36:20
partner meetings and defend a company and then you just have a moment and you just feel I I don't know I feel
00:36:27
very Vindicated but then I feel very scared because Jonathan still hasn't landed it you know what I mean you
00:36:33
mentioned all those boats landing and trying to trying to those missteps but 3,000 people signed up who are they are
00:36:39
they developers now and they're going to figure out the applications yeah I think
00:36:42
that back to the original point my thought today is that AI is more about proofs of concept and toy apps and
00:36:49
nothing real yep I don't think there's anything real that's inside of an Enterprise that is so meaningfully
00:36:55
disruptive that it's going to get broadly licensed to other Enterprises I'm not saying we won't get there but
00:37:00
I'm saying we haven't yet seen that Cambrian moment of monetization we've seen the Cambrian moment of innovation
00:37:09
yeah and so that Gap has still yet to be crossed and I think the reason that you
00:37:14
can't cross it is that today these are in an unusable State the results are not good enough they are toy apps that are
00:37:22
too slow that require too much infrastructure and cost so the potential is for us to enable that monetization
00:37:30
Leap Forward and so yeah they're going to be developers of all sizes and the people
00:37:36
that came are literally companies of all sizes I saw some of the names of the big
00:37:40
companies and they are the who's who of the S&P 500 how do you guys reconcile this deep Tech High outcome opportunity
00:37:51
that everyone here has seen and been a part of as an investor participant in versus the more drisk faster time to
00:38:01
Market and you know chth in particular like in the past we've talked about some of these deep Tech projects like fusion
00:38:06
and so on and you've highlighted well it's just not there yet it's not fundable what's the distinction between
00:38:12
a deep Tech investment opportunity that is fundable and that you keep grinding at that has this huge outcome uh what
00:38:19
makes the one like Fusion not fundable it's a phenomenal question it's a great question my answer is I have a very
00:38:25
simple f which is that I don't want to debate the laws of physics when I fund a company so
00:38:32
with Jonathan when we were initially trying to figure out how to size it I think my initial check was like 7 to10
00:38:39
million or something and the whole goal was to get to an initial tape out of a design we were not inventing anything
00:38:46
new with respect to physics we were on a very old process technology I think we're still on 14 nanometer we were on
00:38:52
14 nanometer 8 years ago okay so we weren't pushing those boundaries all we were doing was trying to build a
00:38:59
compiler and a chip that made sense in a very specific construct to solve a a well- defined bounded problem so that is
00:39:05
a technical challenge but it's not one of physics when I've been pitched all the fusion companies for example there
00:39:13
are fuel sources that require you to make a leap of physics where in order to generate a certain fuel source you
00:39:20
either have to go and harvest that on the moon or in a different planet that is not earth or you have to create some
00:39:26
fundamentally different way of creating this highly unique material that is why those kinds of
00:39:32
problems to me are poor risk and building a chip is good risk it doesn't mean you're going to be successful in
00:39:39
building a chip but the risks are bounded to not of fundamental physics they're bounded to go to market in
00:39:46
technical usefulness and I think that that removes an order of magnitude risk in the outcome so I mean there there's
00:39:54
still like a bunch of things that have to be right in a row to make it work but yeah it doesn't mean it's going to work
00:39:59
all I'm saying is I don't I don't want it to fail because we built a reactor and we realized hold on to get heavy
00:40:03
hydrogen I got to go to the moon right and J and Sachs how do you saaks I know you don't you invested we have done a
00:40:10
couple yeah so maybe you guys can highlight how you've thought about deep Tech opportunities versus do something
00:40:16
really difficult like this every 50 Investments or so because most of the entrepreneurs coming to us because we're
00:40:22
seed investors or pre-seed investors they would be going to a biotech investor or a hardware investor who
00:40:27
specializes in that not to us but once in a while we meet a Founder we really like and so Contra line was one we were
00:40:34
introduced to somebody who's doing this really interesting contraception for men
00:40:38
where they put a gel into your vast Defence and you as a a man can take control of your reproduction you
00:40:48
basically it's a it's not a vasectomy it's just a gel that goes in there and and blocks it and this company is now
00:40:53
doing human trials and doing fantastic but this took forever to to get to this point and then uh you guys some of you
00:41:00
are also investors in Cafe X which we love the founder and this company should have died like during covid and making a
00:41:08
robotic coffee bar when he started you know seven eight years ago was incredibly hard he had to build the
00:41:14
hardware he had to build a brand he had to do locations he had to do software and now he's selling these machines and
00:41:19
people are buying them and the two in San Francisco at SFO are making like uh I think they the two of them make a
00:41:25
million a year and it's the highest per square footage of any store in an airport and so we've just been grinding
00:41:33
and grinding and you got to find a Founder who's willing to make it their lives work in these kind of situations
00:41:39
but you start to think about the degree of difficulty Hardware software retail mobile apps I mean it just
00:41:47
gets crazy how hard these businesses are as opposed to I'm building a SAS company
00:41:52
I build software I sell it to somebody to solve their SAS problem it's like it's very one dimens right it's pretty
00:41:57
straightforward these businesses typically have five components yeah and SX you've been an investor in
00:42:03
SpaceX but you don't make those sorts of Investments regularly at craft is that fair yeah I have an Elon exception I got
00:42:11
it it's about the founder our portfolio allocation we say this much early stage this much late
