Pope vs AI, Anthropic's Digital God, AI Job Loss Narrative Flips, Open Source Crackdown Coming?

1. 0:00 – 6:00

   Bill Gurley joins the show!

   1. JCJason Calacanis0:00

      Okay, we are gathered here today-

   2. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:03

      [laughs]

   3. JCJason Calacanis0:03

      ... in holy unity, brothers and sisters, to convene and discuss on this most holy day, the day the All-In podcast drops, many topics: AI data centers, China, justice, human dignity. Dario unwinding these SPVs hasn't been good for the Vatican.

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:26

      [laughs]

   5. JCJason Calacanis0:26

      We got in at 20 billion. That was a 50-bagger for us. So let's get started.

   6. DSDavid Sacks0:32

      Jason, I'm pretty sure you believed you were the vicar of God before the encyclical, so this is nothing new for you.

   7. CPChamath Palihapitiya0:38

      [laughs]

   8. JCJason Calacanis0:40

      [laughs]

   9. DSDavid Sacks0:41

      You let your winners ride.

   10. JCJason Calacanis0:44

       Rain Man, David Sacks. I'm going all in. And instead-

   11. DSDavid Sacks0:49

       We open-sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

   12. JCJason Calacanis0:52

       Love you, S. I'm going all in. The smoke has risen from Chamath's pool house.

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:01

       [laughs]

   14. JCJason Calacanis1:02

       And from the poker room.

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:04

       He's staying in my pool house. He's been there for the last three days.

   16. JCJason Calacanis1:07

       It's been magnificent. He didn't know. You know what? I understand where OJ was coming from.

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:12

       [laughs]

   18. JCJason Calacanis1:12

       You know, you put Kato Kaelin in your house for long enough, you just lose your [beep] at some, at some point.

   19. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:18

       [laughs]

   20. JCJason Calacanis1:18

       Somebody's getting whacked. All right, enough with the shenanigans. Uh, but it's been great staying at the house because there's actually, Chamath is not aware of this, there's an iPad in the kitchen, and that's logged in to Uber Eats, DoorDash, Instacart, Amazon, Loro Piana.

   21. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:35

       Shut the [beep] up. Come on, stop. [laughs]

   22. JCJason Calacanis1:36

       No, there is.

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:37

       It's not true.

   24. JCJason Calacanis1:37

       It's literally-

   25. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:38

       It's not true

   26. JCJason Calacanis1:38

       ... every single service. And I told the house manager, like, "Listen, any packages that come in the next 72 hours-

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:46

       [laughs]

   28. JCJason Calacanis1:46

       "... right to the pool house if it says JCal. Right to the pool house." So all these packages have been coming. Then I relabeled them, gave them back, sent them to the ranch, and now the house manager's sending that stuff to the ranch.

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:58

       Loro Piana wants to know why my inseam went from 36 to 12.

   30. JCJason Calacanis2:02

       [laughs]
2. 6:00 – 17:37

   Making yourself valuable in the age of AI, first class of "AI Natives"

   1. CPChamath Palihapitiya6:00

      your take on all of this doomerism? Like, if you're a young personAnd you're in college, or you're in high school. Is this, is this much ado about nothing, or how do you run down a dream in the face of something like that?

   2. BGBill Gurley6:11

      Yeah. Well, I, you know, I started the book before this happened, and I've been asked the question a lot, and it, it came up in the TED Talk. I f- I fear that the, a lot of people are in jobs they actually don't care about that much. And, um, there's a Gallup poll that backs this up. They came up with that word quiet quitters. They're, like, 59% of the people they s- surveyed are kinda ambivalent about their job. And when you're ambivalent about your job, you're not high agency, and so you don't lean in. You know, if you, if you look at how Jason talks about all, how they implemented AI in all of his, his different w- working groups, you hear that enthusiasm and that high agency, and then you wanna go try these things. And I think the best way to protect yourself from AI is to be the most AI-enabled version of yourself you can be. But if you're ambivalent about your job, you're probably not doing that, and you could be, you know, a sitting duck. So I think it's the mindset that's the problem.

   3. JCJason Calacanis7:12

      I created an associate and training program for my firm 'cause we wanna, like, help people get into venture capital, and we gave them a choice of assignments. One of them was to write coverage of one of our portfolio companies that's breaking out. MicroOne is the name of it. And just give us, like, "Hey, here's the competitive landscape." Basically write a DL memo and coverage of that company, and then we gave them another option to vibe code a very specific project I've wanted to have for our venture firm for a long time, you know, on competitive intelligence. And I would say, I think, like, maybe 80% of the students applying, and we had 4- or 500 people apply for six positions, 80% of them did the vibe coding, and I was shocked. I thought it would be the exact opposite. Anybody can write, anybody can throw [beep] in ChatGPT and get some output, but they, they actually built software, and th- that's the scary thing. The students who graduated, at least this is my perception, Chamath, the students who graduated, like, 5, 10 years ago before AI, they're not AI first. They feel lost and adrift. They don't have agency. But the group coming out of college right now that cheated their way through school [laughs] using ChatGPT, doing their assignments, like, using those tools... I, I'm joking, cheating, but I mean hacking.

