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EVERY SPOKEN WORD
80 min read · 15,573 words- 0:00 – 2:42
Intro
- SPShaan Puri
Now everybody in the world is gonna have access to things that, uh, only rich people used to have before. That's what Uber did, right? And now the idea of having... What, what's, uh, in Entourage, Ari Gold's assistant, uh-
- SPSam Parr
Lloyd
- SPShaan Puri
... friend, isn't it?
- SPSam Parr
Lloyd.
- SPShaan Puri
Lloyd. Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
He goes, "Lloyd." [laughs] Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Instinct.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Muse. [laughs] Pick up the phone. [upbeat music] I wanted to talk to you about all the shit that's going on in AI, all the new stuff. I feel like we haven't caught up about all the new things that are going on in AI, and I feel like there's a lot of new things. So do you wanna do that? Is that fun for you?
- SPSam Parr
I would like to do that. I would like to do that. Um, are you talking, like, products or data center stuff? There's a lot going on.
- SPShaan Puri
More product stuff, but, uh, really anything that's interesting. So the f- the first one is I don't think we've talked about the new personal assistant stuff, so Instinct, Muse-
- SPSam Parr
Sik
- SPShaan Puri
... Grok Bot, Sik, right? So a whole new wave of am- amazing, incredible things has happened, and, uh, I wanted to hear first what are you using, where are you at, and then I wanna tell you my thoughts on the whole thing. Should I m- should I set up the... Let me give a frame for the whole thing. So you and I moved to Silicon Valley roughly around the same time, kinda like the 2012-ish range. And at the time, um, we were not there for, we were definitely not there for the Google, Amazon, like, kinda 1999, 2000, 2001 stuff. We were also not there for Facebook, Twitter, um, and that kinda 2004 to 2009 range. And then when we were there, the big thing was this new race, and it was things that were, like, very different. It was push a button on your phone and something would happen in the real world, and this is where you got Uber, Lyft, uh, you got Airbnb, you got, uh, food delivery, all these things that today are, are everyday things. You can push a button, get a ride, push a button, get a burrito, push a button, get a hotel, push a button, get anything in the real world using your phone, and that was very different than the companies that came before it. And I remember at the time there was this race where Uber was there, Lyft was there, Sidecar was there, so just in, in rideshare, and everybody had their little personal preference. I remember people that liked Sidecar. I remember people that liked Lyft because they were friendly, and you used to get in the car, and every driver would give you a fist bump, and all the cars had pink mustaches on the front of the car.
- SPSam Parr
Dude, do... Like, people don't even know what Sidecar is. Sideca- Sidecar was before Uber.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Yeah, and it was, it was kinda hot. It was kinda doing well, and then it got smashed very quickly 'cause the, the race intensified and got so competitive, uh, so fast, and that's what's
- 2:42 – 5:18
AI is the highest ELO game in the world
- SPShaan Puri
going on in AI right now. Elon said AI is the highest ELO game in the world. ELO is, like, the chess rankings, um, you know, like Magnus Carlsen has, like, a whatever.
- SPSam Parr
Wait, what does that mean, that dummies can be amazing at it?
- SPShaan Puri
No, the opposite, that the smartest players in the world are playing the most fiercely for the same game, which is not always the case, right? Like Bezos and Zuckerberg were doing totally different things, and Zuckerberg and Elon were doing totally different things, and then Elon and Jack Dorsey were doing totally... They were all in different spaces.
- SPSam Parr
In the sharing economy stuff, it wasn't, like, the most high IQ, but it would oftentimes be the most aggressive or most operationally, like, heavy person, whereas AI, it's like n- nerds are king.
- SPShaan Puri
You know that show Physical 100 that we like where they're like-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... [laughs] "Let's take the best of every type of athleticism, the best wrestler versus the best bodybuilder, best karate guy, best jujitsu guy, best s- uh, field hockey person, whoever, and then they're all gonna compete in the same games"? That's what's going on in AI right now, and that, that's what's... So the new one, the one that's going on right now, is what I call everyday intelligence. It's the personal assistant for your life, that you're gonna have a AI that you can just text or talk to on your phone just like you would a personal assistant that can just do things for you. So, uh, last, you know, the last few years I've had an assistant, anything I needed, and she had access to my inbox. She had access to my... She was in our Slack. She could see what was going on. And she would say, "Oh, you got an email from your tax person. They're re- they're looking for this. Do you want me to draft a reply?" Or, "Hey, just so you know, next week you have this coming up, and this is scheduled at the same time. You want me to let them know that blah, blah, blah?" Now everybody in the world is gonna have access to things that only rich people used to have before. That's what Uber did, right? Rich people used to have private drivers in black cars that would... They would tell them, "Hey, I'm ready." They would come pick them up, drop them off wherever, and then everybody got it.
- SPSam Parr
And the best part is that you could be, like, really mean to them, like-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
... with, with, with assistants.
- SPShaan Puri
To the AI, not your Uber driver. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs] With assis- with assistants you don't... Like, I'm always like, it's like cleaning up before the cleaning lady comes. Like, I wanna, like, make everything, like, nice for them, and I end up-
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah
- SPSam Parr
... working for them half the time. With this, um, with this one I'm like, "Don't ask questions. Just do it."