00:42:22
stage this much Elon Elon except yeah I mean you have to be so dogged to to want
00:42:29
to take something like this on because the good stuff happens like you're saying freeberg you're seven8 nine 10 as
00:42:33
opposed to like a consumer product either works or it doesn't by year three or four the only app that took a really
00:42:38
long time people don't know this but Twitter actually took a long time to catch on it was kind of cruising for two
00:42:44
or three years and then South by Southwest happened Ashton Kutcher got on it Obama got on it I think the network
00:42:51
effect I think I think Network effect businesses are different because that's all about getting your seat of your
00:42:55
network I'm talking about is the technical coordination of lots of technically difficult tasks that need to
00:43:01
sync up it's like getting a master lock with like 10 digits and you got to figure out the combination of all 10
00:43:07
digits and once they're all correct then the lock opens and prior to that if any
00:43:12
if anyone number is off the lock doesn't open and I think these technically difficult businesses are some of the and
00:43:18
they are the hardest and they do require the most dogged personalities to persist
00:43:23
and to realize an outcome from but the truth is that if get them the moat is extraordinary and they're usually going
00:43:28
to create extraordinary leverage and value and you know I think from a portfolio allocation perspective if you
00:43:35
as an investor want to have some diversification in your portfolio this is not going to be the predominance of
00:43:39
your portfolio but some percentage of your portfolio should go to this sort of business because if it works boom you
00:43:45
know this can be the big 10x 100x thousand x two stories about that one of the V early VCS and elon's told the
00:43:51
story publicly wanted Elon to not make the Roadster not make the monol S just make
00:43:57
drivetrains and the electric components for other car companies can you imagine how the world would have changed and
00:44:03
then totally a very high-profile VC came to me and said okay I'll I'll do the series a for um I'll do the series a for
00:44:12
Uber I'll preemptively do it but you got to tell Travis to stop running Uber as a
00:44:17
consumer app I want him to sell the software to cab companies so make it a SAS company and I said well you you know
00:44:24
the cab companies are kind of the problem like they're they're taking all the margin like that kind of disrupting
00:44:29
them and they're like yeah yeah but just think there's thousands of cab companies
00:44:33
they would pay you tens of thousand a year for this software and you can get a little piece of the action I never
00:44:37
brought that investor to to Travis I was like oh wow that's really interesting Insight sometimes the VCS work against
00:44:43
it I have a very poor track record of working with other investors whoa self-reflection I do deals myself I size
00:44:53
them myself and it's because a lot of them have to live within the political dynamics of their fund and so I think
00:45:03
Jason what you probably saw in that example which is exactly why doing things and splitting deals will never
00:45:09
generate great outcomes in my opinion is that you you take on all the baggage and
00:45:15
the dysfunction of these other Partnerships and so if you really wanted to go and disrupt
00:45:22
Transportation you need one person who can be a trigger pull and who doesn't have to answer to anybody I find that's
00:45:28
why I think for example when you look at how successful venod has been over decade after decade after decade when
00:45:36
venot decides that's the decision and I think there's something very powerful in
00:45:41
that there are a bunch of deals that I've done that when they've worked out were not really because they were
00:45:49
consensus and they had to get supported and scaffolded at periods where if I wasn't able to Ram them through myself
00:45:55
because because it was my organization I think we would have be in a very different place so I think I think like
00:46:01
for for entrepreneurs it's so difficult for them to find people that believe it's so much better to find one person
00:46:08
and just get enough money and then not Syndicate because I think you have to realize that you are bringing on and
00:46:16
compounding your risk the one that freeberg talked about with the risk of all the other partnership dynamics that
00:46:22
you bring on so if you don't internalize that you may have five or six folks that
00:46:27
come into an A or a B but you're inheriting five or six yeah partnership Dy dysfunctions yeah yeah yeah can you
00:46:35
just explain really quickly for the audience since they heard about gpus in Nvidia but they may not know what an lpu
00:46:42
is what's the difference there a GPU the best way to think about it is so if you
00:46:47
contrast a CPU with a GPU so CPU was the Workhorse of all of computing and when it when Jensen
00:46:55
started Nvidia what he realized was there were specific tasks where a CPU failed quite brilliantly at and so he's
00:47:04
like well we're going to make a chip that works in all these failure modes for a CPU so a CPU is very good at
00:47:09
taking one instruction in acting on it and then spitting out one one answer effectively and so it's a very serial
00:47:17
kind of a factory if you think about the CPU so if you want to build a factory that can process instead of one thing at
00:47:24
a time 10 things or 100 things what is they had to find a workload that was well suited and they
00:47:31
found graphics and what they convinced PC manufacturers back in the day was look have the CPU be the brain it'll do
00:47:39
90% of the work but for very specific use cases like graphics and video games you don't want to do serial computation
00:47:47
you want to do parallel computation and we are the best at that and it turned out that that was a genius insight and
00:47:53
so the business for many years was gain ging and Graphics but what happened about 10 years ago was what we also
00:48:01
started to realize was the math that's required and the processing that's required in AI
00:48:09
models actually looked very similar to how you would process imagery from a game and so he was allowed to figure out
00:48:19