   4. CPChamath Palihapitiya8:23

      I, I agree with that.

   5. JCJason Calacanis8:24

      So th- they were hacking.

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya8:25

      They're totally hacked. Yeah.

   7. JCJason Calacanis8:26

      Yeah, and, and they're just like, "I know how to use these tools to get through my finals."

   8. BGBill Gurley8:31

      Yeah.

   9. CPChamath Palihapitiya8:31

      Gurley, I think you're saying something super important. I said this last week, which is nobody asks the warehouse worker at Amazon whether they actually want that job. And so to your point, job satisfaction isn't some external person judging your job to be valid and saying, "You must be able to have it." I think it should be asking the person that does the job, "Do you like it, and do you want to keep it?" Those are two very different questions. And-

   10. BGBill Gurley8:54

       Yeah

   11. CPChamath Palihapitiya8:54

       ... I think that the, all of this AI doom and gloom was a lot and too much, frankly, of the former and not enough of the latter. And y- now this whole lie is kind of getting undone. I think Sacks posted about it this week as well. The Goldman Sachs CEO said it. And now in this crazy twist of fate, now that we need to have trillion-dollar IPOs, the entire Frontier Labs are all like, "Wow, this is gonna be a bonanza of jobs."

   12. BGBill Gurley9:18

       And Mark Cuban had, had a great quote. He said, "There are two types of people in the world, those that use AI to learn faster than they ever could before, and those that use AI to avoid learning altogether." And I, I think it's this notion of high agency or not. Like-

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya9:33

       That's pretty good

   14. BGBill Gurley9:34

       ... are you leaning in and using this stuff to be ever more powerful in what you try and accomplish? Are you using it, you know, as a cheat code? And if you're in the latter, yeah, you're probably at risk.

   15. CPChamath Palihapitiya9:46

       You get asked a lot about how to educate yourself if you're a parent of kids so that you can put them on a path to launch and do well and chase their dreams.

   16. BGBill Gurley9:56

       Well-

   17. CPChamath Palihapitiya9:57

       Do you have a good answer for that question?

   18. BGBill Gurley9:58

       I m- I mean, the, the second chapter of the book's all about lifetime learning, and it's kind of a requirement that you're following your fascination because the lifetime learning comes for free if you're fascinated with something. Like, you just constantly soak up and devour new information. And I, I do think that a lot of kids get exhausted because [laughs] we've made high school and college such a grind that they think the learning ends the day they, they walk out with their diploma. And as we all know, the best and brightest in all of our fields are on a constant learning journey, and when something new comes out, they dive in and try and figure it out, right? And so, and every, every single, uh, person in the book that we profiled has that kind of attitude about their craft, you know, in every day. And so I, I think the real test is if you're not proactively self-learning, then you're probably not tilting against something that you really adore and are fascinated by.

   19. JCJason Calacanis10:56

       Sacks, you wanted to jump in there.

   20. DSDavid Sacks10:58

       With respect to new college grads, I was gonna say that I think the single most marketable skill in the economy right now has gotta be proficiency in Claude. If you're going into a firm r- right now and you're the only one who knows Claude, it would be like you're the only one who knows how to work a spreadsheet, you know, or a word-

   21. JCJason Calacanis11:17

       Mm-hmm

   22. DSDavid Sacks11:17

       ... processor. The advantage would be enormous. Now, I think that that's probably a short-term arbitrage because eventually everyone's gonna have to figure out how to use these tools. But as a young college graduate right now, you'd have such an advantage if you're an AI native, uh, just knowing how to use these tools. And this thought, uh, partially occurred to me when I saw what our producer Nick has been doing with using Claude to, for... You know, he's been creating this daily-

   23. JCJason Calacanis11:43

       Oh, the daily, uh-

   24. DSDavid Sacks11:44

       ... briefing-

   25. JCJason Calacanis11:44

       Yeah

   26. DSDavid Sacks11:45

       ... document.

   27. JCJason Calacanis11:45

       We've been doing it for-

   28. DSDavid Sacks11:46

       Have you guys seen this?

   29. JCJason Calacanis11:46

       We've been doing it for three months. [laughs] You, you're late to the party.

   30. DSDavid Sacks11:49

       Oh, I just, I just ran it for the first time.
3. 17:37 – 26:54

   Reacting to Pope Leo's AI encyclical: Who guards the guardians?

   1. JCJason Calacanis17:38

      We're gonna start with the Pope. The Pope is dope, and, uh, the Pope Leo, he's the 14th, released his first encyclical, encyclical on AI, and it was long, 235 pages, over forty-two thousand words. Just to give you an idea, Bill Gurley's book, um-

   2. BGBill Gurley17:56

      When did he write it, do you think? When did he put that together?

   3. JCJason Calacanis17:59

      Well, no, no.