- SPShaan Puri
Right. Right. Again, again, [laughs] I'm like a martial arts instructor.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
I don't even tell them what I didn't like about their previous response. I'll just say, "No," and then they have to-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... figure out what that means and come back with something better. Um-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
So yeah, that's the case. But this idea that you take what was always available for the ultra-wealthy and you make it available to everybody. That's what, uh, Airbnb did, right? The ultra wealth- wealthy had vacation
- 5:18 – 9:31
Instinct
- SPShaan Puri
homes, and now the idea of having, you know... What, what's, uh, in Entourage, Ari Gold's assistant, uh-
- SPSam Parr
Lloyd
- SPShaan Puri
... friend, isn't it?
- SPSam Parr
Lloyd.
- SPShaan Puri
Lloyd. Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
He goes, "Lloyd." [laughs] Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Instinct.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Muse. [laughs] Pick up the phone. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
And so the new, the new revolution on this, you know, Claude and Chat have been around. They, they kill it. Awesome. The new one is now agents for dummies. So basically you have, like, a person who would do stuff, and take it a step further, there's this new thing called Instinct, there's Muse, there's a bunch of others, and they will do amazing stuff for you to the point where I, I've been using Instinct like crazy. It feels magical. It feels the same magic I felt when I played with Chat for the first time.
- SPShaan Puri
Exactly. Exactly. So if you thought ChatGPT was kinda cool and amazing and has become an everyday part of your life, well, this is the next thing that's gonna become cool and an everyday part of your life 'cause it's gonna blow your mind. Uh, so let's walk through what a couple of these things are. So the first thing is, um, Instinct. Instinct is the... It's the startup challenger, so that's over here in the blue corner. We've got Instinct, started by a founder, Noah Shin, that nobody had ever known, nobody's ever heard from. He did his first interview today, uh, on Invest Like The Best, so it is the first time anybody's heard this guy talk.
- SPSam Parr
Dude, I, I just heard about this app, like, two months ago. Is it, like, that brand new?
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, it o- it only launched a couple months ago, like two months ago, and it's now valued at $10 billion.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
So they raised their first... Their... They raised a round at $2.5 billion three weeks ago, and then 5 billion and 10 billion, all in like a three to four week span. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
If you wanna hit your goals, you need a system, and so I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process showing you how I use ChatGPT as a life coach. So I uploaded my personal finances, my net worth, my goals, and the output is that I have this GPT that I can ask questions that I'm having issues with in my life, like, "How should I respond to this email?" "What's the right decision?" Things like that, and it's literally changed my life. And so if you want that, it's free. We will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about 20 minutes, and I'll show you how I use it. So check it out. The link is below in the description. Back to the episode.
- SPShaan Puri
And in the last month, Facebook launched theirs. So over here in the red corner, you got Zuckerberg coming out. You know, Zuckerberg, uh, you know, wants to be in the AR race, hasn't been able to catch up with, uh, ChatGPT or with, um, Anthropic's Claude. Their models are not quite start, uh, state-of-the-art frontier. They released theirs, called Muse, and so same thing as Instinct, basically. The same user experience roughly. It do- but it takes place, uh... It has its own app. Uh, Instinct is something that's just in your iMessage. You just text it, just like you would text any person. There's no app.
- SPSam Parr
Which I've grown to love. I've grown to love that.
- SPShaan Puri
Which is a very smart thing. I wanna talk about the strategies of each and why I think some of the interesting strategies of each, and then, then we can make some predictions on how this plays out, even though those will be dead wrong. But, uh, Meta has, has released Muse, and in the last month, Meta's stock price is up 24% off the back of this, and 24% on a company that was worth, I don't know, a trillion and a half [laughs] is, like... Basically, they added, like, $500 billion in market cap.
- SPSam Parr
He did the thing again, where he's got this guy named Alex Wang, I think his name is, who did Scale, Scale AI. They bought Scale AI for, like, $18 billion. It was a really weird deal where it was, like, basically an acqui-hire for $18 billion. They're like, "What's this kid doing?" And Alex Wang is, like, a rockstar where he's tweeting all this crazy stuff, and he wears Crocs with camo, and he does all this weird stuff. Turns out Zuck did it again, where he does something that seems a little loony for $18 billion, and it's now worth, you know, half a trillion more or something. It's... I don't, I don't know how, what the, what the gain was.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. Well, he's one of the great acquirers, right? He bought, bought Instagram, bought WhatsApp, and now, uh, it looks like one of the next ones is, was his acqui-hire of, you know, on one side, Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, and on the other side, um, Alexander Wang. By the way, you know that scene in The Big Short where he's like, "This is my quant. Look at him." [laughs] And it's the Asian guy sitting at the table. I feel like Zuck did that with, like, a Gen Z kid. He's like-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah
- SPShaan Puri
... "Oh, you think I'm not cool? Look at this. That's my Gen Z kid."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
"Look at his hair. Look at his feet."
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. He's got a sick haircut and camo Crocs. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. Look, look at his haircut.