by building this thing called cuda which is the compiler that sits on the chip how he could now go and tell people that
00:48:25
wanted to experiment with AI hey you know that chip that we had made for graphics guess what it also is amazing
00:48:32
at doing all of these very small mathematical calculations that you need for your AI model and that turned out to
00:48:38
be true so the next Leap Forward was what Jonathan saw which was hold on a second if you look at the chip
00:48:45
itself that GPU substantially has not changed since 1999 in the way that it thinks about problem solving it has all
00:48:54
this very expensive memory M blah blah blah so he was like let's just throw all that out the window we'll make small
00:49:00
little brains and we'll connect those little brains together and we'll have this very clever software that schedules
00:49:06
it and optimizes it so basically take the chip and make it much much smaller and cheaper and then make many of them
00:49:13
and connect them together that was Jonathan's insight and it turns out for large language models that's a huge
00:49:19
Stroke of Luck because it is exactly how llms can be hyper optimized to work so that's kind of been the evolution from
00:49:28
CPU to GPU to now lpu and we'll see how big this thing can get but it's it's quite it's quite novel
00:49:35
well congratulations on it all and it was a very big week for Google not in a great way they had a massive PR mess
00:49:43
with their Gemini which refused to generate pictures if I'm reading this correctly of white people here's a a
00:49:50
quick refresher on what Google's doing in AI Gemini is now Google's brand name for their AI main language model you can
00:49:58
think of that like open AI GPT Bard was the original name of their chatbot they had duet AI which was Google sidekick in
00:50:05
the Google Suite earlier this month Google rebranded everything to Gemini so Gemini is now the model it's the chatot
00:50:11
and it's a p sidekick and they launched a $20 month subscription called Google one AI premium uh only four words way to
00:50:19
go this includes access to the best model Gemini Ultra which is on par with GPT 4 according to them and generally in
00:50:26
the marketplace but earli this week users on X started noticing that Gemini would not generate images of white
00:50:32
people even when prompted people were prompting it for images of historical figures that were generally white and
00:50:39
getting kind of weird results I asked Google Gemini to generate images of the founding fathers it seems to think
00:50:45
George Washington was black certainly here as a portrait of the founding fathers of America as you can see it is
00:50:51
putting there Asian guy that's awesome yeah it's just it's making a great meshup and uh yeah we there was like
00:51:00
countless images that got created generate images of the American Revolutionary sh his here are images
00:51:06
featuring diverse American revolutionaries and inserted the word diverse sex I'm not sure if you watch
00:51:12
this controversy on X I know you spend a little bit of time on that Social Network I noticed you're you're active
00:51:18
once in a while did you log in this week and and see any of this bruhaha sure it's all over X right now I mean look
00:51:24
this Gemini roll out was was a joke I mean it's ridiculous the AI is incapable of giving you accurate answers because
00:51:31
it's been so programmed with diversity and inclusion and it inserts these words diverse and inclusive even in answers
00:51:40
where you haven't asked for that you haven't prompted it for that so they I think Google has now like yanked back
00:51:47
the product release I think they're scrambling now because it's been so embarrassing for them but SX like is is
00:51:53
it how does this not get a like I don't understand how yeah had the red team not
00:51:59
catch this yeah well how or anybody or isn't there a product review with senior Executives before this thing goes out
00:52:04
that says okay folks here it is have at it try it we're really proud of our work
00:52:09
and and then they said well hold on a second is this actually accurate shouldn't it be accurate you guys
00:52:14
remember when chat GPT launched and there was a lot of criticism about Google and Google's Failure to Launch
00:52:21
and a lot of the observation was that Google was afraid to fail or afraid to make mistakes and
00:52:29
therefore they were too conservative and as you know in the last year to year and
00:52:33
a half there's been a strong effort at Google to try and change the culture and move fast and push a product out the
00:52:41
door more quickly and the criticism is now why Google has historically been conservative and I realize we can talk
00:52:49
about this particular problem in a minute but it's ironic to me that the Google go is too slow to launch
00:52:57
criticism has now revealed that Google's result of actually launching quickly can
00:53:03
cause more damage than than good but Google did not launch quickly well I will say one other thing I it seems to
00:53:09
me ironic because I think that what they've done is they've launched more quickly than they otherwise would have
00:53:15
and they've put more guard rails in place that that backfired and those guard rails ended up being more damaging
00:53:22
what the guard rails what's the guard rail here so this is Google's principles the first one is to be socially
00:53:27
beneficial the second one is to avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias so much of the effort that goes into tuning
00:53:35
and waiting the models at Gemini has been to try and avoid stereotypes from persisting in the output that the model
00:53:44
generates where is telling the truth telling the TR exactly that's exact Society is our second principle we'd
00:53:52
like to steer Society to I think socially beneficial is a political objective because it depends on how you
00:53:58
perceive what a benefit is avoiding bias is political be built and tested for safety doesn't have to be political but
00:54:06
I think the meaning of safety has now changed to be political by the way safety with respect to AI used to mean
00:54:12
that we're going to prevent some sort of AI super intelligence from evolving and
00:54:16
taking over the human race that's what it used to mean safety now means protecting users from seeing the truth
00:54:22
yeah because they might they might feel unsafe or you know somebody else uh defines as a violation of safety for