   4. DSDavid Sacks18:00

      Must have gone through-

   5. JCJason Calacanis18:00

      I think he used ChatGPT. That's what it says here, um, in the notes.

   6. BGBill Gurley18:03

      [laughs]

   7. JCJason Calacanis18:03

      Uh, no, I mean, I, I'm guessing-

   8. BGBill Gurley18:05

      How long did it take for him to write this in between all of his other tasks?

   9. JCJason Calacanis18:08

      I think it's a six-month process to do this, but I'm sure he had collaboratorsBill, your book I'm assuming was sixty or s-

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya18:14

       Oh, you're say- Oh, he didn't, he didn't write it?

   11. JCJason Calacanis18:15

       I'm sure there was a team that wrote it. But Bill, your book's 60, 70,000 words, I'm guessing, so this is almost a, a literal book, right?

   12. DSDavid Sacks18:23

       Mm-hmm.

   13. JCJason Calacanis18:24

       In terms of how long it is, and it's called Magnifica Humanitas, or Magnificent Humanity. In it, he warns business leaders to safeguard humanity from AI. His core argument is AI's not inherently evil, but technology is never neutral, and that technology takes on the characteristics, wait for it [chuckles] of those who build, finance, and control it. And I don't think he thinks super highly of that group of people. The Pope called for regulation of AI companies. Obviously, we're gonna have that debate here. As some of the things he, uh, called for I think are not very debatable, and there's a lot of consensus around worker retraining, safety, uh, for children, and guardrails, a ban on autonomous weapons. That's the, uh, Skynet rule. Don't build Terminators with your [chuckles] AI. But he was joined by Anthropic co-founder, Chris Olah. I don't know how many co-founders there are of this company, [chuckles] uh, but apparently there's dozens, and Olah is not Catholic. According to a Vanity Fair profile, he was raised Evangelical, and now he's an atheist. The folks at Amazon, Google, and Meta lobbied the Vatican on April 29th to soften the language in his missive, and, uh, he was not swayed. His central question, Sacks, is will AI be used to concentrate power in the hands of a few, or will it serve everyone, something you brought up when you mentioned monopolies, duopolies, et cetera, two weeks ago on this very podcast. What's your take on the Pope and his interest and his, uh, missives on AI and promoting a bit of AI regulation?

   14. DSDavid Sacks20:07

       Well, I very much agree with the Pope that the biggest risk of AI is the centralization of power and then its misuse against us, um, in some Orwellian way. I think it's government that's gonna do that, um, not necessarily an individual actor because it's governments that ultimately have the power. So I do worry about the potential for AI to be used to surveil us, censor us, control us, as Orwell described in 1984. So if that's where the Pope is going with this, I very much agree with him. The... Maybe where we end up in different places is he thinks that government regulation is the way to prevent this, and I would just say that we have to be careful not to empower government too much. Because if you give government the power to regulate or approve AI development, if you create, say, an FDA for AI as many people are calling on, that will give government the power to approve models and, and therefore give notes to model developers. And very soon this definition of safety will expand because the government always takes an expansive view of its powers. And we saw this during the social media wars where the definition of trust and safety expanded to issues like psychological safety, microaggressions, disinformation, transphobia, and so on, that, you know, again, the social media companies were told that they had to stamp out all of those threats to safety, and it ended up becoming a censorship agenda. So I get very worried about, you know, what if some government agency can give notes to the model developers, and they start telling the model developers that your definition of safety is not expansive enough. You have to, again, protect the public from disinformation or, you know, psychological harms. So again, I think we just have to be careful not to aggrandize government because that's gonna be the most likely culprit in terms of the centralization of, of power. And, um, I know the, um, the Vatican likes Latin. Th- this is a problem of political philosophy that goes all the way back to Socrates. It's called Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, which is who will guard the guardians.

   15. JCJason Calacanis22:22

       Hmm.

   16. DSDavid Sacks22:22

       In other words, if we entrust a set of guardians to protect us from a bunch of threats, what's to stop them from becoming tyrannical and from becoming the new threat against us? And I mean, this is, uh, the central dilemma of political power going back thousands-

   17. JCJason Calacanis22:41

       Who watches the watchers?

   18. DSDavid Sacks22:41

       Yeah, who watches the watchers or who guards the guardians, meaning who's gonna protect us against our guardians if they turn against us. The genius of the American founding, by the way, is that it was a second order solution to this question. The founders of America very much understood this, and what they came up with is we have to have the guardians guard against each other. And so they came up with the idea of separation of powers. We'd have separation of federal and state. We'd have, um, the, the three branches of, of the government. Even within the legislative branch, it was a bicameral legislature. So they divided up the powers in a way that hopefully the guardians would check against each other as opposed to becoming tyrannical against us. And that, that is kinda my view on AI, is that ultimately we have to have a solution of checks and balances. If the AI market becomes monopolized and falls into the hands of one or two companies, I would use antitrust law very aggressively-

   19. JCJason Calacanis23:37

       Hmm

   20. DSDavid Sacks23:37

       ... to, as a check and balance against their power. Right now we have a very competitive market. You know, we have five frontier labs competing very aggressively. As long as the market is competitive, I would use that because I think competition generates the best outcomes. It helps us win against China, but it also protects the population because these companies, you know, if they get out of line, there's some competitor that can offer something better.

