All-In PodcastE147: TED goes woke, Canada's Nazi blunder, AI adds vision, plus: who owns OpenAI?
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
155 min read · 30,578 words- 0:00 – 1:12
Bestie intros with Coleman Hughes
- JCJason Calacanis
Hey, Coleman. How's it going?
- CHColeman Hughes
Hey, Coleman. Welcome to the show.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
You guys doing?
- JCJason Calacanis
Hey. How's it going?
- CHColeman Hughes
It's a real pleasure.
- JCJason Calacanis
Have you ever heard of this show? (laughs)
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah, I have. I- I'm actually a fan. My girlfriend introduced me to the show, like, two years ago, and I've been-
- JCJason Calacanis
Oh, nice.
- CHColeman Hughes
... a fan ever since.
- JCJason Calacanis
Great to meet you.
- CHColeman Hughes
And, uh, apparently, like many women, she has, like, a... she has a legit concerning obsession with sax, uh, but also trumps.
- JCJason Calacanis
No! Don't say it!
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- CHColeman Hughes
(laughs)
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Gosh.
- JCJason Calacanis
Oh my god. What on earth? Those sax fans- Me and Guevara are tilted. Those sax fans are crazy. End the episode. End the episode. Shout out, Letty. Shout out, Edith.
- CHColeman Hughes
Oh my god. Oh my god.
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- CHColeman Hughes
Jesus.
- JCJason Calacanis
Horrible.
- CHColeman Hughes
Way to go, Coleman.
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- CHColeman Hughes
You would fit right in here. All right, here we go.
- JCJason Calacanis
All right. (laughs)
- CHColeman Hughes
Let me... Let me just... This here is your cold open, folks.
- JCJason Calacanis
I'm sorry. I- I need... Let me just psychologically explore this before we get into the real substance of it. W- why does she like him so much? I don't understand this. (laughs)
- CHColeman Hughes
By the way, I think you guys-
- JCJason Calacanis
What is-
- CHColeman Hughes
... missed the second half of my statement. I said sax and Tremont.
- 1:12 – 15:11
Coleman's experience with TED, Understanding TED's ideological shift
- DSDavid Sacks
- CHColeman Hughes
All right, everybody. Welcome back to the All-In Podcast. We have a very full docket today. I thought we'd start with something pretty crazy. There was a really weird, uh, moment last week. TED threw one of its speakers under the bus, so we decided to have him on to talk about the experience. This is the second time they've done it, at least. They did it to Sarah Silverman for doing comedy at TED, because people at TED are a bunch of virtue signaling lunatics, including some of my friends (laughs) who go. But Coleman Hughes, uh, if you don't know him, is a writer and podcaster. He has a, a, a pretty popular podcast called Conversations with Coleman, and he did a talk, which I encourage everybody to watch, at TED, and it's titled A Case for Color Blindness. Uh, we all watched it. It's a very powerful talk, and something weird happened. Coleman, welcome to the program, and, um, maybe you could just share with the audience how you wound up speaking at TED, what the content, uh, of your talk was, briefly, and then the bizarre reaction when they tried to ban and kill your talk post you giving it. Yeah, so first, really glad to be on, guys. I'm a fan of the pod. So I'll give the short version here. If you want the long version, you can go to the Free Press, where I wrote a big, uh, summary of, of what happened there. Basically, what happened is Chris Anderson invited me to give a TED talk, and, uh, I chose the subject of my upcoming book, which is coming out in February, called The End of Race Politics, and the argument is just essentially color blindness. This is the idea that you want to treat people without regard to race, both in your personal lives and in our public policy, and wherever we have policies that are meant to collect and help the most disadvantaged, we s- we should preferentially use class as a variable rather than race. That's, that's my talk in a nutshell. So, I prepared the talk with the TED team. I got their feedback, edited, curated, et cetera. Got up there in April, gave the talk. 95% of the people in the audience, it was quite re- well received. Whether or not they agreed with every point, it was... they, uh, well within the bounds of acceptable discourse. There was a very small minority on stage, I could see, that was physically upset by my talk. On stage? Now, I, I could see this on stage, yeah, in the moment, but, um, I mean, I'm talking five people in a crowd of almost 2,000. So, I expected that because, you know, color blindness is not in vogue today on, on the left, uh, uh, on, amongst progressives. It's really the idea non grata. And so I was expecting to field some pushback, and I, I talked to some critics and so forth, but what happened is what began as just a few people upset began to spiral into a kind of internal staff meltdown at TED. So, this group called Black@TED asked to speak with me. I agreed, and then they said, "Actually, we don't want to talk to you," and they are an employee group at TED. After the conference, Chris emailed me and said, "Look, I'm getting, um, I'm getting a lot of blowback here internally. There are people saying we shouldn't release your talk at all." And then, over the course of the next month, they came up with a variety of sort of creative solutions about how to release my talk in a way that would appease the woke staffers that really didn't want it to be released at all. And at this point, I had to start kinda sticking up for myself. So first, they wanted to attach, uh, like, a, a debate to the end of my talk and release it as one video, which I felt would really send the wrong message. Hmm. It would send the message that, like, this idea can't be heard without the opposing perspective. Did they tell you what was problematic about your talk? No.