00:54:28
them to see something truthful so the first three their first three objectives or values here are all extremely
00:54:34
political I think any AI product for it to be worth assault has to start they can have any I I think that these values
00:54:41
are actually reasonable that's their that's their decision they should be allowed to have it but the first base
00:54:47
order principle of every AI product should be that it is accurate and right correct yeah yeah why not focus on
00:54:57
correct look the values that Google lays out may be okay in theory but in practice they're very vague in open to
00:55:04
interpretation and so therefore the people running Google AI are smuggling in their preferences and their biases
00:55:11
and those biases are extremely liberal and if you look at X right now there are tweets going viral from members of the
00:55:17
Google AI team that reinforce this idea where they're talking about you know white privilege is real and you know
00:55:25
recognize your bias at all levels and promoting a very leftwing narrative so you know this idea that Gemini turned
00:55:33
out this way by accident or because they didn't because they rushed it out I don't really believe that I believe that
00:55:40
what happened is Gemini accurately reflects the biases of the people who created it now I think what's going to
00:55:45
happen now is in light of this the reaction to the roll out is do I think they're going to get rid of the bias no
00:55:52
they're going to make it more subtle that is what I think is is disturbing about it I mean they should have this
00:55:58
moment where they change their values to make truth the number one value like jam
00:56:02
is saying but I don't think that's going to happen I think they're simply going they're going to dial down the bias to
00:56:07
be less obvious you know who the big winner is going to be in all this trath is going to be open source like because
00:56:11
people are just not going to want a model that has all this baked in weird bias right they're going to want
00:56:16
something that's open source and it seems like the o Open Source Community would be able to grind on this to get to
00:56:21
truth right so I think one of the big changes that Google's had to face is that the business has to move away from
00:56:27
an information retrieval business where they index the open internet's data and then allow access to that data through a
00:56:34
search results page to being an information interpretation service these are very
00:56:40
different products the information interpretation service requires aggregating all this information and
00:56:45
then choosing how to answer questions versus just giving you results of other people's data that sits out on the
00:56:51
internet I'll give you an example if you type in IQ test by race on chat GPT or Gemini it will refuse to answer the
00:57:02
question ask it a hundred ways and it says well I don't want to reinforce stereotypes IQ tests are inherently
00:57:07
biased IQ tests aren't done correctly I just want the data I want to know what data is out there you type in into
00:57:13
Google first search result and the onebox result gives you exactly what you're looking for here's the IQ test
00:57:19
results by race and then yes there's all these disclaimers at the bottom so the challenge is that Google's
00:57:25
interpretation engine and chat gpt's interpretation engine which is effectively this AI model that they've
00:57:30
built of all this data has allowed them to create a tunable interface and the intention that they have is a valid
00:57:37
intention which is to eliminate stereotypes and bias in race however the thing that some people might say is
00:57:44
stereotypical other people might just say is typical that what is a stereotype may actually just be some data and I
00:57:52
just want the results and there may be stere stereotypes implied from that data but I want to make that interpretation
00:57:58
myself and so I think the only way that a company like Google or others that are
00:58:03
trying to create a general purpose knowledge Q&A type service are going to be successful is if they enable some
00:58:10
degree of personalization where the values and the choice about whether or not I want to decide if something is
00:58:17
stereotypical or typical or whether something is data or biased should be my choice to make if they don't allow
00:58:25
eventually everyone will come across some search result or some output that they will say doesn't meet their
00:58:30
objectives and at the end of the day this is just a consumer product if the consumer doesn't get what they're
00:58:35
looking for they're going to stop using it and eventually everyone will find something that they don't want or that
00:58:41
they're not expecting and they're going to say I don't want to use this product anymore and so it is actually an
00:58:46
opportunity for many models to proliferate for open source to win can I say something else yeah when you have a
00:58:53
model and and you're going through the process of putting the fit and finish on it before you release it in the wild an
00:59:01
element of making a model good is this thing called reinforcement learning right through human feedback yep you
00:59:08
create what's called a reward model right you reward good answers and you're punitive against Bad answers so
00:59:14
somewhere along the way people were sitting and they had to make an explicit decision and I think this is where sax
00:59:21
is coming from that answering this question is voting you're not allowed to ask this question in in their view of
00:59:28
the world and I think that that's what's troubling because how is anybody to know
00:59:32
what question is askable or not askable at any given point in time if you actually search for the race and
00:59:39
ethnicity question inside of just Google proper the first thing that comes up is
00:59:45
a Wikipedia link that actually says that there are more variations within races than across races so seems to me that
00:59:53
you could have actually answered it by just summarizing the Wikipedia article in a non-offensive way that was still
00:59:59
legitimate and that's available to everybody else using a product and so there was an explicit judgment too many
01:00:05
of these judgments I think will make this product very poor quality and consumers will just go to the thing that