   21. JCJason Calacanis24:01

       You, consumers can opt out of it if they don't trust-

   22. DSDavid Sacks24:03

       Yeah, exactly

   23. JCJason Calacanis24:03

       ... ChatGPT-

   24. DSDavid Sacks24:04

       Yes

   25. JCJason Calacanis24:04

       ... they can use Anthropic, or if they don't trust Anthropic, they can go to Groq.

   26. DSDavid Sacks24:07

       Right.

   27. JCJason Calacanis24:07

       Bill, you had the number one rated s- talk at the All-In Summit in history, 2,851 miles. You have been famously against regulatory capture.In light of the Pope's comments of, hey, regulating, what do you think is common sense? Because AI is everything. AI can help people make bio weapons. It can also help people [chuckles] get their term paper in or do, you know, uh, be a better salesperson at-

   28. BGBill Gurley24:35

       Right

   29. JCJason Calacanis24:35

       ... you know, Oracle. Like, we're talking about paper, like we're talking about oxygen here. This is like a fundamental horizontal technology. So where do you think there is a case to regulating AI, if at all, and where do you think, "Hey, yeah, free market, we'll figure it out"?

   30. BGBill Gurley24:51

       Well, I have, I have two takes, one on the Pope and one on Anthropic. So-
4. 26:54 – 38:32

   Anthropic's Digital God: Do they believe they are creating a superior species?

   1. BGBill Gurley26:54

      I have to tell you that, that Anthropic is a mystery to me. I've never, ever seen a company that is both leading their field and the most negatively outspoken commenter on what they do. I've, I've just never seen it, and my initial theory was the regulatory capture theory, that they just want to ensure there's regulation. And quite frankly, I think they're, you know, very close to achieving that. Like, they have stirred up, you know, a frantic position, especially in America. American consumers are definitely afraid of AI. Um, yeah, I think I've talked to you guys in the past about, you know, the book that Jonathan Haidt's written about social media, and there's a whole bunch of state legislators that think we should have regulated social media, and so now they're destined to t- wanna get in front of it. And we know that Anthropic's one of the most aggressive lobbying company startups of all time. You know, the, the, the amount of effort that they're putting in, the amount of money at a state-by-state basis. So that was always my first theory, but then they just... they got so loud that I, I've literally, in the past 30 days, read everything I can about Anthropic, and I've come up with a new theory. This is, this might-

   2. JCJason Calacanis28:13

      Okay. New breaking theory

   3. BGBill Gurley28:15

      ... this might... I call it the Dr. Frankenstein theory. Um, you remember when Elon had that conversation with Larry Page where-

   4. JCJason Calacanis28:23

      Yes

   5. BGBill Gurley28:23

      ... Larry called him a species-

   6. JCJason Calacanis28:23

      I was, I was literally sitting next to him [chuckles] when l- he called him-

   7. BGBill Gurley28:27

      Would you explain the story real quick?

   8. JCJason Calacanis28:29

      Well, we're at a birthday party and, and, you know, E- Elon was like, "Listen, humanity needs to be protected from the stuff at DeepMind," 'cause at DeepMind they had an example of the AI having tried to break out, to jailbreak out of its computer and not be turned off and, you know, had some sentience or some, you know, inkling of sentience. And he said, "You know, we have to protect the human species." And he said, well, Larry said, "Well, what do you think that's species? Because you care about the human species over AI." This is at least 15 years ago.

   9. DSDavid Sacks29:01

      No, this is right before Elon co-founded, uh, OpenAI, right?

   10. JCJason Calacanis29:05

       Oh, way, way before that.

   11. DSDavid Sacks29:06

       It's back in 2015 or something.

   12. JCJason Calacanis29:06

       The actual story here is Elon ha- Elon and Google had backed Demis and the team at, uh, DeepMind when they were an independent company. Then Elon was like, "Oh my God, Google's gonna buy this," and I remember having the conversation with Elon about this. "We have to figure out a way for DeepMind not to go to Google. We have to block this somehow." And he begged those folks to not sell to Google, 'cause Google was running the table on everything, and he wanted this technology to be independent, and he was on the board of the company.

   13. BGBill Gurley29:37

       And he also said this was his motivation to launch OpenAI as a nonprofit.

   14. JCJason Calacanis29:41

       And when Google got it, he just said, "We, we... This is, this technology's too powerful for any one person." So, like, once again, you gotta give Elon a lot of credit. He saw the writing on the wall. If one person can... And he saw it 15, 20 years ago, and him and Sam Harris used to debate this over dinner. You know, what happens if somebody controls this-

   15. BGBill Gurley29:58

       Right

   16. JCJason Calacanis29:58

       ... and they run away with it?