- JCJason Calacanis
To use a woke term.
- CHColeman Hughes
Well-
- JCJason Calacanis
Like, what was the problem with the talk?
- CHColeman Hughes
Well, there were no factual problems. It passed the fact-checking team. There were, there were no substantive issues with the talk. The problem was that it upset-
- JCJason Calacanis
You had the wrong opinion.
- CHColeman Hughes
... the staff. It upset the staff. That was the language that was used. It upset certain people in the staff.
- JCJason Calacanis
Got it. And, and those people are all Black?
- CHColeman Hughes
Um, probably most were. Uh, you know, I, I, I tried to actually have face-to-face conversations with, uh, some of these folks. I only got to, to, uh, talk to one woman, so presumably, many of them were Black, but po- prop- possibly not all.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay. What was the... what did you perceive was the problem with your talk, or what they perceived the problem with your talk is?
- CHColeman Hughes
So, the, uh, the last day of the TED conference, they have a town hall. People from the audience come and give feedback. The town hall opened with two people denouncing my talk back to back. The first said that it was racist and dangerous and irresponsible, and the second guy, who's actually a guy I knew...... he said that I was willing to have a slide back into the days of separate but equal, which was totally the opposite of my talk and I, I implore anyone to just go online and watch it. Go on YouTube, decide for yourself whether these criticisms bear any resemblance to, to reality. But that was the idea, that the talk is racist, that, you know, I'm- I'm some kind of pro-Jim Crow person. It was really, really deranged kind of criticisms.
- DSDavid Sacks
Your- your talk is up on TED's website and on YouTube, right? But-
- CHColeman Hughes
Correct.
- DSDavid Sacks
... part of the controversy was that the number of views seemed to be pretty suppressed. Was that discussed with Chris when you talked with him, or do you have a point of view on the suppression of the promotion of the video, even though they put it out there, and how that's affected, you know, how widespread the video has been made available to folks?
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah, so i- in- in my final call with Chris, he sort of presented this idea about how to release it, and he sold it to me as a way to amplify my talk, which, uh, I think was kind of some spin. He was in a tough position, caught between me and his employees. We ultimately decided they would release the talk, and then two weeks later, they'd release a debate between myself and this guy, Jamelle Bouie, who was a New York Times columnist. Um, so the talk came out on TED website, the debate came out, and I kind of mentally, uh, had forgotten about the whole situation until Tim Urban, who is a popular blogger, who's actually given the-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, Wayne Mabini.
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah. The, he gave them-
- JCJason Calacanis
He spoke at All-In Summit last year, yeah.
- CHColeman Hughes
Oh, that's great, yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yes.
- CHColeman Hughes
Tim is great. He- he's also given the most viewed TED Talk of all time on YouTube. Tim noticed that my talk just had a really absurdly low view count, like an implausibly low view count on- on TED's website. In mid-August, he tweeted this, and that he believed they were intentionally under-promoting my talks, so I checked.
- JCJason Calacanis
They sandbagged you, yeah, yeah.
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah. I checked and all of the, of the five talks surrounding mine, they all had between, you know, 450,000 views and 800,000 views. That was the full range. Mine had 73,000, right? So 16% of the low end of the range of all the talks released around mine. So when that happened, I- I felt that TED had kind of reneged on its end of our bargain, and that's when, um, Bari Weiss got wind of it and I- I went public.