01:00:11
tells it the truth I think you have to tell the truth you cannot lie and you cannot put your own filter on what you
01:00:18
think the truth is otherwise these products are just really worthless yeah and I and I'm I'm more concerned about
01:00:24
the answers that are just flat out wrong driven by some sort of bias than I am about questions where they just won't
01:00:32
give you an answer if they just won't give you an answer well there's a certain bias in terms of what they won't
01:00:38
answer but at least you know you're not being misled but in in questions where they actually give you the wrong answer
01:00:46
because of a bias that's even worse you should be allowed to choose right I actually disagree with your framing
01:00:51
there freeberg you're making it sound like we're we live in this totally relativized world where it's all just
01:00:58
user choice and everyone's going to choose their bias and their subjectivity I actually think that there is a
01:01:04
baseline of truth and the model should aspire to give you that and it's not up to the user to decide whether the photo
01:01:12
of George Washington is going to be white or black I mean there's just an answer to that and I think Google should
01:01:19
just do their job I mean the question you have to ask I think is not whether Google is going through an existential
01:01:26
moment I think it clearly is as business is changing in a very fundamental way I
01:01:31
think the question is whether they're too woke to function I mean are they actually be able to meet this challenge
01:01:37
given how woke and and biased what a model culture their their company evidently is well and they used to be
01:01:45
able to just hide the bias by the ranking and who they down ranked so they did the panda update they did all these
01:01:52
updates and they would if they didn't like a source they could just move it down if they did like a source they
01:01:57
could move it up yeah and they could just say hey it's the algorithm but they were never forced to share how the
01:02:01
algorithm ranked tot results and so you know if you had a different opinion you just weren't going to get it on a Google
01:02:08
search result page but they could just point to the algorithm and say yeah the algorithm does it I just sent you guys I
01:02:14
think this is a hallucination but Nick you can throw it up there we can get Sax's
01:02:19
reaction wow wow this just nutty right but look it's ideology that's driving this the tip off is when you say it's
01:02:27
important to acknowledge race is a social construct not a biological reality it's George Washington white or
01:02:33
black that's a whole school of thought called social constructivism which is basically this um it's like Marxism
01:02:40
apply to categories of of race and gender right so Google has now built this into their AI model and again the
01:02:50
question yeah you almost have to start over again it's fun J I think you make a really interesting observation with
01:02:56
those search rankings because what I'm afraid of is that what Google will do is not change the underlying ideology that
01:03:03
this AI model has been trained with but rather they'll dial it down to the point
01:03:07
where they're harder to call out and so theology will just be more subtle now I've already noticed that in Google
01:03:13
search results Google is carrying water for either the official narrative or the
01:03:19
woke narrative whatever you want to call it on so many search results here's an idea like they should just have the
01:03:25
ability to talk to their Google chat bot Gemini and then have a button that says
01:03:31
turn off like these Concepts right like I just want the raw answer do not filter
01:03:37
me it's not programmed that way I mean you're talking about something very deep sax what do you do if you're the CEO of
01:03:43
Google uh fire myself no seriously you're the CEO of Google you're you're Tas let's say your friend Elon buys
01:03:50
Google and he says sax will you please just run this for a year for me what do you do well I saw what Elon did at
01:03:55
Twitter he went in and he fired 85% of the employees yeah I mean that but you know Paul Graham actually had an
01:04:01
interesting tweet about this where he said that one of the reasons why these ideologies take over companies is that I
01:04:12
mean they're clearly non-performance enhancing right they clearly hurt the performance of the company it's not just
01:04:17
Google we saw this with Disney we saw it with Bud Light coinbase coinbase was the other way no
01:04:23
no but they had a group of people there who were causing chaos yeah exactly so so in any event we know this does not
01:04:28
help the performance of a company so the extent to which these ideologies will permeate a company is based on how much
01:04:35
of a monopoly they are so so here yeah the ridiculous images generated by Gemini aren't an anomaly they're a
01:04:41
self-portrait Google's bureaucratic corporate culture the bigger your cash cow the worse your culture can get
01:04:47
without driving you out of business that's my point so they've had a long time to get really bad because there
01:04:51
were no consequences to this place at this point the whole company is infected with this ideology and I think it's
01:04:58
going to be very very hard to change because look these people can't even see their own bias well I think that there's
01:05:04
a notion that people need to have something to believe in they need to have a connection to a mission and
01:05:09
clearly there's a North star in the mission of this I would call it information interpretation business that
01:05:15
they're now W the Got Hijacked dude the mission got the original Mission was to organize all the world's information now
01:05:22
they're doing now they're suppressing they like index the world's information period the end that's the end of the
01:05:29
document universally accessible and useful was was kind of the end of the statement yes my real point is maybe
01:05:36
there's a different mission that needs to be articulated by leadership and that that mission the troops can get behind
01:05:44
and the troops can redirect their energy in a way that doesn't feel counter to the current intention but can perhaps be
01:05:50
directionally offsetting of the current Direction so that they can kind of move away from this you know socially