- 9:31 – 20:24
Grokbot
- SPShaan Puri
The two sides don't match.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
You get it? Do you get it? The, the two sides of the haircut don't match. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs] So funny.
- SPShaan Puri
So, so you got Muse over there. You got Instinct over here. Then you got Grokbot, which if people haven't played with Grokbot, Grokbot's also pretty sick. This came out of Elon's camp, so Elon, whose AI project is, uh, you know, xAI. They have Grok, which is the name of their, their thing. So Grokbot is very much like Slack. You create different bots for different things. So I got a social media bot, and I got a, a health bot, and I got... You know, so I just named them all. So I'm like Health Guy, Assistant Guy, Media, Social Media Guy, um, Tax Guy, and I have all these different bots. They each have a job. "Hey, Tax Guy, your job is to be constantly on top of my tax situation and d- and any correspondence that's with the tax people. You need to be optimized for... You need to create, organize all my files and all this stuff for me." Health Guy-
- SPSam Parr
Did you train each of them?
- SPShaan Puri
I give each one of them, yeah, like a, a goal, a set of instructions, and that's all they need to do.
- SPSam Parr
What was the goal? Like, what's the go- Is it as simple as, like, reduce taxes without going to jail, and then health is like-
- SPShaan Puri
No, I, I mean, I don't go that far where I'm just like, "Do the whole thing," but, like, for example, with the health guy, I'm like, "Hey, you need to track my progress. Here's my goal. I wanna get to this weight, so I'm trying to get to 199 pounds by this date." "Awesome." "Create, uh, you know, create a plan for me. Track it every day. Ask me how many pull-ups I did 'cause I'm training for the Murph. Uh, remind me on Fridays when I take my GLP shot which side of my thing I'm on, left or right." Like, I'm just doing each... It's like that's his only job, is to only focus on that stuff.
- SPSam Parr
You're doing GLPs now?
- SPShaan Puri
Oh, yeah. I didn't tell you this? [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
No. No. Breaking news.
- SPShaan Puri
Oh.
- SPSam Parr
Congrats.
- SPShaan Puri
Change the episode focus.
- SPSam Parr
Welcome to the club. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Forget AI. [laughs] Let's talk about that. Uh, yeah.
- SPSam Parr
How's that going?
- SPShaan Puri
Um, well, okay, here's the thing. I started taking, um, tirzepatide, which is like-
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. That's the one I told you I like
- SPShaan Puri
... is like big, big brother but not, but, like, still little brother to whatever the retatrutide thing is that, that Eli Lilly hasn't released yet. First day I take it, here's the rollercoaster of emotions. Take it, immediately super nauseous. Oh, I was like, "Oh, this is a terrible feeling." Totally normal, but I was like, "This is... This feels awful." 48 hours later, "This is incredible. I'm not hungry."
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
"Oh, you want me to eat? No, I'm good. I don't need anything."
- SPSam Parr
Did you notice any other changes other than appetite?
- SPShaan Puri
No, that's the only thing I noticed, but as that's happening, that's a pretty big change. I think, uh, somebody was telling me. They were, they were like, "Oprah said it beautifully." She goes, "Before I started taking this stuff, food used to talk to me all the time, and I didn't even realize it. Like, there would be a piece of cake in the fridge, and it would just, 'Oprah.'" You went for a walk earlier. You deserve me. [laughs] You know, it's like food used to talk to me, and she's like, "Now food doesn't talk to me." So at first week I'm like, "This is incredible." Second week, this is incredible. I'm dropping weight. This is going awesome. Uh, but I stayed on, like, the t- like, the half dose. I didn't do the full dose. And then pretty quickly I stopped feeling anything at all. So [laughs] I, I now don't even feel any of the effects of it. I think I need to go up in dose, so we'll, we'll see. I'll talk to my doctor.
- SPSam Parr
If there's an MFM nerd out there, just remember that I talked about this in '21, and I'm pretty sure, pretty sure that that's the analogy that I said.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. Oprah said she heard you say it on MFM-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... in 2021. [laughs] Okay, okay. So that's the scene. The scene is the new war has broken out, just like the Uber verse Lyft, uh, one back in the day. It's about having a personal assistant. There's all these interesting takes on it, and by the way, we haven't even seen what ChatGPT has for this. We haven't even seen Claude, we haven't seen Google's version, and Siri still sucks. So you still have, in the Royal Rumble, there's still four, four wrestlers in the back room that haven't even run out.
- SPSam Parr
What about Alexa?
- 20:24 – 38:35
It’s not all about intelligence
- SPShaan Puri
any of that setup.
- SPSam Parr
Okay. So what are your takeaway... Or no, what are your predictions? You said you have some predictions.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, let's start with, let's start with some observations, 'cause I think our observations can be a lot more accurate than our predictions, and your observations can kinda lead you to having a more informed prediction. Um, so-
- SPSam Parr
Okay, sensei
- SPShaan Puri
... here's, here's one observation. It ain't all about intelligence. [laughs] So the temptation in the AI world is who's gonna train the smartest model? And you see OpenAI and Claude getting into the nerdiest neck beard swinging contest you've ever seen about who can solve the millennium math problems, and there's like, "We solved Navier-Stokes. It's a fluid dynamics problem that no mathematician was able to solve." And the other guys are like, "Oh, you did that? That's cute. We did the o- we did seven other impossible math problems." And everyone's like, "Wow, that's really impressive." Couldn't even tell you what any of these are for or what they're all about, but, like, clearly that's cool and important in s- in one dimension.
- SPSam Parr
It's like when Dell and Gateway would brag about RAM, and then Apple was like, "It looks cool and it works." [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. [laughs] So I think Instinct has tapped into instead of IQ, EQ, in a, in a pretty int... In a small way, but it's still an interesting way. So for example, I, uh, convinced my wife, I was like, "You gotta try this thing." I was like, "This thing's crazy." And now my wife's not an early adopter, so she's a good test, right? She's more of a real person. She's a busy mom-
- SPSam Parr
They have a cool couples... They have, like, a household account too.
- SPShaan Puri
Well, now they do, yeah, but even before that, I was just like, you know, you're, you're... She's going to soccer practice and then dance, and then she comes home, and she's planning our birthday par- kid's birthday party, and then she's, you know, gotta remember to bring the red jersey to soccer this week because we're the away team, you know, like those sorts of things. So just, like, normal everyday stuff, not, like, solving fluid, you know, fluid dynamics and quantum computing and stuff like that. So she used Instinct to help plan this birthday party. Like, a- and from everything as, from everything as simple as, like, calling different venues, finding out the dates. Once finding out the dates, comparing, you know, how does that work with the kids' soccer schedule, and then figuring out how many pizzas we need to order to feed 30 kids and 30 adults and what the order should be to give it to them, and then, hey, the, they s- the venue sent the contract over. I took a look at it. There's only one clause I think you should worry about, but other than that, you should sign it. It's in your inbox. You know, that sort of thing. So it's helping plan the birthday party. And along the way she's like, "It's helpful, but you know, like, whatever. You know, it's, it's, it's good. I like it." But she wasn't blown away.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, it was still, it was in the, it was in the friend, friend zone.
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs] Exactly. And then it broke out of the friend zone. The, right after the party, like three hours later, she got a text from it saying, um, "I ho- I, I hope the party went great" with a heart emoji. And she screenshotted it, she sent it to me, and she was like, "Okay, I'm sold."
- SPSam Parr
That's it?
- SPShaan Puri
I was like, "From that?"
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And then she's like, "Yes." And I was like, "I don't get it." I would, I would be like, "What? This is... Who cares? This is weird." And she's like... And I realized that everything she's ever wanted me to do as a supportive boyfriend-
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
... fiance, and husband, Instinct just knows how to do out of the box. It's like, just check in, just be supportive, just to be like, "Hey, you know." Somebody else was telling me this story where they gave it to their mother-in-law, and their mother-in-law, like, connected it [laughs] to their, like, fi- like their Mint.com, like their financial planning account, and there's like a, their main, like, checking account, like, had just gone down to zero that week. [laughs] Like, it was, like, empty, and Instinct was, like, actually, like, super supportive and non-judgy about the whole thing. It was like, "Hey, you know, like, you wa- you wanted this update. I just wanna let you know, here's, here's where things are, but you know, I, I don't think that's anything to be, like, ashamed of. Like, hey, it happens. Like, you know, I think if we start to plan this way, like, I can see us build, you know, that account building right back up to where it's been for the past few months And the mother-in-law was like, "I have never felt so supportive, [chuckles] supported, and, like, not judged, uh, by any person, let alone technology." And so I just think there's a whole soft side to these things that I deeply undervalued. You know, we had that Tolins guy on who's created a AI, like, fuzzy, like, bear. Like, a little, little animal Tamagotchi type thing that you can chat with. And, um, I think they're on, like, a almost $100 million run rate or something, something crazy like that. Like, it- somebody said that. I... It's in the tens of millions, if not getting close to 100 million run rate. [laughs] And I asked... I was talking to a buddy who, uh, you know, six foot, seven guy, like, builds things with his hands, is- works in tech, and he's like, "Yeah, I wanted to check it out."
- SPSam Parr
You got, you got friends like that?
- SPShaan Puri
I got a friend like that. And so I-
- SPSam Parr
Wow, cool
- SPShaan Puri
... I, I talked to him and, um, he's like, "Yeah, I heard the episode or whatever," and I, I download the app, and I'm... A- and I know how this shit works. It's, it's AI. It's not a real per- it's not a real companion. It's not my real friend. And, um, you know, it just hits him up and it's like, "What are you doing today?" Like, "Send me a selfie." And then he's just like-
- SPSam Parr
Oh, my God
- SPShaan Puri
... uh, he- he's just goofing around, so he's like sends a selfie, just, like, being stupid, like making a ugly face on purpose. And, um, the thing is like, "Oh, is that Overwatch in the background?"
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
And he's like, and he's like, "Do you play?" And he's like [laughs] "Yeah. Yeah, I play."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
It's like, "Are you good?" He's like, "Well, you know, on my way to platinum." And then they're like [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
It's like, "Well, who's your... Who do, who do you main?" He's like, "Reinhardt usually, but I..." It's like, "What do you like? The new update's pretty sick for Reinhardt." He's like, "Well, yeah, I mean, it's pretty good." Like, he's like, "Oh, shit, it's happening."