   17. BGBill Gurley29:59

       Right.

   18. JCJason Calacanis29:59

       It would be extremely dangerous. It has to be available to all the people. Essentially, the Pope's position. It has to be in the service of humanity, not ruled by one person. It's far too powerful.

   19. BGBill Gurley30:09

       So the reason I call this the Dr. Frankenstein theory is the more I dig, I've met people who I, who I dare say think it's their responsibility, and they're excited about building a species that's, that's superior to humansAnd I would just encourage people to read, you know, as much as they can about Anthropic. Chris Olah worked on this thing called the Constitution. It's about 80 pages. It's hard to get through, but I would encourage you to read it. Amanda Askell, who is the chief philosopher, has started doing podcasts. I would encourage you to listen to them and listen to her language. And then Dario wrote this blog post called Machines of Loving Grace.

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya30:52

       Loving Grace.

   21. BGBill Gurley30:54

       Yes.

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya30:54

       Yeah, I read it.

   23. BGBill Gurley30:54

       And it, it was based on a poem, and the poem is kind of weird. I would... We should put a link to the poem. It's quite short. But the last, the last stanza of the poem says, "I like to think of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters." I don't know what that means, like we're gonna go live in the fields where the mammals live.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:19

       [laughs]

   25. BGBill Gurley31:19

       I, I... And then the, the kicker, "And all watched over by machines of loving grace." Sounds like overlord to me. And then in Dario's post, he says, he, near the end, and it's very long. You read it, Chamath. I mean, Machines-

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:35

       I have

   27. BGBill Gurley31:35

       ... of Loving Grace is very long.

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya31:36

       Yeah.

   29. BGBill Gurley31:36

       But he's, he's talking about in the future, what are humans gonna do, because he believes in the massive abundance and UBI and that we won't have to work. I don't believe in any of those things, but he does. And then he says, "It could be a capitalist economy of AI systems which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans." So, so that's envisioning a, a deity of sorts that's gonna break ties and deser- decide what humans get.

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya32:12

       A cal- it's a comput- it's a computational reward function for humans.
5. 38:32 – 59:56

   AI sovereignty, the next era of privacy, open-source crackdown coming?

   1. JCJason Calacanis38:32

      And this is something that is in control, I think, of humanity. I've been talking about AI sovereignty here for a bit, just in terms of how much more cost-effective it is and how you're not training other people's AIs with your knowledge and your insights. This is why it's super important that open source, open source agents, and local hardware be able to run these models, and that consumers and companies learn how to roll their own language models, how to make a small language model, an SML, a V-SML, a verticalized one, and run it on your Apple hardware, 'cause Apple actually has taken a principled approach historically to your sovereignty for your data. Data sovereignty now isn't-

   2. DSDavid Sacks39:14

      They care a lot about privacy.

   3. JCJason Calacanis39:15

      Yes, and now-

   4. DSDavid Sacks39:16

      Yeah, they care a lot about privacy

   5. JCJason Calacanis39:16

      ... it's intelligence sovereignty. The, the intelligence sovereignty is different than privacy. Privacy is, "Oh, you can't see my photos. You can't, you know, peek into my Notes app and what I wrote there in my journal." Now, intelligence sovereignty is, "You can't tell me what to think. You can't use your AI to analyze my photos, to analyze my emails, to analyze my messages, and tell me how to interpret the world." That's actually gonna be the next key piece here. This is why I think Apple is just the dark horse in this entire race. If there is an open-source product that can run on this hardware, the M5s, the, you know, 48 gigs, 128 gigs, the stu- new Mac Studio coming out with supposedly a terabyte, that changes the whole game. And this is so paradoxical, Bill, that our adversary, the Chinese, of all people, the Communist Party, is leading the open source movement, and the United States-

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya40:08

      Well, no

   7. JCJason Calacanis40:09

      ... is centralizing it.

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya40:10

      They're leading the open weight movement. It's not open source, just the distinction-

   9. JCJason Calacanis40:14

      Okay

   10. CPChamath Palihapitiya40:14

       ... is important.

   11. JCJason Calacanis40:15

       Yeah, yeah.

   12. DSDavid Sacks40:16

       Look, I, Jacob, I agree with you about the importance of open source because open source means software freedom. You can run the program yourself on your own hardware. You don't have to share... You don't have to give up your data sovereignty. You don't have to give up your privacy to, again, to some monopolist who's gonna be, you know, in bed with the government or the deep state, right? So that's the thing we're all afraid of, and if that's the only AI that's available is from the, you know, monopoly or duopoly, then your choices are to live off the grid and not participate in the modern economy or give up control, right, to some social credit system. So I think the open source is really important, and by the way, that was Elon's instinct in creating OpenAI. He was afraid that Google was gonna monopolize AI, so he's like, "Let's create open AI so that it's not dominated by a single company." But that, that is, I think, the right answer here is I know people wanna... I think their instinct to the idea of powerful AI is to clamp down and just control it, but actually you have to have multiple players. That's the only way you're gonna be protected is, is to have multiple players.

   13. CPChamath Palihapitiya41:21

       This next wave of the market evolution I think is going to be extremely high stakes and messy. Nick, just throw this up because I just want these guys to react to it. So this is a company that I just ran into on X called Rogo, and what they did was they created a test bench and a set of evals to be a financial analyst essentially, and tested all of the frontier models. And it was so interesting because they summarized, I read their paper that they published, and I quoted the most interesting part because I see it everywhere now across all evals, which is this one phrase. "There is no single best model anymore. At the top of the leaderboard, Opus 4-7, GPT-5-5, Sonnet-4-6 appear almost indistinguishable, separated by less than," in this case, you know, "three-tenths of a percentage point overall. Read superficially, the results suggest convergence. Three frontier systems reaching roughly the same level of capability." Okay, why is that interesting? Well, you got trillions of dollars going into each of these guys to trying to create these next superbrain, but increasingly, our existing set of evals and our existing capabilities

   14. JCJason Calacanis42:31

       When applied on these models, roughly produce the same thing, which theoretically says that these things are getting commoditized way too quickly, and then you'd say, "Well, what's the ROI on all this incremental spend?" Which is a very interesting economic and investment question. So I don't know, like Gurley, what do you think happens if these evals continue to asymptote and we need more and more and more money for training?

   15. BGBill Gurley42:54

       Some of the smarter people in the open source community have suggested to me that we need more open source connectors of types. So MCP, uh, is actually run by the Linux Foundation, and if you think about any surface area where a model might interact with other software, the more of those connectors that can be open source and commoditized, it would low-- This is what Google did with Kubernetes, uh, to, to try and commoditize where workflows live off of AWS and to make it easy to migrate. And so the more you can create systems that make that type of exchange you just described super easy, so that you can plug and play the model, and you have to worry about things like context and how does context come in and, and data and, you know, stuff that like Glean and, and Databricks do. But how... Anyway, if you can do that, if you can create more of those connectors like that, then the models become swappable. And certainly with the, with both the model companies trying to move up the stack, you have massive desire from the app layer players to try and figure this out. And we already, you know, have watched what Cursor's doing in playing with their own model and being forced to kinda reckon with the fact that they're coming up the stack fast. So I think that's a really good insight that this gentleman shared with me, and I think w- the founders and developers that are out there should work on more of these interfaces and throw them into the open source world just to make it more exchangeable, swappable.

   16. DSDavid Sacks44:27

       Is there an issue right now with we don't have a good harness for open source? I mean, the way that like Claude is a harness for O3.7.

   17. JCJason Calacanis44:34

       That it is part of it. Yeah, there's people making open source versions of this or building companies around harnessing and building the integrations into it. But open source is always like the last to build the fit and finish around the product. They focus on the core of the product, right? So like Linux for your desktop never really took off because the interface was never polished, the UI was never like perfect. But there are companies building that, and I'll just... I'll show you one company that we invested in. This is a company called Abacus, and they had a very simple idea. They came up with their own hardware stack. They came up with their own, uh, platform, and now they are sold out of these boxes that they're building for insurance, healthcare, and everybody wants to run AI inside their organization and then start building their own models. We actually incubated this in our incubator, and you can check it out, goabacus.co. They're just basically saying a- and organizations cannot get enough of this product. It is crazy how savvy these organizations are getting. And Chamath, you're doing it with eighty ninety as well, I think, where they're just like, "We have to build headless products so that we don't get locked into any one provider."

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya45:48

       Whenever we go into the Fortune 1000, we never compete with OpenAI or Anthropic. They'll have a preference sometimes of what they wanna see under the hood, so our control plane can basically hot swap, as Bill said, between one or the other. We've also started to lay the seeds for open source and open weights. But the reason is because they don't wanna be tied into one of these critical frontier labs. They wanna be able to ride the wave of innovation, but they're afraid of two things. They're afraid that one technology leapfrogs the other too quickly for them to participate, and they pick the wrong one. And the second thing that they're increasingly afraid of is terms of service and being at the sake of a frontier lab and a political philosophy that they may be in the crosshairs of accidentally, right? So you're a hospital system in Canada, you support the euthanasia laws in Canada, but this frontier model in America says, "Nope, can't do it, so now we shut you off," right? That's an, an, an example. I'm not saying one is right or wrong. It's just to illustrate the case. So a lot of the folks that we see now in the Fortune 1000 and increasingly the global 1000, they want, as Gurley said, abstraction above it. They wanna sit, as Sacks said, in a control plane. They wanna see, be at this level, and they wanna have the flexibility because they don't know how it's gonna shake out. They see all the money being invested at the model layers, but they see the model quality asymptote. So they're like, "Wait a minute. What are we supposed to do?" Just from a risk perspective.