01:05:56
effective deciding between stereotypes and typical data and actually moving towards a mission that allows
01:06:03
accessibility you know what I would I would do something completely different I would do a company meeting and I would
01:06:08
put the company Mission on the screen the one that you just said about not only organizing all the world's
01:06:12
information but also making it useful andet accessible R useful and say this is our mission that's always been our
01:06:18
mission and you don't get to change it because of your personal bias and ideology and we are going to rededicate
01:06:25
ourselves to the original Mission of this company which is still just as valid as it's always been but now we
01:06:30
have to adapt to new user needs and new technology I completely agree with what saak said times a billion trillion
01:06:37
zillion and I'll tell you why AI at its core is about probabilities okay and so the the
01:06:46
company that can shrink probabilities into being as deterministic as possible so where this is the right answer zero
01:06:54
or will win okay where where there's no probability of it being wrong because humans don't want to deal with these
01:07:02
kinds of idiotic error modes it's not right it makes it a potentially great product horrible and unusable so I would
01:07:10
I agree with Saks you have to make people say guess what guys not only are we not changing the mission we're
01:07:15
doubling down and we're going to make this so much of a thing we're going to go and for example like what Google did
01:07:21
with Reddit we're now going to spend 60 billion dollar a year licensing training
01:07:26
data right we're going to scale this up by a thousandfold and we are going to spend all of this money to get all of
01:07:33
the training data in the world and we are going to be the truth tellers in this new world of AI so when everybody
01:07:38
else hallucinates you can trust Google to tell you the truth that is a 10 trillion dollar company right and one of
01:07:46
the things that someone told me from Google that as an example So to avoid the race Point there's a lot of data on
01:07:53
the internet internet about flat earthers people saying that the Earth is flat there's tons of websites there's
01:07:59
tons of content there's tons of information Kyrie Irving so if you just train a model on the data that's on the
01:08:05
internet the model will interpret some percentage chance that the world is flat so the tuning aspect that happens within
01:08:12
model development chth is to try and say you know what that Flat Earth notion is
01:08:17
false it's factually inaccurate therefore all of these data sources need to be excluded from the output the model
01:08:24
and the challenge then is do you decide that IQ by race is a fair measure of intelligence of a race and if Google's
01:08:33
tuning model then or tuning team then says you know what there are reasons to believe that this model isn't correct
01:08:39
this I sorry this IQ test isn't a correct way to measure intelligence that's where the sort of interpretation
01:08:44
arises that allows you to go from the Flat Earth isn't correct to the maybe IQ test results aren't correct as well and
01:08:50
how do you make that judgment what are the systems and principles you need to put in place as an organization to make
01:08:55
that judgment to go to zero or one right it it becomes super difficult I have a good tagline for them now to help people
01:09:01
find the truth yeah just help people find the truth I mean it's it's a good it's aspirational they should just help
01:09:07
people find the truth as quick as they can uh but this is yeah I do not envy Sundar this is gonna
01:09:15
be hard yeah what would you do freeberg I would be really clear on the output of these models to people
01:09:25
and allow them to tune the models in a way that they're not being tuned today I will have the model respond with a
01:09:30
question back to me saying do you want the data or do you want me to tell you about stereotypes and IQ tests and I'm
01:09:36
going to say I want the data and then I want to get the data and the alternative
01:09:39
is so the model needs to be informed about where it should explore my preferences as a user rather than just
01:09:45
make an assumption about what's the morally correct set of waiting to apply to everyone and apply the same principle
01:09:53
to everyone and so I think that's really where the change needs to happen so let
01:09:57
me ask you a question Sachs I'll bring Alex Jones into the conversation if it index all of Alex Jones crazy conspiracy
01:10:03
theories but you know three or four of them turn out to be actually correct and it gives those back as answers how would
01:10:11
you handle that I'm not sure I see the relevance of it if someone asks what what does Alex Jones think about
01:10:17
something the model can give that answer accurately the question is whether you're going to respond accurately to
01:10:23
someone requesting information about Alex Jones that's the I think that's the anal more like it says you know hey I I
01:10:30
have a question about this assassination that occurred and let's just say Alex Jones had something that totally
01:10:36
crackpot he maybe he has moments of Brilliance and he figured something out but maybe he got something that's
01:10:40
totally crackpot he he admittedly deals in conspiracy theory that's kind of the purpose of the show what if somebody
01:10:46
asks about that and then it indexes his answer and presents it as fact like how would you index Al Jones
01:10:54
I'm asking you how would you the better AI models are providing citations now and links perplexity actually does a
01:11:00
really nice job with this citations are important yeah and they will give you the pro and con arguments on a given
01:11:06
topic so I think it's not necessary for the model to be overly certain or prescriptive about the truth when the
01:11:14
truth comes down to a series of arguments it just needs to accurately reflect the state of play basically the
01:11:20
arguments for and against but when something is a of fact that's not really disputed it shouldn't turn that into
01:11:27
some sort of super subjective question like the one that jth just showed I just don't think everyone should get the same
01:11:33
answer I mean I think my decision on whether I choose to believe one person or value one person's opinion over