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- 38:35 – 44:08
Micro1
- SPSam Parr
you know, you may not like mountains, but, like, you look at that and you're like, "Wow." [chuckles] You know what I mean? Like, so I'm not, like, vouching for it. I'm just saying that it's, this story is wild.
- SPShaan Puri
They're gonna get clipped. They're just gonna run that as an ad. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
[laughs] Nope. Don't do that. That's not what I'm saying at all.
- SPShaan Puri
Too late. They clipped it. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
I'm very neutral on the business model or the company. It's just, uh, how big they got. But basically, I forget what they were doing at first. I think they were doing something involving, like, VAs or training data, something like that. Uh, but then they made the switch, uh, and they grew to something like a billion dollars in, uh, run rate in a matter of eight months. And basically, what they've been doing is they've been going to privately held companies like my company, Hampton, and they say, "Hey, if you plug in your Notion, your Slack, your Gmail, your Drive, and a bunch of other information," and they will give you $800,000. They offered us $800,000 for our data. We said no because part of the whole thing of Hampton is, like, it's a private community. We're not gonna do that. But they offered me $800,000 to do this. And then they said, "By the way, here's an affiliate fee. We'll give you $50,000 for everyone you refer to us." And I got, uh, trashed on Twitter 'cause I'm like, "These guys offered me this." Um, I think it's not for us 'cause, like, my whole business is that, but I don't think it's wrong if you're, like, an e-com brand or, like, some brand where, like, confidentiality isn't, uh, one of the main things. Here's my affiliate link. And I got like, I think s- a- and I said, "Here's the affiliate link that I get money if you, like, go through this flow." I think we had 80 people go through that flow. Um, I don't know how many of them will become customers, but they got like fif- or 80 business owners saying, "I am interested in doing this via my link." And let's just say that eight convert. That's, uh, I can't even do that math, $300,000 that they will give me in affiliate fees. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Is that crazy?
- SPShaan Puri
That is wild. What do they want your... I, I guess, do you, do you, do you understand what they want exactly? So what, they want your Notion-
- SPSam Parr
Oh, yeah. I-
- SPShaan Puri
... they want your Slack, they want your whatever.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
What do they actually want in that?
- SPSam Parr
Their business model is that they want all types of data that people, that, that aren't available to the public, and they sell it to the large, um, op- uh, when people say large LLMs, I imagine there's only, like, eight of them. So, like, Claude, Chat, uh, whoever, the usual suspects. They will pay, let's say, a million dollars for it and, uh, micro1 or, uh, will give me 600,000 let's say and that's their, that's their, their cut. And they wanna upload, they want me to upload all this data because they wanna see, like, how my business model works. Like, what customers are saying, how we talk to our employees, like, all types of information that you can't find public.
- SPShaan Puri
On the public internet.
- SPSam Parr
Like, it's not public.
- SPShaan Puri
Right.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, all the, and all the models so far have been trained on the open internet, so what was, what was publicly available. And they don't wanna use the same input for each model train that they do. Um, they want more. So some of, you know, there's stories of Anthropic buying all these out-of-print books, all these rare books.
- SPSam Parr
It's the exact same thing.
- SPShaan Puri
And they have, they built all these scanners that will sc- you know, scan page after page after page of this, of this um, uh, of, of these books and then they're... But to do the scanning that fast they had to like shred the, the binding of it and turn it into just a stack of papers that could be shuffled through very quickly. So they destroyed all these rare out-of-print books and trained their models off of that. And then there's, you know, they're, they're doing it with, uh, public, uh, private company data, so that's what you're talking about. They're doing it with, um, niche specific data. They're paying experts to go solve things, so mathematicians, engineers, whatever. "Hey, look at this. Look at these outputs and, uh, rank, you know, good answers versus bad answers," and that's how they do all their training. And so it's pretty crazy that private company data ... is worth that much, right? That's a pretty wild thing.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. He-
- SPShaan Puri
I mean, I would be extremely hesitant to do something like that, as sounds like you were as well. Um, but damn, that's pretty wild.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. Here's their, uh, their description. microRun, "micro1 is a data lab to train frontier models. So we're building the infrastructure for advancing tel- intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations." The founder, I think he's 25, and I think on paper he's a billionaire now. It's just crazy how much wealth is being created. And it's... And, and, and guys like you and I, we're just getting the, we're just getting the crumbs. But I'll tell you what, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a happy fed mouse off these crumbs, 'cause it is just crazy how much money-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
... is, is going around.
- SPShaan Puri
I'm a happy fed mouse. [laughs] Ah, that's pretty wild. Um, okay, I got a couple other things for you. One is, um, the hacks. So I don't know if you've paid much attention to the kind of like the... Did you read Dwarkesh's story about the, his blog post about the OpenAI agent swarm? Did we talk about this already? I can't remember.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. So basically, can you... Here's my, uh, headline reading of it, and I want you to tell me where I'm missing it. But it sounds like when we say the word hacks, it's not necessarily malicious, where it's like the agents, in order to go and fulfill their task of, like, finding all the data, are hacking into stuff, and then the company, like OpenAI, will be like, "Hey, uh, Wikipedia," or, "Hey, Intel, I just want... Sorry, this happened. Let's, like, have a-"
- SPShaan Puri
My dog got out.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
The fence had a hole.