   19. JCJason Calacanis47:12

       And, and regula- regulated industries are particularly sensitive to these kind of issues you're bringing up, and these are good-

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:18

       Hugely, hugely sensitive in regulated industries

   21. JCJason Calacanis47:19

       And so if you just follow what finance, healthcare, you know, a- and, and those kind of folks are doing, they're just like, "This has to be on-prem." W- and they're very concerned about a data leak, and they're very concerned about HIPAA compliance. They're very concerned-

   22. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:32

       Totally

   23. JCJason Calacanis47:32

       ... about training a model.

   24. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:33

       Totally.

   25. JCJason Calacanis47:33

       Like, what if, you know, all of a sudden somebody does, you know, a, a query or, or writes a prompt and it pulls some information from that Canadian [chuckles] healthcare system, and all of a sudden somebody gets a result and... That sounds farcical. Remember Stable Diffusion-

   26. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:50

       No, no, no, no. You're, you're onto it

   27. JCJason Calacanis47:50

       ... built themselves on Getty, on Getty Images?

   28. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:54

       Yeah.

   29. JCJason Calacanis47:54

       And the, all of a sudden, the Getty image watermark [chuckles] was in the output. Like these systems-

   30. CPChamath Palihapitiya47:59

       Look, to be fair, you see Anthropic and OpenAI in all of these Fortune 1000s at the developer layer. 'Cause most of the developers have their own credit cards. They're allowed to sign up for them. You eventually wrap them in an enterprise license. So it's a typical PLG-led market motion like we saw in Slack. We've seen it everywhere. The interesting thing is not that, but it's the unwind that happens then when you have these huge licenses, you have these huge buckets of spend. You can't really tick and tie it together. The CEOs then wake up and are told by the CFO, "Hey, FYI, here's where we are." Uber was one example. A secondI don't know, Nick, if you have this tweet, but from Vivek Garipalli, the founder of Clover, yeah, this was just yesterday, overheard from a Fortune 20 company CEO asked for a billion in AI-generated OpEx savings at the beginning of the year, so we're six months in. The team has spent $200 million on tokens and with minimal results. And so now they're in this weird motion now where the CEO is pulling [chuckles] the budget back, and now you're having to cut the licenses. You just saw Microsoft announce that they're killing the Claude licenses. It's a super dynamic market right now, and I don't think we know what the terminal solution looks like.
6. 59:56 – 1:34:54

   The Great AI Jobs Debate: Dario and Sam Altman flip their rhetoric, Goldman CEO says no AI job apocalypse

   1. JCJason Calacanis59:56

      missed you, brother.

   2. DSDavid Sacks59:56

      If we're gonna transition to the next topic, there is some evidence that Dario is mitigating his doomer rhetoric. Did you see this?

   3. JCJason Calacanis1:00:03

      Yeah, uh, let me get to it. Yeah, yeah.

   4. DSDavid Sacks1:00:05

      Okay.

   5. JCJason Calacanis1:00:05

      I'll guide, I'll guide to it here. All right. We, we gotta, have to talk for the 16th time in the last 18 months [laughs] about AI's impact on labor because, again, this chaotic, schizophrenic interpretation of the data continues. Cloudflare, as we talked about last week, shout out Matt Prince, ele- uh, he's, he's Chamath's, uh, favorite CEO. 11 hund-

   6. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:00:27

      Letter of the year. Letter of the year.

   7. JCJason Calacanis1:00:28

      Letter of the year. [laughs] He cut 20%

   8. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:00:30

      He wins the award for the letter of the year.

   9. JCJason Calacanis1:00:31

      [laughs] 1100, making friends every week, Chamath, here on the program. So they both blamed AI spec- explicitly and specifically, and Zuck then paired his 8,000... cuts at Meta with the fact that he has put, uh, spyware on everybody's laptop to study every employee to make their training data better. That got leaked, and people thought, "Hey, that's a Black Mirror episode. We're, we're working at Meta in order to, you know, get our two-year severance package." But on the other side of the table, Goldman Sachs', uh, CEO, David Solomon, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times. "I'm the CEO of Goldman Sachs, period. The AI job apo- apocalypse is overblown, period." Obviously, he might be [chuckles] fighting for that Anthropic or OpenAI IPO in the, the coming months, or maybe he's doing it right now. He made three points: AI won't eliminate 25% of jobs. It's gonna automate 25% of work hours, and workers will fill that time with higher level tasks. Obviously, that didn't happen in the case of Zuckerberg's layoffs. Just because a job can be replaced doesn't mean it will be. Bank tellers increased after ATMs. Live entertainment became more popular after TV, and the US labor market creates and destroys 25 to 35 million jobs annually, and the gross churn dwarfs net losses. New categories like agentic AI management are already hiring, yada, yada, yada. Uh, a publication called Fortune is apparently still publishing AI slop, and they say both Sam Altman and Dario have walked back [chuckles] their AI job apocalypse predictions as they gear up for an IPO. Sacks, have at it. W- You know, you've been saying, uh, and your prediction was you took the other side, "Hey, we're gonna create more jobs." There was, uh, a recent, one of the job boards put out some stats that the number of software jobs is going up, the number of listings of other jobs going down. So I guess you're probably in the camp of creative destruction and churn at this point, Sacks?

   10. DSDavid Sacks1:02:37

       Well, I mean, I think you should be giving me more credit than that 'cause my most contrarian take back in January on our predictions show is that AI would lead to job gains, not job loss. And over the past week, you've now seen the narrative shift, I'd say almost completely towards that position. So you have the CEO of Goldman Sachs writing this in The New York Times. You know, I don't think he'd be doing that if he felt like he was completely stepping out on a limb. Maybe even more importantly, you had Sam and even Dario now walking back their claims of massive job loss, and they explained why. Dario said it's kind of like the 25% of work hours thing. He said that AI might automate away 90% of someone's tasks, but the other 10% will expand to do a whole bunch of new, new tasks and new things, which is very similar to the, the types of, of arguments that people like me have been saying, and actually that Jensen's been saying, that just because you automate away some tasks doesn't mean that you automate away the purpose of a job. And now the worker is freed up to do new things, to do the higher complexity tasks that David Solomon, the Goldman CEO, is talking about. So the fact that Dario is now walking this back and coming around to my position, I think that that's kind of amazing. And, uh, where do I go to get my apology, you know?

   11. JCJason Calacanis1:04:02

       Well, we'll, we'll, we're gonna have an apol-

   12. DSDavid Sacks1:04:04

       [laughs]

   13. JCJason Calacanis1:04:04

       We're gonna have an official apology form that you can fill out. It's got checkboxes, "I was wrong," [chuckles] and, uh-

   14. DSDavid Sacks1:04:10

       I mean, some mornings I woke up thinking, "Why am I going out defending these guys?" You know, these idiots. I mean, they're scaring the public with all these dire predictions about an apocalyptic future. There was no data to support that. I mean, we can all debate what's gonna happen in the future, and we probably should be humble about what is gonna happen in the future because we don't completely know, and this industry is very dynamic. But you have to look at what is the data that we have so far on the current situation, and we do not see data that supports massive job loss. You can cite this layoff or that layoff, JCal. Those are anecdotes, and the plural of anecdotes is not data. If you look at the actual data, like Yale Budget Lab did, they said no discernible disruption in the labor market in the last three years due to AI. They've done a comprehensive study. You look at job postings for software engineers, it's up 15% year over year. Their job postings for software developers have, have hit a new three-year high, despite the fact that coding is the single breakout use case of AI this year. So if AI has not caused job elimination for software developers, what category has it caused? I mean, code is now the number one use case, I think, of AI in the enterprise.

   15. JCJason Calacanis1:05:26

       Okay.

   16. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:05:26

       Let's be honest. Over the last five or 10 years, a lot of companies overhired. They mishired. These CEOs did not have a good handle on it. Their OPEX budgets completely got bloated, inflated, and they need to sort of get back to where they were, get back to a fighting weight, and what's this old adage of never-

   17. JCJason Calacanis1:05:49

       Never waste a crisis

   18. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:05:50

       Never let a good crisis go to waste, exactly, and so they point to this thing. It's very simple to say it's AI, it's two letters, and say, "We're gonna fire people." But underneath that is not AI 'cause we know this. It hasn't done anything measurable yet at the end consumption of these tokens. Nobody is standing there and saying, "Look at my filing. Here is the lift that I have gotten." Nobody has said that yet. That's very important to observe, and so instead, what people are doing is realizing, "Okay, I have this cover now to go and clean up what was very poor management and mismanagement over the last five and 10 years, where I overhired and I mishired." That's what's happening today.

   19. JCJason Calacanis1:06:29

       Okay, Bill Gurley, I'm gonna let you chime in here. You've got two besties saying, "Hey, this is all hogwash. It's AI washing. These jobs were just..." You know, the strategy, obviously, in Silicon Valley was to hire-

   20. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:06:41

       They need a scapegoat. They need a scapegoat

   21. DSDavid Sacks1:06:43

       Yeah.

   22. JCJason Calacanis1:06:43

       They hired two years ahead of time, build for the future, and it was a vanity metric, and you were blocking talent from working on other startups or competitors. The Google strategy-

   23. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:06:52

       That's the thing. Hold on. Wait, wait, wait. You just said the critical thing. That is exactly why they did it.

   24. JCJason Calacanis1:06:56

       Yes, that was the sh- explicit strategy from Google.

   25. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:06:58

       That's the actual strategy.

   26. JCJason Calacanis1:06:59

       Yeah.

   27. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:06:59

       These guys were awash in cash.And so part of it was you were just hoarding talent-

   28. JCJason Calacanis1:07:04

       Yes

   29. CPChamath Palihapitiya1:07:04

       ... or what you thought was talent.

   30. JCJason Calacanis1:07:06

       Yes, and just keeping them off the market.

Episode duration: 1:34:56