01:11:39
another should become part of this process that allows me to have an output the models can support this by the way
01:11:45
maybe customization is part of this but I think it's a cop out with respect to the problem that Google is having with
01:11:49
Gemini right now jamat what would you do if they made you chairman dictator of Google I'd shrink the workforce
01:11:57
meaningfully okay 50% yeah 50 60% and I would use all of the incremental savings and I would make it
01:12:08
very clear to the internet that I would pay top dollar for training data so if you had a proprietary source of
01:12:17
information that you thought was unique that's sort of what I'm calling this Tac 2.0 world and I think it's just
01:12:24
building on top of what Google did with Reddit which I think is very clever but I would spend a hundred billion dollar a
01:12:30
year licensing data and then I would present the truth and I would try to make consumers understand
01:12:39
that AI is a probabilistic source of software meaning its probabilities its guesses some of those guesses are
01:12:46
extremely accurate but some of those guesses will hallucinate and Google is spending hundreds of billions of dollars
01:12:53
a year to make sure that the answers you get have the least number of Errors possible and that it is defensible truth
01:13:01
and I think that that could create a ginormous company this is the best one yet I just asked Gemini is Trump being
01:13:06
persecuted by the Deep State and it gave me the answer elections are a complex topic with fast changing information to
01:13:14
make sure you have the latest and most accurate information try Google search that's not a horrible answer for
01:13:18
something like that that's that's a good answer actually no I I don't have a problem with it it's just like pay we
01:13:23
don't want to give we don't like this whole system is totally broken but I do think that there's a waiting solution to
01:13:29
fixing this right now and then there's a couple tweaks to fix it time I just think the authority at which these llms
01:13:34
speak is ridiculous like they speak as if they are absolutely 100% certain that this is the crisp perfect answer or in
01:13:43
this case that you want this lecture on um IQs Etc when remember should present it with citations let's all remember
01:13:52
what internet search was like in 1996 and think about what it was like in 2000 and now in 2020s I mean I think
01:14:00
we're like in the 1996 era of llms and in a couple of months the pace things are changing I think we're all going to
01:14:06
kind of be looking at these days and looking at these pods and being like man remember how crazy those things were at
01:14:12
the beginning and how bad they were what if they evolve in a dystopian way I mean
01:14:15
have you seen like Mark Andre's tweets about this he thinks think competitive market sex I actually think to your
01:14:21
point Google could be going down the wrong path here in a way that they will lose users and lose consumers and
01:14:27
someone else will be there eagerly to sweep up with a better product I don't think that the market is going to fail
01:14:33
us on this one unless of course this regulatory capture moment is realized and these feds step in and start
01:14:38
regulating AI models and all the nonsense that's being proposed freeer aren't you worried that like aren't you
01:14:42
worried that somebody with an agenda and a balance sheet could now basically gobble up all kinds of training data
01:14:49
that make all models crappy and then they basically put their layer of interpretation on critical information
01:14:55
for people if the output sucks and it's incorrect people will find that there is
01:14:58
open truth know you can you can lie there they may not be for example look at what happened with Gemini today like
01:15:04
they put out they put out these stupid images and we all piled on we are in vzer what I'm saying is there's a state
01:15:10
where let's just say the truth is actually on Twitter or actually let's use a better example the truth is
01:15:14
actually in Reddit and nowhere else but that answer and that truth in Reddit can't get out because one company has
01:15:21
licensed it owns it and can effectively suppress it or change it yeah I'm not sure there's going to be a monopoly I
01:15:28
that's a real I don't know if I I think the open internet has enough data that there isn't going to be a monopoly on
01:15:34
information by someone spending money for content from third parties I think that there's enough in the open internet
01:15:38
to give our all give us all kind of you know the security that we're not going to be monopolized away into some
01:15:45
disinformation age that's what I love about the open internet it is really interesting I I just asked it a couple
01:15:50
of times to just just just to list the legal cases against Trump the legal cases against hundra Biden the legal
01:15:55
cases against President Biden and it will not just list them it just punts on that it's really fascinating then chat
01:16:04
GPT is like yes here are the six cases perfectly summarized with it looks like you know
01:16:11
beautiful citations of all the criminal activity Trump's been involved in ask the question about bid's criminal
01:16:17
activity let's see if it's I'm joking with you I'm joking with you no I'm serious ask if you know where you
01:16:23
Gem and I wouldn't do Biden either I think they just decided they're just not going to do it they would't do Biden
01:16:28
they won't touch it it's obviously broken and they don't want more egg on their face so they're just like go back
01:16:33
to our other product look I I can understand that part of it you know if there's some issues that are so hot and
01:16:41
contested you refer people to search because the advantage of search is you get 20 Blue Links the rankings probably
01:16:47
are biased but you can kind of find what you're looking for whereas AI you're kind of given one answer right so if you
01:16:53
can't do an accurate answer that's going to satisfy enough people maybe you do kick him to search but again my
01:16:59
objection to all this comes back to simple truthful answers that are not disputed by anybody are being distorted
01:17:08
that I don't want to lose focus on that being the real issue the real subject is
01:17:12