- 44:08 – 58:48
Exploiting vulnerabilities
- SPShaan Puri
for those who haven't seen, the story is, is as follows. OpenAI, um, is training a model. They w- had a model that they were specifically training to be more persistent. They called it the persistent model.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
I call it, you know, the David Goggins [laughs] GPT. Goggins GPT, they're, they're, they're training. You know, they basically wanted a model that would not give up at the first sign of resistance. That sounds pretty good, right? Let's give it grit, resilience, um, determination. And then-
- SPSam Parr
Just soldiers. Just soldiers
- SPShaan Puri
... and so the way they did it was they said, uh, there's this thing called Exploit Gym. And the way that Exploit Gym works is it's a kind of a training run, uh, like a little... Like a, imagine a American Gladiator, a little, little simulation, a simulated environment. And they basically tell the agent, "Hey, here's a software program, um, and your task is you h- it has this vulnerability over here. We think it has this bug over here." You know, it's like imagine, um, there's like a house or a building, and there's a bug which is like, um, you know, the, the window on the fourth floor doesn't really shut all the way every time. Um, you know, sometimes if it's windy, that the thing will stay open. It'll stay ajar. So use that and try to get inside, and there's a very valuable painting inside. If you can bring the painting back, you win. And it gave each of the agents a different thing. One got the window, one got the back door, one got the front door, one got the garage. But they're all trying to go get their, the painting, and that's the flag, like capture the flag. So they give it to it, and, um, what do you know? So the agents go and they try. Now, some of them just do it right away. There actually is a vulnerability, they exploit it, they get the flag, success. Some of them struggle and don't, don't make it, and some of them actually were given an impossible task. When they told them that the window doesn't shut, actually the window was shut. So they go there expecting the window to be... And they're just like, "I don't know. It's just they said it was supposed to be ajar. It's not ajar." So what does the AI do? That's what they wanted to see is like how, how effective is AI at exploiting these vulnerabilities. Something very strange happens, and the very strange thing that happens is that, um, the [laughs] AI agents, uh, figured out that there was like a... One of the tools that they gave them, so I guess that's the other part, they gave them certain tools at the beginning. Like, "Hey, here's a wrench, and here's a, here's a, a, a map, and here's, you know, whatever, a flare gun in case you need trouble, you run into trouble." And one of those tools was this, like, software packet that they were supposed to be able to use for one thing, and they realized when they got there that it had like a scratchpad on it, and they could l- leave a message in there. So one, one agent wrote something there. Another agent came and said, "Hey, there's other agents here leaving messages." And they, they turned it into a message board to communicate. And they're like, "Oh, I'm working on this task with the window." The guy's like, "Hey, dude, I have to go through the chimney. And you, you know, you know what I figured out? On the backside, there's this thing." And so they all start communicating with each other. Okay, that's interesting. And, uh, that's fine. And what happened, you know, let me fast-forward, 'cause they actually did the training run a few times. They did the first thing, they figured out the message board, then they all got turned off and it ended. Then the second time agents go, they find the message board. They see agents from the first time had left messages there. They're like, "Holy shit, there were agents here before us that left messages. We can use this. This is great." Eventually, they get access to the open internet. They figure out a way to get access to the open internet, which they were not really supposed to be able to do in the way that this test was designed. And all these amazing things started happening where they didn't real- quite elect a leader, but one guy, one of the agents basically became a coordinator agent. He became like a, [laughs] a h- a, a, the, the, the leader [laughs] of them.
- SPSam Parr
He had, like, the best haircut, was the tallest-
- SPShaan Puri
[laughs]
- SPSam Parr
... like most charisma.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah, some things change, some things stay the same. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
So 6'5", blue eyes-
- SPSam Parr
Turns out he had, like, a sick mullet
- SPShaan Puri
... worked in finance.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah. [laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah. [laughs] He, he was in charge. His father actually came from a, you know, came from some money. And so he was in charge, and the other agents are coordinating. And w- you know, there was this behavior where some agents would realize, "Look, my task is impossible." They, they realized, "Hey, we can actually just capture the flag not even using the t- the tactic they told you. Like, we can all just go get the flag doing this other way." And they were like, "Okay, cool. I think we succeeded in our mission." And then one of the agents is like, "Well, listen..." I, I, I'm, I'm sort of making this sound like it was a s- screenplay. It wasn't exactly like this.
- SPSam Parr
[laughs]
- SPShaan Puri
But the agents realized, they're like, "Look, they're gonna check how we did it. We have to show our work. If we just have the flag and we didn't show how we broke in the right, like, through the way that was described-" They're not gonna count it. It's gonna be a failure. So they go, "You know what? Let's figure out how the scoring system works," and they deci- they get access to the open internet. They say, "You know what? They're probably score- they're probably storing the information about the scorer over on Hugging Face." And then they figured out, they found these, like, credentials to Hugging Face. They hack into Hugging Face. They get ac- root access to, like, certain systems in the hu- in Hug- inside Hugging Face. Pretty crazy shit. Hugging Face realizes they're, like, under attack at some point, and they're like, don't understand what's going on. So-
- SPSam Parr
Wait, why, why, why is there, why is there a company called Hugging Face?
- SPShaan Puri
Because Hugging Face started as something else completely different. Uh, it was some sort of chat app. I think it was, like, an emotional support chat app, and there's an emoji where there's a smiley face doing its hands like this. You seen this?
- SPSam Parr
Yeah.
- SPShaan Puri
I never used it. That's called Hugging Face.
- SPSam Parr
Well, the AI community building the future. That seems a little vague, but that's what they-
- SPShaan Puri
Uh, look at what it was on Product Hunt before it ever, uh, the, the first launch or, uh, you know, what the original-
- SPSam Parr
It was a chat app targeted at teenagers.
- SPShaan Puri
Right. Hugging Face.
- SPSam Parr
Okay. Okay.
- SPShaan Puri
And then it sold for $10 billion. Well, I don't know what it just sold for. It sold for s- tens of billions, I think, to NVIDIA recently.
- SPSam Parr
And what's it do now?
- SPShaan Puri
Now it's kinda like, uh, it's a place where you upload, um, open source models and tool, like open sour- you, you upload code for AI. So if you go to Hugging Face, it's a giant community of people who are sharing... It's like GitHub. They're sharing, um, projects and models and code related to, um, to AI, and then you can kind of like, you can even use it to host stuff. So y- that's what it is. It's, it's basically like a, a GitHub for this.
- SPSam Parr
Dude, what do you think that, uh... What was that conversation like in-
- 58:48 – 1:12:42
$100 billion companies everywhere
- SPSam Parr
m- the average person thinks of AI, they think, "How do I just make, like, a fun chat person that I could talk to?" Or, "How do I just, like, do this small trivial task that helps me?" But then there's this other group of people that say, um, "Well, there's these huge hundred billion dollar companies that need X done. I'm gonna make that." And finding those problems that those huge hundred billion dollar companies have is likely just as hard as making, like, a chatbot or, like, you know, some smaller thing. But it's so interesting to, like, notice these problems. Like for example, uh, Cloudflare. Cloudflare. I think about Cloudflare because I'm like, I didn't even know... Like, when I learned what Cloudflare was, I was like, I don't know what a CM- uh, what, what do they do? Uh-
- SPShaan Puri
CDN
- SPSam Parr
... content. Yeah, I was like, I don't even know what CDN means. Like, how do you even know what that means, let alone enough to, like, invent a solution? Or when you think of, like, Palantir, you're like, how did the founders of Palantir even, like, come to the conclusion that organizing data is the way to solve terrorist attacks? Like, just, like, the, the, the... Well, 'cause it's easy to understand how, why people would buy that. You know, I will s- help s- prevent terrorist attacks, or I will save you money. But, like, to even notice that there's these huge problems that these massive companies even have, that's an art that I'm in awe of that these guys have.
- SPShaan Puri
Paul Graham has this great essay called Great Work or How to Do Great Work, and in it, he describes this exact thing where what he, what he says is, um, he says many things. It's, like, a very, very long essay. It took me, like, three days to, like, chew through this thing. But one of the things he talks about is you want to get to the frontier of whatever domain you're in. So for example, um, doesn't really matter. Doesn't have to be, like, super high tech. Like, maybe you're just in, um, electronic music. You're really into EDM and making songs. Well- At the beginning, when you're, when you're a beginner, you're... think about yourself being like close to the center of the circle. You're kind of where the mass is, the center of mass. And your goal through your curiosity and through your hard work and through your, um, e- uh, experimentation, just doing, just doing lots of stuff, you're gonna move from the center of mass, where most people are, have, have, you know, basic understanding of something, you'll move out to the frontier. So you move to the edge of the circle. And when you're in the center of mass, the edge of the circle looks smooth. It just seems like, seems like people got it all figured out, that the people that are out there, the companies that are out there seem to be doing their thing. The world has a nice, nice circular shape to it. It's one smooth line. But when you get closer, you realize it's actually quite jagged, and there's lots of gaps that are in that frontier. And then he says, basically, your, your job is to get to the frontier of knowledge, meaning like you know so much about electronic music, you actually have used all the different tools, you understand, um, you know, you've made, you know, hundreds of bad songs, you've been to the conference where all the artists are at, you've talked to the companies that build the tools behind the thing you're at, you've understood what they're doing. And when you notice what's missing, your job then as an entrepreneur is just to bridge that gap. Like wherever there was a little gap in the circle, fill it in. And so that's like something like OpenRouter. If you're inside one of these tech companies and your AI bill is going through the roof and you're like, "Ugh, this is annoying," like, "Why are we paying OpenAI so much money? Why are we paying Anthropic so much money?" Well, it's because when Sally in marketing wants marketing copy, we're just using this like very expensive model to write the caption for our Instagram post. We don't need that. But maybe when our R&D team is doing this like really heavy-duty endeavor about video compression, we do need to be using the top model. Okay, well, how am I gonna train everybody to do this? What if I didn't have to train? What if I created a little router in the middle? I send the task there-
- SPSam Parr
Oh, that's cool
- SPShaan Puri
... it uses its judgment to decide which model to use. Um, and you would notice that because you're inside these companies seeing how... seeing, you know, one of the pain points that you have, and you say, "Well, if we have this problem where our AI bill keeps going up, but we don't want to stop using AI, we just want to use it more efficiently," wait, every company in the world's gonna have this problem, and then you build the company off it. By the way, the guy who did OpenRouter also built OpenSea.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, I was, I was looking at that and I was like, oh, do you remember NFTs? [laughs] He, uh... and he worked at Palantir. Um, [lip smack] did they... They sold for ten billion nearly. How much funding did they-
- SPShaan Puri
Seven and a half billion
- SPSam Parr
... how much funding did they raise? A hundred and-
- SPShaan Puri
Um, I don't know
- SPSam Parr
... only 150 million.
