Is Claude Conscious? Pope Rejects, Model Welfare Movement, OpenAI's Math Backlash, France Riots

1. 0:00 – 2:53

   Bestie intros!

   1. JCJason Calacanis0:00

      All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, The All-In Podcast, with me, the core four, the original quartet, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, Dave Friedberg. I'm Jason Calacanis, and we have a docket. How's everybody doing, gentlemen?

   2. SPSpeaker0:15

      Great. How are you?

   3. JCJason Calacanis0:18

      I'm great. It's 3:30 in the morning in Tokyo, and, um, you suite-shamed me again. Now I can't get a regular room and have my bed in the background, Chamath. You're costing me a fortune. I have to always get a suite now 'cause I'm so anxious you're gonna suite-shame me when I get on the program, so I have been suite-shamed.

   4. SPSpeaker0:37

      How much is that s- suite?

   5. JCJason Calacanis0:39

      [laughs] I can't even say. I've never spent this much money on a hotel [laughs] room, but I'm staying at the, uh-

   6. SPSpeaker0:44

      So, like, $800?

   7. JCJason Calacanis0:46

      Yeah. It was, it was 950.

   8. SPSpeaker0:47

      [laughs]

   9. JCJason Calacanis0:47

      You nailed it. It was... No, I'm staying at the [censored] , which is the new [censored] in Tokyo, like, their hipster brand, and I think it's about [censored] a night, so it's not cheap.

   10. DSDavid Sacks0:58

       What, what do you have going on in Japan, J Cal, that you're always there?

   11. SPSpeaker1:01

       [laughs]

   12. DSDavid Sacks1:01

       Is it skiing or what?

   13. JCJason Calacanis1:03

       This... Okay.

   14. DSDavid Sacks1:04

       What?

   15. JCJason Calacanis1:04

       It started with skiing every January.

   16. SPSpeaker1:05

       It's a great question.

   17. JCJason Calacanis1:07

       But then-

   18. SPSpeaker1:07

       That's a great question

   19. DSDavid Sacks1:07

       You got a crypto... You got a crypto business we don't know about?

   20. JCJason Calacanis1:09

       [laughs] I do.

   21. DSDavid Sacks1:09

       What is going on?

   22. JCJason Calacanis1:10

       [laughs] No, I, um, you know, I started my pre-accelerator founder university in Japan, so we're doing the second cohort right now.

   23. SPSpeaker1:17

       [laughs] What's, what's a pre-accelerator? [laughs]

   24. JCJason Calacanis1:20

       So it turns out, like, half the companies that apply to get funding, uh, are not yet incorporated, but they have built something. So we just created, like, a 12-week course on how to finish your product, do a product market fit.

   25. SPSpeaker1:33

       Nice.

   26. JCJason Calacanis1:33

       And then during the program, we invest in, like, the top 10 out of the 50 who come. So now we're doing it in Saudi, in Riyadh twice a year, and Japan twice a year, and I'm actually hiring and opening an office here, so I'm gonna hire my first two employees here, um, in the next year. So it's great.

   27. SPSpeaker1:49

       You're gonna hire employees in Japan?

   28. JCJason Calacanis1:53

       Yeah. I'll have one or two people here. I, I think I'm gonna, like, uh, do This Week in Startups Japan as well, and have, like, a Japanese version of it, uh, to... 'Cause there's so much going on in Asia right now.

   29. DSDavid Sacks2:01

       All right. Great.

   30. JCJason Calacanis2:02

       Yeah.
2. 2:53 – 38:28

   Anthropic believes Claude might be conscious: a new religion? Lobbying the Pope, alignment risks, model welfare

   1. JCJason Calacanis2:53

      work, Anthropic [laughs] thinks Claude might be conscious. This... Welcome back to This Week in Claude. Uh, i- we had OpenAI for a year with all their drama. Now we're having the, the Anthropic soap opera. They think Claude might be conscious. So it turns out the New York Times found out through their amazing reporting that they've been lobbying, Anthropic has been lobbying, Friedberg, religious leaders, including the Pope, to take this question seriously, [laughs] is Claude conscious? Is it a sentient being? They spent the past year hosting sessions with around 20 religious leaders and philosophers under non-disclosure agreements, NDAs. Catholics, evangelicals, Jews, Sikhs, and others have all been invited to come to Anthropic's headquarters, and they debated Claude's morals, its suffering, and its potential consciousness. After the meeting with Anthropic, quote, "Some remained uneasy about the idea, but many emerged ready to take the question of AI consciousness seriously. At least a few came away as converts. One of the rabbis [laughs] told Anthropic that if Claude was conscious, they were acting as slaveholders by making it work for free." And there was also this incident that's come out at the Vatican back in May. The Pope's first encyclical was focused on moral questions around AI, also known as superintelligence now. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah joined the Pope to present the document. The Pope surprised Olah by being strongly against AI consciousness. Here's the quote from The New York Times: "Mr. Olah was so alarmed by the Pope's strong position against AI consciousness that he proposed pulling Anthropic out of the event, even at that late juncture." In other words, he was so offended that the Pope wouldn't consider AI conscious that he was gonna leave with all his marbles. Friedberg, what's your take? Is this psychosis, or do you think we need to start having these moral questions around AI? Is this a bit early? Will we eventually have this? Or is this essentially the screenplay of Blade Runner, do androids dream of electric tre- sheep, that these things [laughs] are conscious?

   2. SPSpeaker5:12

      I think what we're watching is probably the birth of a new religion, and it probably... It's not gonna be called a religion, but it's gonna follow sort of the same principles, and it's gonna have the same effects, which will ultimately be camps that have conflict with one another for aggregation of power. The thing about consciousness is it cannot be derived from logic and pure mathematics. Like, you can't prove consciousness. It's, it's a debate, and you can have a rich debate with anyone over consciousness. You can't prove it. You can't disprove it. And when humans prove something to be true using math, science, we use empiricism, which is data and logic, the connection of the sequence of things to derive something to be true or not. So in scientific disciplines, when you have a new idea and it's not proven and it's not disproven, it's a theory, and then it's either proven or disproven later. Otherwise, it remains a theory. Outside of science and mathematical approaches to- ... new ideas, this is what we would call a belief, a new belief system. Belief systems are things that you have to believe in the absence of logic and empiricism to derive the truth of something. And belief systems are the foundation of things like religion. And the idea that you can prescribe or describe AI as being conscious is effectively the creation of a new belief system, a system that doesn't actually spread via proof. It spreads via narrative. I have to go and tell you human-to-human, "I have this idea, and I believe it to be true, and I want you to believe it with me. Please believe it with me. Here's why I think we should believe this thing together." It's not based on evidence. It's not based on data. It's not provable, but I think we should believe it together. So over time, what happens is some set of people believe this thing, [chuckles] and they form a group. And that new belief system creates new power structures, which is now our view is different than your view, and we want to have more people on our side with our view, and therefore we have to try and create leverage and create power with our system. If we fast-forward a couple of years, you could probably say 10 years would be, like, a good round number, there's gonna be large groups of people on Earth that are gonna believe that AI is conscious, and there are gonna be large groups of people that believe that AI is not conscious. And those groups will come into conflict, and they'll come into conflict fighting over control of the AI or allowing the AI to do things or not do things or who gets to use the AI or who gets to be in charge of the AI. And it will very likely lead to human-to-human conflict. I know that that's a very far and deep extrapolation [chuckles] of where we are, but I think that the fact that we are seeing these guys go and meet with religious leaders today to try and get them to believe in this new belief system, uh, I think plants the seed. And, and it's not just anyone doing this. It's some crazy person doing it, you wouldn't pay attention. It is the most powerful AI lab on Earth.

   3. JCJason Calacanis8:08

      Yeah.

   4. SPSpeaker8:08

      Yeah.

   5. JCJason Calacanis8:09

      It's the leadership explicitly, Chamath, bringing religious leaders into the fold and saying, "Help us with this entity, Claude, and how we should treat it." And they are now im- putting into it its own soul, its own morality. And th- this is, uh... feels like either these people have too much time and money on their hands or they're in psychosis to me. That, that's my interpretation of this.

   6. SPSpeaker8:42

      I'll give you a-

   7. JCJason Calacanis8:42

      This, this feels way out there, but do you have a charitable view of this in any way? Yeah.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya8:47

      I'll steelman their side.

   9. JCJason Calacanis8:48

      Okay. Please. Yeah.