- DSDavid Sacks
Just- just to be clear, you're saying that the condition for releasing your v- your TED talk, the bargain you struck with Chris, was that you would do a debate with someone in a separate video, and that you had to do the debate in order to have your TED talk released?
- CHColeman Hughes
Yes.
- DSDavid Sacks
Wow.
- CHColeman Hughes
So yeah, that- that's what, that- that was the end of the negotiation.
- DSDavid Sacks
Wow.
- CHColeman Hughes
The beginning of the negotiation was trying to get me to release those things as one video, and I said, "Hell no." And then next, we're- we're gonna release them as separate videos on the same day. I said, "Hell no," 'cause that dilutes it, and then we agreed on a two-week separation between the two.
- 15:11 – 44:01
Focusing on class instead of race when enacting policies, reaction to Coleman's talk, institutional takeovers
- CHColeman Hughes
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Can we actually talk about that talk for a second, Colman?
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, let's go into this. Colman, what- what was your take on it, Chamath? Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I'll just make a statement, which is, I think that your talk was superb. And just to give you my journey, as a kid that grew up as a refugee on welfare and then to get through every single sort of strata of society, I think when I look back, the biggest thing that I struggled with was always confusing when I felt mistreated, I would always direct it at racism. It would be my sort of safety blanket. And I would always look at other people as doing that. And it was only until I met my wife, and spending years and years talking about it, where I was able to disarm this and see that out of 100 interactions, a lot of the time, just people are having a bad day. Some other percentage of the time, people are actually just being very classist. Because racism, it turns out, is like a pretty severe perversion, and it's really crazy when you actually see it play out. And for me, had I had a framework, if I had your talk when I was in my 20s and 30s, I would have spared myself a lot of self-sabotage. Because what that does is when you feel these things and you don't have a framework to interpret it or to tolerate the anxiety, I would internalize that anxiety, and I was a less productive person. And so if the goal was for me, on behalf of my family or on behalf of people like me, to make it, I would have gotten there much faster had I not gotten in my own way. And when I watched your talk, it was incredibly validating for the work that I had done, and I had thought to myself, "Man, if I had had him, if he had made that for me when I was 20 years old, amazing. I would have, I could have done so much more." Because when I think about some of the mistakes I made, they were rooted in this specific issue that you touched. So, I just want to say thank you. And I also want to say that to the extent other people are interested and feel like that, you should really listen to what you had to say because I thought it was elegantly addressed. I was a huge, huge, huge fan of what you had to say, and I thought it was extremely well done. And especially for someone as young as you, I thought it was just amazing.
- JCJason Calacanis
Colman, let me ask you, what was the reaction from people of color, people who've experienced racism, perhaps, to your talk? 'Cause you must have gotten a tremendous amount, and I, and I did look at the comments. To TED's credit, the comments are open. So, what was the reaction, you know, to, to, to people like Chamath or, or yourself, people of color who maybe who have experienced racism on some regular basis, and this idea of having colorblindness when, when we're, um, you know, operating as a society and that goal? Which, I'll just point out when I listened to your talk, seems to be exactly what Martin Luther King said. So, go ahead.
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah, it is. So, there's th- the stereotype of the reaction is that white people like my talk and people of color don't.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yes.
- CHColeman Hughes
So that's the stereotype that my critics would like to believe is the reality because then they don't have to confront my arguments.... the reality is that even at the TED Conference, which is a progressive space, many, many people of color, uh, Black people, South Asian people, came up to me saying, "That was an excellent talk for this, that, and the third reason." And I think, uh, uh, probably for r- for reasons, uh, similar to what you were saying, Chamath, I, I have found that oftentimes immigrants of color really resonate with my message. Uh, I have many, for instance, Jamaican friends that, you know, they view themselves as Jamaican. They come to America and our conversation about race doesn't make very much sense to them. Right?
- JCJason Calacanis
Why?
- CHColeman Hughes
It doesn't make sense f- for instance, to strongly feel that your racial identity is an aspect of your core inner self, that you ought to judge people on the basis of their racial identity, that, you know, i- if you're a White person that, you know, you don't have a valid perspective to bear on a conversation or you have to, you know, preface every belief by saying, "Well, I'm a, I'm a dumb White guy, what do I know?" This kind of routine that we've gotten into in spaces rather than just confronting each other as, "Hey, uh, you know, I'm Coleman, you're Chamath, you're David," et cetera. Let's all talk about this from the point of view of epistemic equals and have conversations. And yeah, you, you're gonna know about stuff I haven't known because of your individual life story. I'm gonna, I'm gonna have experienced stuff that you haven't. We may have even experienced racial discrimination. We may, we may have stories, stories to tell, but we are starting out fundamentally from the framework of all being human beings that can talk to each other and, you know, we, we don't have to sort of play act th- these racial roles that have become increasingly in vogue in woke spaces, and a lot of people resonate with that. And, and, and, and what's more, you know, y- you've gotten this thing o- on the left, y- you, you've gotten media institutions that have been taken in, in by this, so you, you see New York Times op-eds like one, I think, five years ago that's, "Can my children be friends with White people?" Right? You've got Robin DiAngelo in her book saying things like, "A White person shouldn't cry around a Black person because it triggers us." It's like, this is so the opposite of what it actually feels like to hang out with an interracial and tight-knit group of friends. Your race, racial identity recedes in importance the more you get to know people. And I think people in interracial relationships know this, people with interracial kids know this. So my message actually resonat- resonates with people of, of, of all colors.
- JCJason Calacanis
That, I think, was one of the most poignant parts of it. Sacks, um, you got to watch the talk as well, I believe. So, your thoughts on maybe institutions rotting from the inside and, uh, maybe even one that's supposed to support ideas, ideas that matter, clearly this is an idea that matters, I'm curious what your thoughts, Sacks.
- DSDavid Sacks
J Cal, I just, I just wanna, I wanna, I wanna not use the term rotting 'cause I think your, your point is that it's not good, and I don't think that's necessarily the case because the point is there's institutional capture that's happened and that institutional capture is almost like a democratic process that we're seeing at companies, that we're seeing at government agencies, and that we're seeing in private and non-profit institutions that the individuals that are employed, uh, are capturing the organization's ideals. Obviously we'll still ...
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, that's what I mean-
- DSDavid Sacks
... push back by ...
- JCJason Calacanis
... by rotting. I mean, it's like it's-
- DSDavid Sacks
But I don't know if that's nece-
- JCJason Calacanis
It was such a storied institution, you know, in terms of it was a brave institution under Ricky Sol Warmun, you know?
- DSDavid Sacks
I get it, but I think, I think rotting is such a derogatory term in the sense that-
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay.
- DSDavid Sacks
... some of these institutions evolve to be different, but-
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay.
- DSDavid Sacks
... uh, uh, I, I ... And that's the only thing I, I just ... I, I don't wanna make it ... Yeah.
- JCJason Calacanis
Sacks, so rotting or is it being taken over, uh, from the inside out, from the bottom up? What are your thoughts?
- DFDavid Friedberg
I think captured is a pretty good word to use if we ever use that word. Let's remember, TED's original mission represented in their tagline was ideas worth spreading.
- JCJason Calacanis
Mm.
- DFDavid Friedberg
So they're supposed to be a forum for interesting worthy ideas that they're gonna spread. And here, they're doing the opposite. They're basically sandbagging the views and they didn't wanna publish it at all. And then when they did agree to publish it, they basically subjected that to a new requirement of putting a rebuttal right by it. So, this is not living up to their original mission. Now, why did this happen? I wanna go to Chris Anderson's response here. He wrote this long post on X which is too long to read here. It's a really sort of weasely, mealy-mouthed defense of what they did. A lot of both sides type language. I think there's really only one or two sentences that are relevant in terms of explaining this whole thing. What he says is that, "Many people have been genuinely hurt and offended by what they heard you say." So he's addressing this to Coleman. "This is not what we dream of when we post our talks." So, I think this is really the key intellectual mistake that Chris Anderson's making is that he believes that people can be genuinely hurt by encountering well-reasoned ideas they disagree with.
- JCJason Calacanis
Hm.
- DFDavid Friedberg
I think the way that the marketplace of ideas is supposed to work is that when you encounter an idea you disagree with, you formulate an equally well thought out response and you engage in intellectual discourse and debate.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, maybe get curious. Yeah, get curious about it.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Exactly. But, you know, I think these words are really significant because he's saying not just that the objectors here were offended, he was saying that they were hurt, genuinely hurt. So he's buying into this idea that hearing ideas you disagree with is somehow a threat to your safety.
- 44:01 – 1:04:21
"When Virtue Signalling Goes Wrong": Canadian parliament cheers for a Nazi
- DSDavid Sacks
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
All right, listen. It's a new segment we have here, when virtue signaling goes wrong. If you missed it, the Canadian Parliament gave a standing ovation to a Nazi. Not like a new Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer, uh, one of the few actual Nazis still alive. Uh, here we see, uh, just the crowd going wild. Uh, last Friday, uh, Ukrainian's President Zelenskyy gave a speech at the Canadian House of Commons, and, uh, Canadian House Speaker Anthony Rota introduced a 98-year-old, Yaroslav Hunka, as a Ukrainian war hero. And then the Canadian Parliament proceeded to give him a standing ovation and it, uh, turns out that this person first fought for the first Ukrainian division in World War II. That unit was also known (laughs) as the Waffen-SS Galicia division, if I'm pronouncing that corre- correctly, uh, which was a voluntary unit under Nazi command. So the Canadian Parliament apparently gave a standing ovation to Nazis. They've apologized for this and said it was a mistake. Chamath, I don't know if you got to see this. You're Canadian, uh, so your thoughts on what we've seen here? I mean, I'll give you my feedback as somebody who, when I was, you know, in Canada, was a pretty ardent liberal. I grew up in a liberal household. My father canvassed religiously for the liberals, and I think that at some point after I moved to the United States, they took wokeism, which I think, look, at some level was rooted in something very important, which was how do you get marginalized folks to be seen? But unfortunately along the way just got perverted by folks that just use it as a cudgel to censor people, to make other people feel guilty, to judge people. And so, I think we all could agree that it's kind of become this virus. The thing that it masks are all of these other really bad things that come along with it. And one of them in Canada, which Justin Trudeau is case zero of, is also when nepotism goes bad. His father was an incredible, exemplary prime minister in Canada. Set the benchmark on all dimensions, was just incredible. Cool, composed, moved the country forward, brought the country together. And then fast-forward 25 or 30 years in a vacuum of leadership, what basically happened, we pick this guy who was up until that point a substitute teacher, and the other claim to fame was appearing twice in brownface. Okay, so making fun of people like me. And elected him prime minister. And what happened was he became the sort of like virtue signaler in chief of this very important G8 country. And it was all kind of bumbling along, and in the absence of anybody else that was able to step up and offer an alternative, he got reelected, barely, but he did. Then these things happened in the last year, and when you look through that prism is how you can see what happens if a country doesn't draw a line and finally take a stand. So, we had this guy who was ill-qualified and way over his head, who shouldn't have been in this role as prime minister get put in that position. When finally a group of people in Canada pushed back, in this case the truckers, he and the entire government explicitly labeled them as Nazis, right? And said these people need to be put down and completely dismantled. It didn't seem like it was right. We called that out. We all talked about it and we said, "This doesn't smell right on the surface. These are really, seems like good, earnest people that are just trying to make a point and are not being heard." Then you have this thing three weeks ago to two or three weeks ago where he actually had a speech in front of the entire Parliament where he accused the largest democracy in the world, India in this case, of coming into Canad- Canadian soil and assassinating a Canadian citizen, which is an enormous allegation to levy. And what was important to know about that allegation was that it was done without the explicit vocal support of either Britain or the United Na- uh, United States, which would be the two most natural allies that Canada would present that information to. And instead of doing it behind a closed door to Modi, he did it on live stage like it was like some theatrical performance.... then India follows up and says, "Um, this guy's kind of known to be a little bit of a drug addict and was on a two-day bender," and the Indian drug dogs smelled a bunch of cocaine on the plane. Then they have this thing for Vladimir Zelensky where everybody was there to sort of, like, virtue signal this war, and then they actually invited a Nazi and then gave him a standing ovation. So when you, when you put it all together, I think what it shows is just a lack of professionalism, which also belies just a lack of experience and capability. And so I think what it shows is just, like, isn't this enough? Like, a- are, have we not seen enough of these examples where you can actually start to ask yourself, "Why can't we just get really good, competent people to do these jobs? Why can't we actually embrace free speech and all of what it means and explore that? Why can't we have people that don't need to theatrically perform on stage?" Because eventually, you're gonna make these mistakes and you're gonna embarrass your entire country, and then you're gonna imperil relations with some really important allies. And I think this is a moment in time where all of those things need to be questioned-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... and put on the table.
- JCJason Calacanis
You're clearly questioning his competence here because to not have the care to check who is going to speak in front of Parliament is crazy. And just to make it super clear, the Speaker that invited Hunka, that was Anthony Rota, resigned on Tuesday. And Trudeau says Rota, the person who invited the Nazi, (laughs) uh, is solely responsible.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, then he blamed Russian misinformation on top of that. But Jason, you don't, you don't... The prime minister, who is the most important politician in the country, doesn't show up some place unless the office knows who else is gonna be there. He knew that Zelensky was gonna be there. He would've known who the guest list was.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah. No, and, and clearly he assumed-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So this was, this was just scapegoating to cover it up. But, but the bigger issue is just-
- JCJason Calacanis
Well, but, uh, to be clear, you're not saying that they invited a Nazi on purpose and cheered for a Nazi on purpose, right? Nobody's saying that. You're saying there's a lack of care here, and it's-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's a lack of competence.
- JCJason Calacanis
... unforgivable.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's a lack of competence.
- JCJason Calacanis
Lack of competence. Yeah, yeah, just so we're clear. Yeah. Okay.
- DFDavid Friedberg
So I agree with all of that. I think there's also two other dimensions to this, a backstory if you will. I think first, in terms of how does a mistake like this happen, I think it was Orwell who said that, "He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future." The present is Ukraine. It is the current thing. Everybody has to cheer for Ukraine and for the killing of Russians. The reason why Hunka was cheered with a standing ovation is because they said that he fought Russians. He was a war hero who fought Russians. All you have to do is do a little bit of math to realize the guy's 98 years old. When was there a war against Russia? Who could he possibly have been fighting for? But to the extent people did that, they sort of airbrushed it or whitewashed history. So, the present controls the past s- to ensure a, a vision of the future, which Trudeau laid out in this speech he gave recently where he became so ardent in his support for Ukraine, he was almost yelling at the podium saying that Canada had to make all these economic sacrifices to win the war. So, th- that's point number one is, I think that the woke mind virus almost requires this whitewashing of the past, but it's done for a specific purpose, which is to control the future. Now-
- JCJason Calacanis
But they're not whitewashing the past if it was a mistake. That intellectually doesn't make sense.
- DFDavid Friedberg
No, what they did is, what they're saying is-
- JCJason Calacanis
If I'm understanding you correctly, yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... the present-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... is that we hate Russia so much that we're gonna cheer for anybody who killed Russians.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay, I understand your point. But you're, you're agreeing that they did not knowingly put a Nazi on there, so it was a mistake. Got it. Okay.
- DFDavid Friedberg
I don't think they, they knowingly did it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay. Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
It was a huge debacle and embarrassing spectacle.
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah. Yeah, okay.
- DFDavid Friedberg
But I think that nobody asked any questions about the past because the present overrides it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay, sure.
- DFDavid Friedberg
The present need to support the current thing overrides, like, any sort of examination-
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, the partisanship. Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... of what has happened his- historically.
- 1:04:21 – 1:12:39
OpenAI's big week, informed speculation on Sam Altman's actual ownership of OpenAI
- JCJason Calacanis
All right, there's a bunch of news about OpenAI this week. Just very quickly, OpenAI is in advanced talks, according to the Financial Times, with Jony Ive of iPhone fame, Steve Jobs' long-term collaborator, and Masa Yoshi son of SoftBank, to raise more than $1 billion to build the iPhone of AI. And so the idea would be, uh, Jony Ive's got a design firm called Love From, and they would help OpenAI design their first consumer device. Via the FT sources, Financial Times that is, Altman and Ive have been, uh, having brainstorming sessions in Ive's San Francisco studio about what a consumer product centered around OpenAI would look like. It's very early stages. And Son has pitched a role for Arm in the development, uh, his chip company that he recently took public. They also, uh, discussed, Masa and Altman, uh, creating a company that would draw on talent and tech from their three groups, with SoftBank putting in a billion dollars in seed. And then also OpenAI is discussing a secondary share sale that would value the company at between 80 billion and 90 billion. This would be 3X the most recent valuation. Reportedly though, to their credit, they are on track to generate $1 billion in revenue in 2023. Uh, I'm not sure how much of that is the $20 a month subscription. You know, that'd be pretty extraordinary if that was those personal subscriptions. Uh, this would be a massive gain on paper for Microsoft. OpenAI is 49% owned by Microsoft. And Sam Altman has personally... Has stated multiple times now that he has no equity, so he would be getting $0 of this. I, uh... And of course, we know that OpenAI started as a nonprofit before switching, and our friend Vinod Khosla told us very clearly, uh, that those are just details, uh, what happened there, Chamath.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Those are, those are, those are just details. Vinod is the GOAT (laughs) .
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Sam is the closest thing that we have to an emergent mogul in tech. And the reason is because if everything sits on this substrate, you're gonna need to get a license, you're gonna want to get access to whatever developer program, whatever beta that OpenAI has. And so as a result, he'll be-
- JCJason Calacanis
That's already happened, by the way.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, I was just gonna say, so he'll be in the cat bird seat. So even if he doesn't have any equity in OpenAI...He'll get- he'll just put his money into the best startups that... It's like Y Combinator on steroids.
- DFDavid Friedberg
By the way, I have a take on that whole claim that Sam doesn't own any part of OpenAI.
- JCJason Calacanis
All right, let's hear it.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Well-
- JCJason Calacanis
Go ahead, Colom- go ahead, Columbo.
- DFDavid Friedberg
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Explain to us the details. There's one more thing there, ma'am.
- CHColeman Hughes
Well-
- DFDavid Friedberg
You said you don't own any shares in OpenAI, but you started OpenAI.
- CHColeman Hughes
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Right, well, then, who does? Yeah, that's the thing. What I think is really interesting about what OpenAI has done in its fundraising rounds is that each round has been a capped return model. So, for example-
- JCJason Calacanis
Explain what that is to the audience.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
100x. 100x, right? Every round.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Well, I think some of the very early people got capped at 100x. I think maybe the $30 billion round was capped at 10x. So I think the $30 billion round is capped at a $300 million valuation, meaning if you're an investor, your shares go up in value till the company hits a market cap of 300 billion, and then basically you're ca- effectively cashed out. It's like you bought a share, but sold a call back to the company at the $300 billion valuation.
- JCJason Calacanis
This is how the movie, the movie industry works this way, right? You invest in a film, they tell you you can make three acts, and then it's over, right? Something like that. I've- I've seen that in the independent film business, yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah, so, so in any event, I think people who invested at like the $2 billion valuation were capped at like 100 billion. I heard that employees who are getting stock options are capped at 100 billion, or they were way back when they started granting these things.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay.
- DFDavid Friedberg
So my point is that if OpenAI turns into one of these companies, like a Google, ends up in the trillion-dollar club, then nobody's gonna own anything because it will have already long ago been capped out.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Well, they'll- they'll keep selling new interest. Like, the new interest will end up being, like, 8%, 8%.
- DFDavid Friedberg
May- maybe, but-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, because what will happen at the end is the new people that buy in at that higher price, that, that buy out the early investors, they're getting effectively things like 8% return. It turns into debt eventually. It turns into some-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Well, I think what's really going on here is somebody has to own the residual value of the company. Call it the far out of the money call option.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
That's how they get around the IRS problem of it being non-equity. That's how they say that it's not equity in a private corporation.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Well, yeah, but I think, I think what's so brilliant about it is-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Because there's always a cap.
- 1:12:39 – 1:18:16
The next evolution of AI: multimodal and consumer hardware
- JCJason Calacanis
I'm, I'm just speculating.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So can we talk about the technology point?
- JCJason Calacanis
Let's, yes, I'll tee it up for you. Here we go. So, OpenAI released some new ChatGPT features. The key point here is they're doing what's called multimodal. Multimodal is the big innovation. What does that mean? That means the input could be voice, the input could be code, the input could be data. Uh, it could be a picture. Here's a picture. If you're watching along on the YouTube channel, do a search for All-In Podcast on YouTube, hit subscribe, hit the bell.... and it's a classic picture of one of those no parking signs where there's four different ones. You take a picture of that, that's the input, and you say, "It's Wednesday at 4:00 PM. Can I park in the spot right now? Tell me in one line." It comes back and says, "Yes. You can park for up to one hour starting at 4:00 PM." What this means is the output or the input could be in any of those modalities. Modalities, fancy word for an image, a video, et cetera. So you're gonna be able to say, "Hey, give me the poster for the all-in conference of Bestie Runner, and I want it to be these things, and here are the pictures of the boys," and then make it and go back and forth and back and forth. And this is really groundbreaking. At the same time, last week Google Bard, uh, and, and Sandeep Madedra and I played with this on This Week in Startups, um, you now have Google Flights, Google Docs, Gmail, and a number o- of the other core Google services are now in Bard. So that's not multi, uh, modal exactly, um, but you could do things like ask Google Flights, "Hey, what is the best nonstop, you know, between New York City and Dubai, uh, or from an East Coast destination that has laydown flat seats, et cetera?" And it really does, uh, it's starting to work. So this idea that Google's gonna be displaced or they're moving slow, that might be antiquated information. So those are the two big, big monumental announcements just in the last 10 days. Freeberg, when you look at these two, which one is the more important announcement and, and what do you think about the pace? 'Cause we... here we are. We're about to hit the one-year anniversary of ChatGPT 3.5.
- DSDavid Sacks
I've been using, uh, a lot of different tools the last couple of months, and I'm kind of getting to the point that I feel that much of what's happening is under-hyped rather than over-hyped. There's some really incredible potential emerging. Um, I'll, I'll give a couple of examples, and then I'll talk about the mobile phone. First is, uh, Andrei, uh, Karpathy, as you guys see in the tweet that I just posted in the chat, made a point today that LLMs are emerging not just as a chatbot, but as a kernel process, meaning a new type of operating system that can do input and output across different modalities, can interpret code, can access the internet and information, and then can render things in a visual way or in an audio way that the user wants to consume it. So as a result, LLMs become the core driver to a new type of computing interface. There was a paper published, and I'll, uh, share the link to this paper here as well, and we can put it in the, the notes, it's not worth pulling up on the screen, that showed that using LLMs in autonomous driving can actually significantly improve the performance of the neural nets that the autonomous cars are trained on. So the autonomous car is typically trained on a bunch of sensor data that comes in, and then that sensor data determines what sort of action to take with the car. And what this team showed is that if you actually put in a communication layer that thinks and talks like a human in between the sensor data and the action data, it can do really wide-ranging interpretations of the data that otherwise would not be apparent from the dataset it was trained on. So for example, you can see a person down the road and ask it, "What do you think that person's gonna do next?" And the LLM, because it's trained on a much larger corpus of data than just sensor data from cars, it can make a really good human-like interpretation of that, feed that decision back into the control system of the car, and have the car do something more intelligently than it otherwise would have been able to do. So these LLMs are becoming a lot more like a software, um, operating system. And you can kind of extend that into mobile phones. Mobile phones originally were just voice, and then they were single lines of text in the form of SMS. Then you were able to browse the web, and then the app revolution came about where all of this information emerged through apps. What LLMs now allow perhaps is that the entire operating system of the phone can run and render any sort of application or any sort of service or product you might want to use on the fly in stream. So the input to the phone can be voice, it can be visual, it can be video, and the output can be rendered by perhaps a bunch of what might otherwise be called apps, but call it third-party developers that build in-stream into that chat that's no longer looks like a chat interface like we see on ChatGPT, but can be rendered visually, can be rendered with audio, can be rendered a bunch of different ways. So if mobile really is the dominant tech- hardware platform that humans are using, uh, for computing today, LLMs and these sorts of tools can become the dominant operating system on that hardware, and you can totally rethink the modality of how you use computing through applications today. We have an app store and we download apps and use them, and that all becomes in-stream in an LLM or, or chat-type interface that can be accessed in a bunch of different ways. So for me, there's a really bigger thing that's happening that's not just about making smarter tools and increasing productivity, but a real revolution in computing itself that seems to be emergent. And I think Karpathy's tweet this morning, some of the stuff I've been playing with, some of the papers I've been reading, and some of the speculation around a mobile hardware start to support that thesis, and I think it's gonna be really significant. It's a wholesale rewriting of computing, computing interfaces, human-computer interaction, that's gonna rethink everything, and it's, it seems to be, um, pretty substantial. And, and just using a bunch of tools myself, I'm blown away every single time-
Episode duration: 1:28:05
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