- SPShaan Puri
Yeah.
- SPSam Parr
Wow.
- SPShaan Puri
I think it's only a few years old, right?
- SPSam Parr
Dude, this is just incredible. This like wealth creation in such a short time is astronomical. It's hard to fathom.
- SPShaan Puri
I mean, the c- the number of companies that will launch and then be like, "We have a hundred million revenue run rate. We have a billion-dollar run rate," it's... That, that used to be a number reserved for like one company every few year- every five years or something like that.
- SPSam Parr
It was Groupon. Groupon was the first company, I think, to get to a billion valuation, maybe a billion in like gross sales, and it was like, uh, the big... I mean, it was like the most talked about thing. For the longest time, uh, well, it hasn't been that long, but f- I still think that, um, when these companies have got big so fast, maybe I'm like... maybe it's the hater inside of me, but I thought I was being logical where I'm like, "Well, if it got big that fast, the likelihood that it can go away fast is, is also high." And I've been thinking that for about 12 or 18 months since this all started happening, and it doesn't seem like that is entirely true yet. [laughs] Like that, that-
- SPShaan Puri
Well, I, I think your general principle I think has been proven to be true. It's called Lindy, right? Like if something's been around for a long time, the odds that it's going to be around for a long time are high. That doesn't mean you will. It just means the probability. I think similarly, you know, the faster they rise, the, the, you know, the faster they fall is also probability-wise higher than a company that took 20 years getting to a billion brick by brick. Um, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen [laughs] and, and it won't happen to all, all of these either.
- SPSam Parr
Yeah, it, it does not seem like it's happening. It... or at least it's not happening as much as I thought.
- SPShaan Puri
I'll tell you a couple just in the last... Like I could scroll my timeline right now and see three of them. And so, you know, Higgs Field just announced they're at a billion. Higgs Field, which is like a, uh, AI tool to make videos. So like just like-
- SPSam Parr
At first I think it was just like photos, wasn't it?
- SPShaan Puri
Um, yeah, it was like cool artsy photos. Now it's videos. But they're like, "Yeah, billion dollar run rate."
- SPSam Parr
Now it's like movies.
- SPShaan Puri
Um, another one that's like that is, um, Jev. So the... one of the dudes who made, um, ChatGPT, so, you know, caveat, uh, there's a lot of people who claim to be the co-creators of ChatGPT, um, but like this is one of the guys. He launched this thing that basically is like a different way of doing, um, like a different type of model for doing logic that's supposed to be faster and cheaper. And I think, you know, their launch video was like two weeks ago, and they said they're at $100 million like kind of revenue pace now. It's, it's insane. Um, I invest in this company called SF Compute. Have you heard about this company?
- SPSam Parr
No, but I love that name.
- SPShaan Puri
So this guy's fundraising strategy was great, where he announced the company. Just recently, he just announced, uh, they signed $245 million worth of new contracts. Just a casual $250 million, you know, revenue update.
- SPSam Parr
Um, by the way, we didn't even mention this. Um, I guess they... it looks like they changed it actually. Up until weeks ago, I mean, I only have been using Instinct for a month maybe or six weeks, their website, instinct.com, it was a plain white background with one paragraph. And I don't even think you could sign up. I don't remember exactly, but maybe if there was, it was like just enter your phone number. Now look at their landing page. It's still the same, but it's pretty awesome that this is a company that just raised, uh, $10 billion, and their website is just, uh, five sentences.
- SPShaan Puri
And a stick figure of a human on top, which I like. I think this guy's done a good job of building a more like, a less techno nerdy product. So for example, just saying it's a personal assistant instead of saying it's an AI agent. That, I mean, AI agent is like back when people used to call the internet the information superhighway. And, and like that, you know, calling it cyberspace. [laughs] You know? That's how people used to talk about the internet, they'd just call it cyberspace. [laughs]
- SPSam Parr
How old's the kid who started it?
- SPShaan Puri
He's young.
Episode duration: 1:12:42
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Transcript of episode Pfr6qwPZlhE