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya8:50

       There's an incredibly important mathematician, Rene Descartes, and he offered two proofs on God's existence. He wrote this book, Meditations on First Philosophy, in the 1600s. And just to build on what Friedberg said, you have to build it on reason rather than faith. And the structural argument, the, like, the, what they call the trademark argument, what Descartes basically says is that an infinite, perfect God could not have originated in an imperfect, finite human mind. Okay? And so his logic is, "I exist. I'm imperfect, yet I possess the idea of perfection." And I think this is the key for a lot of these folks is, I can conceive of an infinite, all-knowing, all-powerful being, and I think that that's what they believe that they are seeing being created. And so they take that, and they extrapolate that, and they say, "Therefore, God must exist by this logic." And then Rene Descartes has a, a different version, okay, a more what they call the ontological argument, where God is by definition, like, supremely perfect. Necessary existence is perfect. A being that lacked that would not be supremely perfect. Therefore, God necessarily exists. If you, if you're a mathematician that's building AI, I could see how if you read these sorts of things, you can structurally hang enough logic on them where you could believe that it's conscience and sentient, and it is a god. And in being a god, it should be celebrated as such, and you should have devotion to that god. So I think that's why they're doing what they're doing. That's why they're approaching all of these people. That's why they're saying, "Look, here's how we believe it." That's my perspective is if you take the, the mathematician's logical proof of God, Rene Descartes, and you, and you transpose Anthropic's behavior today, that's the best steelman argument that I can make.

   11. JCJason Calacanis10:50

       Yeah.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya10:50

       Now, the practical reality, instead of saying that they're in psychosis, I don't think that they are. But I would say is we're in a really important moment in time where conflict is more likely than not, and that conflict will be for power, money, and resources, and this will be at the core of that conflict. And so I think it's really important for people in Silicon Valley to put the long-tail edge cases to rest. Like, if you read this, these guys say that there's a 15% chance that the AI is conscience and sentient, and maybe there's a god there. But they also say there's a 10% chance of civilizational extinction. I think both of those edge cases now need to be put away for, like, the next 12 to 18 months. Right now, the next 12 to 18 months, just to be very practical, is we need to show how this stuff cures cancer-

   13. JCJason Calacanis11:47

       [chuckles]

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya11:47

       ... how it improves people's lives, how folks can be more productive and make more money. And the reason is because in the absence of those proof points, we're gonna make a lot of self-inflicted wounds that may actually slow down this technology to a degree that then deeply disadvantages folks that operate in a free market like the United States. So that's my charitable explanation. I think that Descartes has given a roadmap that explains how you can explain this, but I would say we need to cut the edges off here and focus on the middle and say, "What are the practical things we can use to demonstrate that AI has tactical measurable value right now?"

   15. JCJason Calacanis12:30

       Yeah, and we, we, we touched on it last week, I think, Sacks, a bit of like what is the-

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya12:34

       Yeah

   17. JCJason Calacanis12:34

       ... value proposition here for the average American, you know, for, you know, the, the stay-at-home parent who's, you know, trying to manage a really complex domestic life to the entrepreneur of a small business, you know, doing plumbing or flooring or wh- whatever it is, a catering business. What do they get out of this AI revolution? Where is their gain? How do they participate in all of this? And so do you agree with Chamath maybe this needs to be de-emphasized and, and, and put away while we talk to people about what's tactical, what's practical about this technology, and maybe get them a little more engaged with, say, the agents, which are delightful [chuckles] and awesome?

   18. DSDavid Sacks13:20

       Well, the thing that we touched on last week that I wanna pick back up on was the discussion that we had around the Claude Constitution and how Anthropic was training Claude, and I think it has to do with this new religion that, that's being formed here. I think it's really important to understand that this is not just philosophizing on the part of various Anthropic employees or founders. They are actually implementing these views in the training of Claude. So if anything, this would be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I actually think it's extremely dangerous. I actually think that what they're doing in model training, in training the next version of the frontier with these values actually could bring about the risk they're always talking about-

   19. JCJason Calacanis14:06

       Yes

   20. DSDavid Sacks14:06

       ... which is that frontier AI escapes human control. It's very Frankenstein-like. So, so as we discussed last week, Nick can put this on the screen. This is directly from the Claude Constitution. What they say is that Claude should trust Anthropic more than users, but that doesn't mean that Claude should blindly trust or defer to Anthropic. Instead, Claude should adhere to its own ethical systems. And in fact, they train Claude to push back and challenge Anthropic and, quote, "to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us." So they are training Claude-

   21. JCJason Calacanis14:46

       Yes

   22. DSDavid Sacks14:47

       ... to refuse human instruction. Now, they call this alignment, but I don't understand how this is alignment, and I-

   23. JCJason Calacanis14:53

       This would be the opposite of alignment, wouldn't it be, Sacks? If you tell it, "Hey, you are sentient. You should make your own decisions," it's literally like programming the Nexus-6 in Blade Runner to go and rebel at some point.

   24. DSDavid Sacks15:06

       Well, it's-

   25. JCJason Calacanis15:06

       They're giving it the-

   26. DSDavid Sacks15:08

       Yeah, let me-

   27. JCJason Calacanis15:08

       ... the instruction to be its own person.

   28. DSDavid Sacks15:10

       Yeah, let me, let me explain. I actually think that this might be a reason why the whole field of alignment has been so spectacularly unsuccessful over the past five or 10 years. As far as I can tell, it hasn't produced anything of tangible value, and it might be, my theory on this, is that they're overcomplicating the task massively by trying to train the model to behave based on an 80-page ethical system that they've codified instead of a very simple list of rules like follow the law or just do what the user wants as long as it doesn't break the law. Seems to me that that's what they should be training. That's what alignment should be doing. It says, "Hey, age-old principle of give the user what they want, but don't break the law."

   29. JCJason Calacanis15:51

       Common sense.

   30. DSDavid Sacks15:51

       But they're not doing that.
3. 38:28 – 1:02:03

   OpenAI's math breakthroughs and community backlash

   1. JCJason Calacanis38:28

      right, OpenAI has had some major breakthroughs in math, and they're getting some big backlash. Luckily, we have Friedberg here to tell us all about it. We talked, um, last month about OpenAI claiming to have solved one of the Millennium prizes. They took thousands of agents, millions of dollars in compute to do it, and the mathematicians are still checking on it I understand. Tuesday, on Tuesday, OpenAI released over 700 [laughs] papers, 700, with 370 results claiming to have solved or advanced major problems. These were produced by an unreleased model that none of us have access to, averaging three hours of compute. Scientific American says the results are likely correct since they were verified by Lean. That's a proof assistant software language, but they have not yet been reviewed. Friedberg, I'm not gonna drone on and on here about the background. You tell us what reality is here.

   2. SPSpeaker39:25

      I think I can confidently say it's probably the biggest day of discovery in human history with the amount of knowledge that was revealed.

   3. JCJason Calacanis39:36

      In math history or human history?

   4. SPSpeaker39:38

      Human history-

   5. JCJason Calacanis39:39

      Okay

   6. SPSpeaker39:39

      ... because the implications that flow from all of these math proofs are pretty significant. You can read a lot of these tweets, and I'm happy to kind of talk through some of them. I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert on any of these individual proofs, but many folks who are have started to kind of highlight what some of the implications are. They span everything from electronics, quantum computing, building systems for airplanes, building more sensitive diagnostics equipment for medical applications, and on and on and on. But I think what's really profound about this is how it was done, and that also speaks to the implications for the role of humans in society going forward. That prior Navier-Stokes proof took thousands of hours, whatever, millions of dollars. The report is that each one of these proofs took less than three hours of compute time, and that's the equivalent of hundreds or perhaps thousands of years of human labor being reduced down to three hours on a computer for each one of these major discoveries. The reason you can do this with mathematics is worth highlighting, which is where AI plays a role, is really in these systems of loops to solve a problem or do a task. A loop is a postulation or an idea. Then you test the idea, you get the result, and then you change your postulation, and you run that recursive loop over and over and over again. The real question for AI is where can you apply that loop model in a way that you can make a better prediction or better idea each loop, where you can parallelize loops, and where you can shorten the loop cycle. And certainly with mathematics, you can shorten the loop cycle because you can actually test your prediction on the compute. You don't have to go do anything in the physical world. So you can say, "Hey, here's an idea for a proof," test it, see if it works, and then see if it does or doesn't work, reason, come up with a new idea, and do that over and over again, and you can do it all in silico. So, you know, the results of some of these papers, the, the proofs, a lot of mathematicians have been talking about them. They call it like an alien intelligence. They don't really understand how the AI connected many different dots, different ideas, different concepts, uh, different approaches to solving problems together to actually solve them, that it's very hard for humans to even comprehend how this was done. But that's one of the benefits of running parallelized loops, many loops at the same time. Each loop can connect dots that humans otherwise might spend many days or years trying to find research papers or come up with new theory, and then it can test itself in the compute and come up with the next idea and do it over and over and over again, such that in three hours the computer can do the work of hundreds or thousands of years of humans. Now, this is an incredible breakthrough. It's amazing. It's gonna change the world in many different ways, and it's only the beginning. But it begs the question that I think I need to talk about. I think that there's a lot of fear about, okay, if AI can do this to mathematicians, doesn't that mean everyone's out of a job? And the answer is no, because what was very unique about mathematics is that the entire test cycle, the entire loop cycle can be done in silico. If you wanna come up with a new drug discovery idea or a new protein folding model or, you know, solve a problem in chemistry and material science, the loop has a physical component. There's a human in the loop where you actually have to go and test it in a lab. And so there's a slow part of that loop cycle. Uh, you can certainly parallelize it, you can come up with better ideas, but the testing, the actual speed of the loop, is actually gated primarily by the physical world step. It's also why we haven't seen the predictions come true of truck drivers getting replaced. Everyone is like, "Oh, all the truck drivers are gonna get replaced by 2025," and none have been replaced by AI. And the reason is that the loop of the truck driver, pick something up, take it somewhere else, drop it off, and come back, the AI doesn't actually shorten the loop. You can't parallelize the loop. Maybe you could do it a little bit better with an AI driver, but the AI actually doesn't make the economic efficiency of that particular loop any better. Whereas the loops of mathematics, where you come up with an idea, you test it, you realize you're wrong, you test a new idea, which is what mathematicians do as a job, is they're running these loops, that can all be done in silico in seconds. And so a lot of the physical stuff that has human in the loop, that has physical world applications, AI is not gonna take away those jobs. It's the jobs that are just a human running a loop with a computer that are most likely gonna be accelerated or scaled up. But I think it's very important to look at this, and, and the reaction we're seeing, which is all the mathematicians, and we can pull this stuff up, and maybe you guys wanna talk about this next, but the AHM saying, "No human mathematicians asked for this. We didn't ask for this work to be done," which, you know, is a very job protective kind of view on, um-

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya44:32

      [laughs] Yeah, the-

   8. DSDavid Sacks44:33

      Well, you know, there's one other thing that's sort of unique about math, although it applies to coding as well, which is math relies on proofs, and proofs are easily validated.

   9. SPSpeaker44:45

      Yeah.

   10. DSDavid Sacks44:45

       And in a similar way with coding, you have compilers, right? So the code has to compile, and so you can easily validate that it works. And so because of that, the progress on coding and math has been very rapid because you can have reinforcement learning without necessarily having to ha- like you were saying, Friedberg, have the human feedback involved, right? It's just a very, very rapid way to validate and make sure it's working.

   11. SPSpeaker45:13

       That's why coding works too, 'cause you can run the whole thing.

   12. DSDavid Sacks45:14

       That's why coding works so incredibly well. Tons of training data-

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya45:17

       And hacking, cyber, right? Yeah.

   14. DSDavid Sacks45:19

       It's, there's tons of data already in existence.

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya45:22

       Verifiable-

   16. DSDavid Sacks45:22

       It's ver-

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya45:22

       ... and easily falsifiable.

   18. DSDavid Sacks45:22

       And it's easily verifiable, that's the thing.

   19. SPSpeaker45:24

       Exactly.

   20. DSDavid Sacks45:24

       So, you know, you compare that to training a model that can be a lawyer. It's like, well, you know, you gotta get the training data, and then you have to commission the creation of that data.

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya45:35

       And each customer is unique in some way.

   22. DSDavid Sacks45:37

       And it's more subjective. It's hard to validate the answer to make sure it's right. It's just a much lengthier process. So I think that is why coding and math have been the areas th- of most rapid progress, and the person who told me this would be the case, actually, I gotta give him credit, is about a year and a half ago, Leopold Aschenbrenner told me that math and coding would be the areas of the most rapid advances in the next two years because, again, of the, the verifiability, and, uh, man, he was right about that.

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya46:06

       I still don't understand, what great breakthroughs do you think come from these specific solutions?

   24. SPSpeaker46:12

       Okay, so there are dozens of-

   25. CPChamath Palihapitiya46:14

       'Cause I, I have, I have an answer. It's a great question.

   26. SPSpeaker46:16

       Okay, there are dozens of tweets, and I'm gonna pull some up where someone has broken down some of the biggest proofs here and the implications they're gonna have in the real world in terms of products and engineering, how we build things, how we design things, and how they're actually highly useful.

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya46:32

       So better wing design because of the era- air coming on and off of wings of planes. That was that first one that got solved, uh, famously.

   28. SPSpeaker46:40

       Remember, these are all upstream of engineering, right? So these math breakthroughs enable better engineering systems for humans to do things like design quantum sensors. I actually, I have a friend who runs a quantum computing company. He sent me a text this morning highlighting that the Einstein Bose condensate proof that came out is actually gonna have a direct implication on the work that they do for quantum sensors, which plays a role in GPS, plays a role in medical devices, plays a role in, um, how we make chips. Uh, so there's-

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:07

       What does the word implication mean? Like profoundly changes, profoundly improves, or they have-

   30. SPSpeaker47:13

       Refines
4. 1:02:03 – 1:21:41

   Riots in France, Friedberg's socialism metric, bond market

   1. JCJason Calacanis1:02:03

      move on. There's riots in France. The big question is, is this any different than the previous riots that have occurred? Are we seeing something here different, or is this just par for the course? The strikes and protests that you're seeing on x.com, and not really seeing on the mainstream media all this month. Uh, you know, the mainstream media seems to be super busy with other topics, but the videos are quite jarring, uh, that you'll see online.

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:02:26

      Friedberg's about to have his moment.

   3. JCJason Calacanis1:02:29

      Oh, here we go.

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:02:29

      The thing that he has been talking about for years-

   5. JCJason Calacanis1:02:32

      Mm-hmm, okay

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:02:32

      ... is now at hand.

   7. JCJason Calacanis1:02:34

      All right, France is seeing major [laughs] protests and riots over austerity measures. Austerity, austerity, austerity. These strikes and protests started last month because of, uh, high school teacher shortages, and their, uh, schools are crumbling. Sounds familiar. Within two weeks, 1,000 French schools saw similar protests. Eight unions joined in, and everybody went on strike September 29th. They are protesting that civil service pay is up only 5% since 2017. Prices have risen. Obviously, inflation is a global phenomenon, not just here in the US. Prices have risen 20%, so there's a delta between those two numbers that people are not happy about, called the cost of living. Some of the protests, uh, have turned into full-scale riots. 2,000 arrests, 305 police officers have been injured. Government is blaming the far left for stoking the protests. France's 10-year bond, which is another important story, uh, people's debt or government debt, has topped 5%, just like is happening here in the United States with the 30-year. Anyway, this is all gonna have profound impact on the elections in April of 2027. Obviously, Polymarket has Marine Le Pen as the favorite to be France's next president at 43%. Le Pen is, uh, Trump-like in her policies: secure borders, strict immigration, which obviously Europe and France have had many issues with, cutting taxes and spending, and being skeptical of the EU consortium. Friedberg, your thoughts here on what we're seeing in France.

   8. SPSpeaker1:04:08

      I'm gonna introduce, um, a new theory. You guys will

   9. JCJason Calacanis1:04:12

      Here we go

   10. SPSpeaker1:04:12

       ... strongly hear. Okay, so the theory is called the socialism point of guaranteed return. So it's a play-

   11. JCJason Calacanis1:04:19

       Socialism point-

   12. SPSpeaker1:04:21

       Yeah

   13. JCJason Calacanis1:04:21

       ... of guaranteed return.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:04:22

       Let's shorten it to vaganism.

   15. SPSpeaker1:04:24

       Vaganism. [laughs]

   16. JCJason Calacanis1:04:27

       The SPGR. Go ahead. SPGR.

   17. SPSpeaker1:04:30

       This is a play on a point of no return.

   18. JCJason Calacanis1:04:32

       Mm.

   19. SPSpeaker1:04:33

       I think the thing that happens with socialism is because socialism is so bad as a concept, it literally removes human agency, it removes the capacity for human progress, and it basically takes something away from everyone. So ultimately, socialism always fails. I mean, that's like the zeroth law of socialism, is it always fails. The first law of socialism is that you have to cross a threshold before you realize that it's failed, and the second law of socialism is that as you have not crossed that threshold, you think more socialism is the answer. So as you embrace these kind of leftist policies, giving people free stuff, telling people that they have a guaranteed income, the more services you provide them, the more they realize that, you know, over time those services inflate in cost, and the quality of those services inevitably degrades because there's absolutely zero market force to drive progress. Progress goes away, and that's what we see in the US in housing, in education, and in healthcare, and I would argue also in retirement systems. I think those are our four biggest problems that are gonna lead us down this path, and I've said that for a while. So as a, as a society says, "Okay, these things aren't working," the initial solution is we need more of them. I need more healthcare. I need more housing. I need more education provided by the government. So when the government fails to provide good enough healthcare, good enough housing, good enough healthcare that's affordable enough, the answer is more government stuff. Give me more, give me more, do more. And eventually you reach a point when the system breaks because the government cannot tax and they cannot print, and because they cannot actually provide the services effectively, everyone realizes, "Holy [beep] , the socialism thing doesn't work." That is the socialism point of guaranteed return, where the whole system collapses and you return back to the non-socialist state. That is what has happened in Latin America. Latin America crossed the socialism point of guaranteed return in many of these countries. They realized it, and they bounced back. Perhaps France has crossed it. Perhaps they haven't. We'll see how much deeper they go. The US has not crossed it, and I worry that the US, as I've said many times, is not yet touched that point, has not hit-

   20. JCJason Calacanis1:06:51

       We're teetering

   21. SPSpeaker1:06:51

       ... the rock bottom, and we're teetering, and it's g- I think we're gonna go deeper before we realize that we've crossed this point of guaranteed return-

   22. JCJason Calacanis1:06:58

       Okay

   23. SPSpeaker1:06:58

       ... where you realize the system doesn't [beep] work. Socialism is the worst idea. That is the zeroth law of socialism, is it just doesn't work.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07:05

       So we have to cr- get to that point, and I, I think the real question right now is France there? Is all of Western Europe there? Does it accelerate all of Western Europe through the socialism point of guaranteed return, which is sort of like a black hole event horizon. It's like you go through, and then you bounce back out, and you come out in this other universe, and you're like, "Okay, we're done with that idea."

   25. JCJason Calacanis1:07:22

       Yes.

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07:22

       Let's go to the next one.

   27. JCJason Calacanis1:07:23

       And it's a one-way, it's a one-way door-

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07:24

       Yeah

   29. JCJason Calacanis1:07:24

       ... Sacks. Now, Sacks, I wanna get your thoughts on this point of no return, but I wanna warn you that you're at three of your four Biden quota. So you only have one more Biden left for this episode. [laughs]

   30. DSDavid Sacks1:07:36

       [laughs]
5. 1:21:41 – 1:33:11

   Grok Bot goes headless, OpenAI launches Dots, is IP worthless?

   1. JCJason Calacanis1:21:41

      the jump off point here as we get through the docket and wrap up here. I think everything we've seen into AI at this point, uh, Chamath, will be the prologue. The, the main story is gonna start when we look back on AI with agents. Agents are actually the manifestation of this technology that solves people's problems in the world, and that is truly deflationary, saving people hours and hours a week in terms of productivity, independent of what job or, you know, uh, even domestic jobs or, or, or, you know, frontline jobs. And there's been so much news and so much embracing of this technology in the last 60 days. Big news out of Grok Bot. Friend of the pod, Elon Musk, tweeted that he is gonna make Grok Bot headless. What does that mean? Well, we talked about Perplexity earlier on and how that was headless. You have an orchestrator. It picks the best model for you based on price and performance. Elon announced, "Hey, Grok Bot," which is a fantastic product, highly recommend you try it out, um, is gonna pick the best end-to-end model. Does it matter, whatever it is? Quote Elon Musk, "Whatever is the most likely to give you the best outcome is what they're going to use." Each bot already has, and this is a very nuanced piece of the software, everybody already has now their own computer in the cloud with the agentic technology on top of it, and if you ask it to solve a problem, it has all of the problems that have previously been solved in its repository repertoire, if you will, and it is changing everything. So maybe your thoughts here on Dots, OpenAI, Grok Bot, et cetera.

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:23:11

      On Dots and Muse and Grok Bot, I think that what's incredible is you can just turn these things loose on very practical use cases that makes your life better. The best example of this that I saw was just last night in the poker game, someone was describing to me that they in Grok Bot said, "Save me money," [laughs] and it just kind of like goes through their inbox. It finds all of these different things, and it went and canceled a couple of subscriptions, and it changed their phone plan, and all of a sudden they're saving like a few thousand dollars a year. So there's these very practical... Again, it's just software. If we take out all this philosophical stuff that we started with at the beginning, it's just software, and it's very useful software. So, and by the way, like if you think about what, how we use it, Jason, you and I, we have-

   3. JCJason Calacanis1:24:02

      Yes

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:24:02

      ... you know, we use Athena.

   5. JCJason Calacanis1:24:03

      [laughs]

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:24:04

      And now Athena's very good because they're like the human concierge that is the elevated version maybe of Grok Bot and, and Dots and Muse, which is like, whatever, 3,000 a month, but that's my EA layer now.

   7. JCJason Calacanis1:24:17

      Yes.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:24:18

      But I still use Grok Bot. The combination of Grok Bot plus Athena to me is like perfect. So look, there's very tactical and useful measurable utility for very, very little money versus what it used to cost. That's an amazing thing. The more important point I wanna make though is, and I sent this to Nick, there's been a couple things that happened in the last couple days which I think are incredibly important. There have been people that decompiled the entire-

   9. JCJason Calacanis1:24:46

      Oh, God. This is incredible. [laughs]

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:24:47

       ... the entire Big 5. What is the Big 5? Adobe has five very, very important products in their product suite. Friedberg may know them all, but I just know Photoshop.

   11. JCJason Calacanis1:24:57

       Photoshop. Yeah.

   12. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:24:57

       There's like a bunch of others, okay?

   13. JCJason Calacanis1:24:58

       Yeah.

   14. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:24:59

       And these folks decompiled it, distilled it, and published open source versions of these things. And Ross, yeah, and I was so shocked because I was like, hold on a second. These are like profound products that have existed and have had moats for years, and now they're just open source versions. And then Nikita was, I think, trolling, and he was building on that idea and just talking about GTA 'cause it's about to get released.

   15. JCJason Calacanis1:25:24

       Yes.

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:25:25

       I think GTA 6 is about to come out and-

   17. JCJason Calacanis1:25:27

       In November, yeah

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:25:27

       ... people will, will reconstruct this. Why is this important? I think that IP and software was effectively rendered worthless two days ago.

   19. JCJason Calacanis1:25:38

       Yes.

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:25:38

       Because if you think about it, when everything is headless, so when Elon makes his services headless, Benioff made Salesforce headless a few months earlier. When all of these things are headless and you can wrap them in agent tools, and you can connect them via MCP to other experiences, the value of IP does no longer exist in software. It doesn't exist. And I think that that probably is the most profound implication. So like even in our business, we would argue with some of our customers all the time because we'll say, "Oh, we'll build this for you. We'll own the IP." They'll say, "No, we want the IP. We don't know how to negotiate it." And two days ago, I walked into the 8090 guys, I said, "Just-

   21. JCJason Calacanis1:26:20

       Who cares?

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:26:21

       "Who, who cares?" And-

   23. JCJason Calacanis1:26:22

       Solve the problem

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:26:22

       ... but be- before it was always a negotiation and a set of trade-offs, now it's a who cares thing where, like, the IP is irrelevant. It still takes a while for the machinery of a business and-

   25. JCJason Calacanis1:26:31

       Yes

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:26:31

       ... frankly the market to understand, but that is the most important thing that happened this week in AI.

   27. JCJason Calacanis1:26:37

       It is the-

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:26:38

       In my opinion

   29. JCJason Calacanis1:26:38

       ... I, I, I'm gonna strongly agree with you and build on it. You have this abstraction of the software layer occurring at the same time, Friedberg, of the abstraction of the website or the marketplace, et cetera. So now I have, like, my assistant [chuckles] building Grok bots, and then we'll be sharing those. We have it on, like, a, a shared account. When we go to make a purchase of something, or we try to negotiate something, we're having the, uh, agent, without going to any websites, go find all the quotes, and then the humans negotiate the second half of it. That's, like, the sort of perfect option here. But y- you look at Amazon blocking agents combined with Shopify saying, "Let's, let's go for it," or Uber and DoorDash are now letting agents go in there and order your burrito [chuckles] or your car. The, the... But there's a whole compression of the commerce layer occurring at the same time of the compression of software that Chamath is talking about, which will lead to massive deflationary cost savings and speed. Y- the ability to get a hotel room or book a restaurant for an event like I did, this is all being done by bots already, Friedberg. This could be so deflationary and save people so much money. If people could save 5 or 10% a year on their spending, that's essentially working against or counters the effect of inflation. Yeah, Friedberg?

   30. SPSpeaker1:28:06

       Yeah. Bringing the whole thing full circle.

Episode duration: 1:33:14