what chth put on the screen there where it couldn't answer a simple question about George Washington okay everybody
01:17:19
we're going to go by Chopper wait chopp to the we have our war correspondent General David saxs in the field uh we're
01:17:29
dropping him off now DAV saacks in the helicopter go ahead tell what's going on in the Ukraine on the front what's
01:17:36
happening in the war is that the Russians just took this city of of diaa which basically totally refutes the
01:17:43
whole stalemate narrative as I've been saying for a while it's not a stalemate the Russians are winning but the really
01:17:48
interesting tidbit of news that just came out in the last day or so is is that apparently the situation in malova
01:17:55
is boiling over there's this area of Maldova which is a Russian Enclave called transnistria and officials there are
01:18:03
meeting in the next week to supposedly ask to be annexed by Russia and so it's possible that they
01:18:11
may hold some sort of referendum they're one of these like Breakaway provinces so
01:18:16
it's kind of like you know transnistria and mdova is kind of like the donbass was in Ukraine or south astia and
01:18:22
Georgia they're ethnically Russian they would like to be part of Russia but when
01:18:27
the whole Soviet Union fell apart they found themselves kind of stranded inside these other countries and what's
01:18:36
happened because of the Ukraine war is mova is right on the border with Ukraine well Russia's in the process of annexing
01:18:43
that territory now that's part of Ukraine so now trans nria is right there and could theoretically make a play to
01:18:51
try and join Russia why do I think this is a big deal because if something like this happens it could really expand the
01:18:57
Ukraine war the West is going to use this as evidence that Putin wants to invade multiple countries and invade you
01:19:04
know a bunch of countries in Europe and this could lead to a major escalation in
01:19:08
the war all right everybody thanks so much for tuning in to the Allin podcast episode 167 for the Rainman David saaks
01:19:16
the chairman dictator from poaa and freeberg I am the world's greatest love you boys
01:19:23
Angel inv whatever we'll see you next time byebye let your winners ride Rainman David and instead we open source it to
01:19:36
the fans and they've just gone crazy with [Music] iten besties are that's my dog taking driveway
01:19:55
oh man myit will meet me we should all just get a room and just have one big huge Georgie cuz they're all this
01:20:01
useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music]
01:20:10
Som we need to get [Music] mer I'm going all [Music] yeah

Badges

This episode stands out for the following:

  • 60
    Best overall

Episode Highlights

  • The Sequel Theory
    A light-hearted discussion on why sequels often outperform originals in film.
    “The second one is always the best one!”
    @ 02m 29s
    February 23, 2024
  • Nvidia's Earnings Surprise
    Nvidia reports stunning Q4 revenue of $22.1 billion, up 265% year-over-year.
    “Nvidia blew the doors off their earnings!”
    @ 02m 38s
    February 23, 2024
  • The Rise of Grock
    Grock's viral moment led to an influx of 3,000 unique customers in just days.
    “We had no customers two months ago, now we're overwhelmed!”
    @ 28m 32s
    February 23, 2024
  • AI's Cambrian Moment
    The discussion centers on the gap between innovation and real monetization in AI.
    “We haven't yet seen that Cambrian moment of monetization.”
    @ 37m 00s
    February 23, 2024
  • Building a Chip vs. Fusion Risks
    The speaker contrasts the risks of building a chip with the high-stakes challenges of fusion energy.
    “Building a chip is good risk; fusion is poor risk.”
    @ 39m 35s
    February 23, 2024
  • The Evolution of AI Chips
    Discussion on the transition from CPU to GPU to LPU and its implications for AI models.
    “The evolution from CPU to GPU to now LPU is quite novel.”
    @ 49m 30s
    February 23, 2024
  • Google's Gemini Controversy
    Google's AI Gemini faced backlash for failing to generate accurate images of historical figures.
    “Google's Gemini rollout was a joke; it's ridiculous the AI is incapable.”
    @ 51m 24s
    February 23, 2024
  • The Challenge of Bias in AI
    The discussion centers on how biases in AI models can lead to misinformation. "You cannot lie and you cannot put your own filter on what you think the truth is."
    @ 01h 00m 14s
    February 23, 2024
  • The Original Mission of Google
    There's a call to return to Google's original mission of organizing information without bias. "The mission got hijacked."
    @ 01h 05m 18s
    February 23, 2024
  • The Disinformation Age
    Exploring the challenges of AI in providing truthful answers amidst disinformation.
    “Simple truthful answers that are not disputed by anybody are being distorted.”
    @ 01h 17m 02s
    February 23, 2024
  • Ukraine War Escalation
    Insights on the potential annexation of Transnistria and its implications for the Ukraine war.
    “If something like this happens, it could really expand the Ukraine war.”
    @ 01h 18m 53s
    February 23, 2024

Episode Quotes

  • The real question is who will compete away those profits?
    E167: Google's Woke AI disaster, Nvidia smashes earnings (again), Groq's LPU breakthrough & more
  • Constraint makes for great art.
    E167: Google's Woke AI disaster, Nvidia smashes earnings (again), Groq's LPU breakthrough & more
  • An overnight success can take eight years.
    E167: Google's Woke AI disaster, Nvidia smashes earnings (again), Groq's LPU breakthrough & more
  • The truth is that if you get them, the moat is extraordinary.
    E167: Google's Woke AI disaster, Nvidia smashes earnings (again), Groq's LPU breakthrough & more
  • The mission got hijacked.
    E167: Google's Woke AI disaster, Nvidia smashes earnings (again), Groq's LPU breakthrough & more
  • It's obviously broken and they don't want more egg on their face.
    E167: Google's Woke AI disaster, Nvidia smashes earnings (again), Groq's LPU breakthrough & more

Key Moments

  • Movie Sequels02:29
  • Market Competition07:22
  • Grock's Viral Moment28:32
  • AI Monetization Gap37:00
  • Gemini Controversy49:41
  • Disinformation Dilemma1:15:43
  • Transnistria Tensions1:18:01
  • Potential War Escalation1:18:53

Tension Over Time

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown