back to indexEp4. Tesla FSD 12, Imitation AI Models, Open vs Closed AI Models, Delaware vs Elon, & Market Update
Chapters
0:0 Intro + Phase Shifts
3:42 Tesla FSD 12 & Imitation Learning
28:32 AI Model Improvements | Open vs Closed Models
49:10 Elon Musk Delaware Court Case
58:30 Macro Market Outlook
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I would make the argument that every company in Delaware 00:00:07.540 |
because they could be sued in a future derivative law 00:00:11.460 |
suit for the risk they've taken by staying in Delaware. 00:00:35.880 |
People loved when you were here last week in person, 00:00:47.560 |
It's been a lot of action the last couple of weeks. 00:00:57.320 |
a part of the venture capital industry in the startup world 00:01:04.800 |
someone that likes constant learning, it's really amazing. 00:01:10.400 |
the stuff I'm listening to podcasts on every day, 00:01:27.360 |
to work in kind of these exponentials, right? 00:01:30.400 |
I mean, you and I both know every sell-side model 00:01:32.920 |
on Wall Street has linear deceleration and growth rates. 00:01:44.320 |
that the biggest investment opportunities really 00:01:50.040 |
I mean, Satya talks about all the value capture 00:01:53.360 |
occurs in the two- to three-year period around phase shifts. 00:01:56.280 |
But it's hard to forecast in those moments, right? 00:01:59.120 |
I mean, that's when you see these massive deltas, 00:02:03.960 |
And I just went back and looked at, for example, 00:02:09.400 |
estimate of the smartest people covering NVIDIA day-to-day 00:02:22.200 |
OK, they were off almost by a factor of 3 or a 4, right? 00:02:27.760 |
The EPS at the beginning of last year, the earnings per share, 00:02:33.720 |
And now it looks like it's going to be $25, right? 00:02:43.240 |
I mean, just like, you know, very, very rare. 00:02:46.560 |
Like, you know, once a decade, maybe, you know, 00:02:52.480 |
So, you know, and I've had investors say to me 00:02:55.320 |
when the stock was at 200, hell, you and I talked about this. 00:03:03.640 |
are calling me every day saying, have you sold it yet? 00:03:07.160 |
Our general view is that if the numbers are going up, 00:03:10.120 |
so if our numbers are higher than the street's number 00:03:12.520 |
for whatever variant perception that we have, right, 00:03:15.400 |
then the stock is going to continue to go higher. 00:03:18.080 |
At some point, the street will get ahead of itself 00:03:29.480 |
But of course, some things will be wildly overestimated 00:03:33.400 |
and some things will be wildly underestimated, 00:03:44.480 |
we teased on the pod, I think at the start last time, 00:03:48.760 |
that I had taken a test ride in Tesla's new FSD-12. 00:04:05.400 |
both together and with some folks on the Tesla team. 00:04:21.920 |
Moving it from this really C++ deterministic model 00:04:31.000 |
that's really driven by imitation learning, right? 00:04:44.360 |
I think there's a lot of skepticism in the world. 00:04:46.680 |
Like, is this going to be, you know, something different? 00:04:50.040 |
You sent me a video and I have tons of these videos, 00:04:54.360 |
you know, floating around at the moment, you know, 00:05:08.120 |
react to this video and give us your thoughts. 00:05:10.720 |
You know, I think you've been a longtime observer 00:05:14.680 |
I might even describe you as a bit of a critic of, 00:05:17.800 |
you know, or a skeptic when it comes to full self-driving. 00:05:36.080 |
is they would say that, yeah, we're 98% of the way 00:05:39.880 |
there are 99, but the last 1% is gonna take as long 00:05:47.920 |
it's nearly impossible to code for all of the corner cases. 00:05:53.800 |
And the corner cases are where you have problems, 00:06:01.640 |
until this point in time was one where you would 00:06:08.680 |
every circumstance, every case in like a piece of software. 00:06:15.920 |
And that ends up being a patchwork kind of a, 00:06:19.920 |
just a big nasty, you know, rat's nest of code. 00:06:32.280 |
What we learned this week is that they've completely 00:06:35.360 |
tossed all of that out and gone with a neural network model 00:06:40.360 |
where they're uploading videos from their best drivers. 00:06:44.720 |
And literally the videos are the input and the output 00:06:48.480 |
is the steering wheel, the brake and the gas pedal. 00:06:56.360 |
as Occam's razor, which has been around forever in science. 00:07:00.680 |
But the simplified version of it is a simpler approach 00:07:05.680 |
is much more likely to be the optimal approach, right? 00:07:09.360 |
And when I fully understood what they had done here, 00:07:13.640 |
it seems to me this approach has a much better chance 00:07:18.400 |
of going all the way and of being successful. 00:07:21.640 |
And certainly of being maintainable and reasonable. 00:07:29.240 |
It requires them to upload a hell of a lot of video, 00:07:33.540 |
But, and the other thing that's just so damn impressive 00:07:45.040 |
made a decision so radical to kind of throw out 00:07:51.320 |
And it sounds like the genesis of that may have been, 00:07:56.640 |
but they got to the point where they're like, 00:07:59.580 |
this is gonna be way better and threw the whole thing out. 00:08:02.840 |
And I think about four months after they made the change, 00:08:11.520 |
So we can put that in the notes and people can watch it. 00:08:22.040 |
it's got a much higher chance of being wildly successful. 00:08:35.440 |
this model does not have a deterministic view 00:08:40.160 |
I mean, McCarthy has talked about this before, 00:08:43.360 |
you know, before you have to label a stoplight, right? 00:08:46.440 |
So you would basically take the data from the car. 00:08:53.840 |
You would say, this is a, you know, this is a stoplight. 00:08:58.640 |
would have to be to identify that you're at a stoplight. 00:09:02.400 |
Then the second thing is you would write all of this C++ 00:09:12.840 |
And so for all of that second half of the model, 00:09:18.200 |
you know, the heuristics, the planning and the execution, 00:09:25.080 |
And that was like, you would just chase, you know, 00:09:41.480 |
In fact, they just watched the driver's behavior. 00:09:44.320 |
So the driver's behavior is actually the label. 00:09:48.320 |
It says, when we see pixels like this on the screen, 00:09:53.600 |
which I thought is just an extraordinary break. 00:09:56.120 |
And I don't think there's a deep appreciation 00:10:00.560 |
because we've had 11 versions of what came before it, 00:10:03.720 |
those were just slightly better patchwork models. 00:10:09.800 |
we learned was that the rate of improvement of this 00:10:14.320 |
is order of magnitude five to 10X better per month 00:10:24.040 |
the whole old thing and put a new thing in is just crazy. 00:10:31.520 |
One, in terms of just how they got this going, 00:10:35.640 |
you know, a lot of people I fear equate AI with LLMs 00:10:40.640 |
because it was really the arrival of ChatGPT and the LLM 00:10:45.680 |
that I think introduced what AI was capable of 00:10:49.480 |
to most people, but those are language models. 00:10:54.640 |
And these AI models that Tesla's used for FSD-12 00:11:08.040 |
So there's some proprietary code there at Tesla, 00:11:11.720 |
but, you know, AI has been evolving for a very long time. 00:11:15.320 |
And this notion of neural networks was around 00:11:18.000 |
before the LLMs popped out, which is why, you know, 00:11:20.800 |
they had started on this four years ago or whatever, right? 00:11:24.560 |
But the foundational elements, you know, are there. 00:11:31.920 |
They use the big NVIDIA clusters to do the training. 00:11:49.720 |
Yeah, no, it's a, to me, if we dig in a little bit 00:11:54.720 |
to, you know, the model itself, you know, the transformers, 00:12:00.200 |
the diffusion architecture, the convolution neural nets, 00:12:13.520 |
but like, this is just this great example, you know, 00:12:22.960 |
those have been worked on for the last decade. 00:12:25.480 |
And now they're bringing those components together, 00:12:36.880 |
these deterministic, you know, patches effectively, 00:12:40.120 |
and now they're focusing them on how do we make sure 00:12:45.320 |
that the data that we're pulling off of the edge 00:12:50.200 |
So all of a sudden it becomes about the data, 00:12:52.880 |
because the model itself is just digesting this data, 00:12:56.720 |
brute forcing it with a lot of this, you know, 00:12:59.200 |
NVIDIA hardware and outputting better models. 00:13:21.160 |
And Tony Fidel, who ended up building the iPod 00:13:26.400 |
talks about how the pieces just weren't there. 00:13:28.920 |
So they were having to do all the pieces, right? 00:13:45.560 |
and I think one of the most fascinating things 00:13:52.080 |
is when you understand where they get the data. 00:13:55.240 |
So they are tracking their best drivers with five cameras, 00:14:07.320 |
And so, you know, talk about the pieces coming together. 00:14:11.080 |
We've found Reddit forums and stuff we can put links to 00:14:22.120 |
And so, you know, you had to have the Wi-Fi infrastructure, 00:14:26.440 |
like, how would it be possible to upload that much? 00:14:31.440 |
Here's someone who's Tesla uploaded 115 gigabyte in a month, 00:14:44.320 |
And, you know, I think we'll talk about competition 00:14:51.000 |
It's unbelievable to, like, the footprint of cars they have. 00:15:09.840 |
I think eight cameras on the car, five megapixels each, 00:15:12.960 |
and then the data going back 10 years, right? 00:15:21.120 |
and you couldn't possibly store all of this data, right? 00:15:26.160 |
So what they've had to do is process this data on the edge. 00:15:30.320 |
And in fact, I think 99% of the data that a car collects 00:15:36.520 |
So, you know, they're using video compression, 00:15:40.800 |
they're running, you know, neural nets and software 00:15:49.320 |
and there's nothing interesting that happens on the highway, 00:15:53.640 |
So what they're really looking for is, you know, 00:16:06.440 |
or thousands of those moments to train the model? 00:16:09.280 |
So they're literally pulling this compressed, 00:16:12.160 |
filtered data every single night off of these cars. 00:16:18.280 |
So before they would have engineers look at that data 00:16:21.040 |
and say, okay, what have we perceived here now? 00:16:22.760 |
How do we write, you know, this patchwork code? 00:16:25.040 |
Instead, this is simply going into the model itself. 00:16:30.160 |
And they're constantly running this autonomous process 00:16:34.680 |
And then they're re-uploading those models back to the car. 00:16:38.320 |
Okay, this is why you get these exponential moments 00:16:41.600 |
of improvement, right, that we're seeing now, 00:16:45.080 |
which then brings us back to build this question. 00:16:47.800 |
You know, Tesla has 5 million cars on the road. 00:17:01.600 |
I don't know, they have 30 or 40 cars on a road, 00:17:07.360 |
Does Waymo have any chance of competing or even 00:17:21.640 |
they've taught the car what moments it should record. 00:17:35.360 |
where they want the video before and the video after. 00:17:38.000 |
The other thing would be any abrupt movement. 00:17:40.600 |
So if the gas goes fast, or if the brake has hit quickly, 00:17:48.400 |
And the part I didn't know, which they told us, 00:17:54.080 |
have heard about reinforcement learning from human feedback. 00:17:59.040 |
And they've talked about how that could make it-- 00:18:04.760 |
What we were told is that those moments, these moments 00:18:08.120 |
where the car jerks or whatever, if it is super relevant, 00:18:12.400 |
they can put that in the model with extra weight. 00:18:16.720 |
And so it tells the model, if this circumstance arises, 00:18:25.600 |
And so if you think about these corner case scenarios, which 00:18:30.960 |
we all know are the biggest problems in self-driving, 00:18:37.440 |
the things that are most likely to be those things 00:18:42.560 |
So the amount of data they needed to get started 00:18:50.120 |
And now the way that plays to their advantage 00:18:56.600 |
these more severe, less frequent moments because 00:19:03.440 |
And so you ask the question, I don't know who could compete. 00:19:07.320 |
It certainly couldn't-- let's make an assertion. 00:19:11.640 |
If this type of neural network approach is the right answer, 00:19:15.880 |
and once again, Occam's razor seems that way to me, 00:19:22.040 |
And several of the companies who would be least likely 00:19:45.760 |
What would it cost to build a five-camera device 00:20:06.760 |
Something magic happens around a million cars. 00:20:09.760 |
Yes, you've got to get all that quantity of data. 00:20:14.680 |
these are events that occur tens or just hundreds of times. 00:20:18.720 |
That's where you really need millions of cars. 00:20:20.880 |
Otherwise, you don't have a statistically relevant pool 00:20:26.160 |
And what they're uploading from the Edge, Bill, he said, 00:20:29.800 |
each instance is a few seconds long of video, 00:20:35.120 |
plus some additional vehicle-driving metadata. 00:20:38.880 |
If you only have hundreds of cars or thousands of cars, 00:20:50.760 |
It's about the quality of the data, those adverse events. 00:20:55.200 |
Yes, and I guess the other type of company that maybe 00:20:58.760 |
could take a swing at it would be like Mobileye or something. 00:21:06.880 |
And so this part where Tesla has the car in the garage at night 00:21:11.920 |
and uploads gigabytes and puts it right into the model, 00:21:15.400 |
are they going to be able to get that done working 00:21:20.840 |
Are they going to be able to organize all that? 00:21:23.360 |
Do they have the piece on the car that says when to record 00:21:33.400 |
I would probably, if I had to handicap anybody, 00:21:36.760 |
it would probably be BYD or one of the Chinese manufacturers. 00:21:41.480 |
And if you think about it, they have a lot of miles driven. 00:21:50.560 |
of this nationalistic stuff that emerges on both ends of this. 00:21:56.000 |
But one of the things I asked our analyst, Bill, 00:21:58.280 |
is if we just step back, I think these guys have network 00:22:04.360 |
They have bigger H100 clusters than the people 00:22:11.680 |
But if you think about what's the so what to Tesla? 00:22:17.800 |
pull up this slide that Frieda on our team made, 00:22:21.320 |
if you look at the unit economics of a Tesla, 00:22:24.720 |
with no FSD, they're making about $2,500 on a vehicle. 00:22:29.640 |
If you look at it today, they have about 7% penetration 00:22:36.240 |
And those people paid $12,000 incrementally for that FSD. 00:22:41.080 |
And as we know, you can go read about it on Twitter. 00:22:44.960 |
but it's not as good as I thought it would be. 00:22:51.800 |
the model getting better at a much faster rate. 00:22:54.960 |
So I asked the question, what if we reduce the price on this 00:23:01.120 |
What if Tesla said, this is such a good product, 00:23:05.920 |
so let's make it $500 a month, not $1,000 a month? 00:23:09.840 |
So if you assume that you have penetration go from 7% to 20%, 00:23:17.040 |
give it to everybody for free, they drive around for a month, 00:23:19.680 |
they're like, wow, this really does feel like a human driver. 00:23:25.160 |
If you get to 20% penetration, then your contribution margin 00:23:30.640 |
at Tesla is about the same, even though you're 00:23:35.880 |
Now, if you get to 50% penetration, all of a sudden 00:23:41.160 |
Now, think about this from a Tesla perspective. 00:23:43.880 |
Why do they want to drive even more adoption of FSD? 00:23:46.800 |
Well, you get a lot more information and data 00:23:49.680 |
about disengagements and all these other things. 00:23:52.440 |
So that data then continues to turn the flywheel. 00:23:59.120 |
this meaningful improvement, is going to focus on penetration. 00:24:03.600 |
My guess is that they want to get a lot more people trying 00:24:06.840 |
the product, and they're going to play around with price. 00:24:11.040 |
Maybe $100 a month is the right intersection between adoption 00:24:21.560 |
are occurring at an accelerating rate at Tesla. 00:24:27.160 |
people saying Waymo's worth $50 or $60 billion. 00:24:30.400 |
But you could be in a situation on that business 00:24:37.600 |
and they have a hard time structurally of catching up. 00:24:49.400 |
But we've been told they have a head count similar to Cruise. 00:24:54.600 |
And the Cruise financials came out, and they were horrific. 00:25:00.800 |
that the Waymo financials are any different than the Cruise 00:25:08.080 |
that we're going to build this incredible car, 00:25:10.840 |
and our business model is going to be to run a service. 00:25:13.800 |
Like the CapEx, if you just build a 10-year model, 00:25:16.760 |
the CapEx you need, they would have to go raise $100 billion. 00:25:20.720 |
And there's another element that's super interesting. 00:25:26.840 |
that LIDAR does not need to be a component of this thing. 00:25:31.600 |
And so the Waymo, Cruise, all those approaches, and Mobileye 00:25:36.080 |
are LIDAR-dependent, which is a very costly piece of material 00:25:44.280 |
And so if this is all true, if this is how it plays out, 00:25:53.600 |
So one of the things I also want to talk about, 00:25:55.840 |
because one of the reasons I started going down this path 00:26:01.760 |
with the robotics companies, new robotics companies. 00:26:06.680 |
Figure.ai just raised some money from OpenAI and Microsoft, 00:26:13.480 |
And they're all doing really interesting things. 00:26:22.080 |
these deterministic models to teach the robot maybe 00:26:30.800 |
And now they're moving to these imitation models. 00:26:35.560 |
and I came across this video by a PhD student 00:26:40.800 |
And he showed how this robotic arm was basically just 00:26:44.680 |
collecting data very quickly using a little camera 00:26:49.680 |
And then they literally take the SD card out of the camera. 00:26:59.520 |
And just based on two minutes of training data, 00:27:07.680 |
knows how to manipulate this coffee cup in all 00:27:13.320 |
So I think we're going to see the application 00:27:18.480 |
imitation learning models, impact not just cars. 00:27:23.560 |
that's probably the best robot we could possibly 00:27:32.200 |
well, maybe that's a manageable challenge, particularly 00:27:36.920 |
Yeah, and the other great thing about that video, 00:27:41.640 |
it actually explains pretty simply how the Tesla stuff's 00:27:46.720 |
I mean, it's just a different scale, obviously, 00:27:48.680 |
but that's the exact same thing, just at a very reduced state. 00:27:55.200 |
this autonomous flywheel without a lot of human intervention. 00:28:00.960 |
has some engineering intervention along the way. 00:28:03.080 |
But I think the engineering team working on this at Tesla 00:28:06.560 |
is about 1/10 the size of the teams at Cruze. 00:28:10.720 |
Well, I mean, that gets back to this simplicity point, right? 00:28:15.480 |
Like, this approach removes so much complexity 00:28:21.600 |
that you should be able to do it with less people. 00:28:24.480 |
And the fact that you can have something better 00:28:39.880 |
We seem to get model improvements and model updates 00:28:45.040 |
Maybe I just go through a few of the recent ones. 00:28:48.360 |
And I want to explore this open versus closed. 00:29:03.640 |
Then yesterday, we get Claude III announcements. 00:29:06.440 |
Their best model, Opus, is just a little bit better 00:29:18.120 |
that their SONET level model can do workloads 00:29:25.000 |
even though it's performing at or near that quality. 00:29:29.560 |
And then we have-- those models were trained on a mixture, 00:29:34.320 |
I think, of H100 and prior version of NVIDIA chips. 00:29:44.800 |
So we're hearing rumors that both of those models 00:29:47.560 |
are going to come out in the May-July time frame. 00:29:50.480 |
With respect to LLAMA III that was trained on Meta's H100 00:29:55.240 |
cluster, rumors are that it has Claude III-like performance, 00:30:00.000 |
which is pretty extraordinary if you're thinking about a fully 00:30:11.080 |
And they're simply in kind of their post-training safety 00:30:19.160 |
We hear that's going to launch sometime in May versus June. 00:30:24.400 |
we hear it is like a 2x improvement versus chat GPT-4. 00:30:30.000 |
But then we hear all the rest of the Frontier models 00:30:36.680 |
to get launched to this Q3, Q4 out of NVIDIA, which probably 00:30:40.040 |
means the next iteration of the Frontier models 00:30:48.760 |
So Bill, if you go through this bedrock page on AWS, 00:30:55.720 |
that Amazon is offering all these different models. 00:31:03.480 |
Snowflake today just announced a deal with Mistral. 00:31:10.960 |
Microsoft, you can use LLAMA, or you can use Mistral, or OpenAI. 00:31:19.000 |
goes in terms of the models that will actually 00:31:21.320 |
get used by enterprises and consumers in practice? 00:31:27.240 |
My first one, when this new Anthropic thing came out 00:31:30.640 |
and they list all the different math tests, and science tests, 00:31:33.880 |
and PhD, and they're all listing the same thing, 00:31:45.560 |
Because they're all running these same comparative tests, 00:31:53.800 |
are creating the type of differentiation that's 00:31:56.880 |
going to lead to one of them becoming the wholesale 00:32:06.560 |
in a way that's going to matter to people or to the users? 00:32:13.360 |
I mean, I see some developers get way more excited 00:32:16.480 |
about the pricing at the low end of those three choices 00:32:19.320 |
than they do about the performance of the top end. 00:32:23.440 |
The second thing on my mind, I don't have a lot of logic 00:32:30.800 |
I wonder if these companies can simultaneously 00:32:33.640 |
try and compete with Google to be this consumer app 00:32:37.480 |
that you're going to rely on to get you information. 00:32:40.600 |
So you could call that Wikipedia on steroids, 00:32:48.280 |
And simultaneously be great at enterprise models. 00:32:56.480 |
And maybe that'll get to the third thing, which 00:33:02.320 |
about when it comes to companies that are actually 00:33:08.840 |
because they start with these bedrock components that 00:33:12.800 |
And one thing that happened in the past 20 years-- 00:33:16.160 |
it happened very slowly, but we definitely got there-- 00:33:21.440 |
to be an IBM shop or an Oracle shop or a Microsoft shop. 00:33:27.720 |
They slowly got to the place where most of the best CIOs 00:33:39.880 |
Like, oh, is there an open source choice we can use? 00:33:45.280 |
And two, they don't want to get stuck on anything. 00:33:47.680 |
And so when I look at what I see going on in the startup world, 00:33:51.880 |
they might start with one of these really well-known service 00:33:57.520 |
But the minute they start thinking about production, 00:34:00.000 |
they become very cost-focused and on the inference side. 00:34:03.080 |
And they'll just play these things off of one another, 00:34:05.720 |
and they'll run a whole bunch of different ones. 00:34:17.320 |
to compete with Google on this consumer thing. 00:34:23.640 |
If you had a legal application you wanted to use, 00:34:28.080 |
you'd be better off with a smaller model that 00:34:33.640 |
It wouldn't need some of the training of this overall LLM. 00:34:38.120 |
And it might be way cheaper to have something 00:34:40.480 |
that's very proprietary-- or not proprietary, 00:34:55.560 |
of different pieces where a bunch of different parties 00:34:58.720 |
could be more competitive, and where those components are 00:35:09.600 |
One, I've said in the past, if I was Sam Altman running OpenAI, 00:35:17.040 |
and just focused on the multi-trillion dollar 00:35:24.920 |
beating Google at consumer and beating Microsoft 00:35:30.080 |
Andy wants to beat NVIDIA at building chips-- 00:35:38.840 |
building memory, building all this thing that's 00:35:41.320 |
going to differentiate you in the consumer competition-- 00:35:46.800 |
that just seems best aligned with who they are, 00:35:49.680 |
I mean, ChatGPT has become the verb in the age of AI. 00:36:01.840 |
When I look at the competition in enterprise-- 00:36:05.240 |
I think Anthropic was up at the Morgan Stanley 00:36:07.320 |
conference this morning, and they said they're hiring-- 00:36:11.040 |
their sales force went from two people last year 00:36:15.920 |
Think of the tens of thousands of salespeople 00:36:23.280 |
Now, of course, they're also partnering with Amazon. 00:36:29.080 |
there's going to be all this margin stacking, Bill. 00:36:39.400 |
you can pull one of those pieces of the margin stacking out. 00:36:43.440 |
So now, this is just Microsoft getting paid using LLAMA 3 00:36:48.160 |
They don't have to pay for the use of that model. 00:36:51.360 |
So I think in the competitive dynamics of an open marketplace 00:36:58.240 |
to be tough for two different reasons for these model 00:37:01.440 |
Number one, Zuckerberg is going to drive the price. 00:37:05.000 |
He's going to give away Frontier-esque models 00:37:10.640 |
And that's going to be highly disruptive to your ability 00:37:14.680 |
If I'm a CIO of JP Morgan or some other large institution, 00:37:19.840 |
do I really want to pay a lot for that model? 00:37:24.680 |
because then I can move my data around a little bit more 00:37:29.320 |
I get the safety benefits of an open source model. 00:37:35.760 |
I'm not sending my data to some of these places. 00:37:38.200 |
Huge point you just made that is in addition to everything 00:37:57.240 |
is not just how do I build an enterprise fleet 00:37:59.400 |
to go compete with the largest hyperscaler in the world who 00:38:04.280 |
got to compete with Databricks and Snowflake, et cetera. 00:38:22.280 |
that I think that's important for everyone to understand. 00:38:25.560 |
One of the reasons open source is so powerful 00:38:31.480 |
you end up with just so much more experimentation. 00:38:34.800 |
So it turns out right now there are multiple startups who 00:38:39.480 |
believe they have an opportunity hosting open source models. 00:38:49.680 |
but they're going to tune it a little different way. 00:38:52.120 |
They're going to play with it a little different way. 00:38:57.160 |
buy one of these open source models delivered as a service 00:39:09.720 |
On top of the data privacy problem, the pricing stuff 00:39:16.000 |
that make me think that the open source component 00:39:19.200 |
models are going to be way more successful in the enterprise. 00:39:22.400 |
And it's a really tough thing to compete with. 00:39:25.800 |
Well, it kind of brings into stark relief a big debate 00:39:32.240 |
that erupted this week, certainly on the Twitters, 00:39:41.240 |
And part of that was about this not-for-profit to for-profit 00:39:46.440 |
That's, to me, a little bit less interesting. 00:39:50.400 |
But it blew the doors wide open on this open versus closed 00:39:56.040 |
And the potential that exists here for regulatory capture. 00:40:00.000 |
Nobody's more thoughtful about this topic than you. 00:40:04.360 |
I think I saw somebody tweet this 2x2 matrix. 00:40:17.240 |
But we saw a lot of very sharp opinions expressed. 00:40:24.480 |
So help us think about the risk of regulatory capture 00:40:35.400 |
when I did my regulatory capture speech at the all-in 00:40:39.960 |
I mentioned very briefly when I showed a picture of Sam Altman 00:40:51.320 |
to build regulation that would be particularly beneficial 00:41:02.760 |
that people at some of the big model companies 00:41:05.760 |
were going around saying we should kill open source, 00:41:09.680 |
or we should make it illegal, or we should get the government 00:41:13.440 |
And then Vinod started basically saying that, literally, 00:41:21.520 |
I think it obviously became concerning to Mark Andreessen 00:41:25.440 |
And for me, the biggest reason that it's concerning 00:41:29.360 |
is because I think it could become a precedent where 00:41:31.600 |
all companies would try and eliminate open source. 00:41:51.400 |
We just talked about all this open source that they're using. 00:41:54.640 |
So it's the last thing I would want to see happen. 00:41:58.920 |
But we do live in this world where these pieces exist. 00:42:06.960 |
a Politico article that shows the amount of lobbying 00:42:11.120 |
that has been done on behalf of the large proprietary models. 00:42:17.840 |
literally, the only thing that comes close, perhaps, 00:42:21.800 |
but is SBF, who was also lobbying at this kind of level. 00:42:25.640 |
But this Politico article shows they have three or four 00:42:33.320 |
onto the staffs of the different congressmen and senators 00:42:42.760 |
I think the open source models are so prolific right now 00:43:03.960 |
I also don't believe in the Dumerism scenario. 00:43:07.560 |
Someone who I admire quite a bit, Steve Pinker, 00:43:10.520 |
posted a link to this article by Michael Totten 00:43:13.440 |
where he goes through, I think in a very sophisticated way, 00:43:19.040 |
And I would urge people maybe to read that on their own. 00:43:36.500 |
I mean, there's a level of bias that's obvious here. 00:43:43.120 |
And so I'd rather listen to a Dumerism argument 00:43:46.480 |
from someone who's not standing to gain from regulation. 00:43:50.520 |
Yeah, I mean, I think you saw this tweet from Martin Casado 00:43:55.560 |
that was in response to Vinod comparing open source-- 00:43:59.880 |
would you use open source for the Manhattan Project, which 00:44:15.720 |
hearing these things like, we can't allow these types 00:44:24.080 |
We saw India is now requiring approval to release models. 00:44:29.360 |
That also was, I think, a scary development for people 00:44:46.200 |
In the Totten article, Pinker uses an analogy 00:44:53.040 |
could spread a Dumerism argument that a self-driving car would 00:44:57.720 |
just go 200 miles an hour and run over everybody. 00:45:00.680 |
But he says, if you look at the evolution of self-driving cars, 00:45:08.160 |
We don't program the AI to give them this singular purpose that 00:45:13.400 |
overrides all the other things they've been taught, 00:45:23.800 |
And so I think the whole article is great, but I think-- 00:45:28.440 |
and look, I also think Pinker is a really smart human. 00:45:33.080 |
He's also one of the biggest outspoken proponents 00:45:35.480 |
of nuclear, which is another topic that I think 00:45:40.720 |
And so anyway, I'm more of an optimist about technology. 00:45:46.080 |
These kind of Dumerism things go way back to the Luddites, 00:45:50.560 |
hence the definition of the word, and ever since then. 00:45:54.680 |
And someone else tweeted it'd be like telling the farmer, 00:46:05.880 |
Well, the reason I think this is so important 00:46:11.880 |
going to come from these models, all the evidence 00:46:14.000 |
suggests that it moves us to a better place, but not 00:46:18.160 |
However, during these moments where you do have a new thing, 00:46:25.960 |
have all these people coming to Washington saying, hey, 00:46:40.240 |
talking to leadership in both the House and the Senate 00:46:42.680 |
about a program near and dear to me called Invest America. 00:46:49.320 |
with many senators and many senior leadership 00:46:53.280 |
And one of them said to me, when he was asking about AI, 00:46:58.080 |
I said I was worried about excessive government oversight 00:47:18.320 |
Like, the way we stay ahead of China is we need competition. 00:47:27.640 |
And I think this China thing comes up all the time. 00:47:31.360 |
The one thing that would cause us to get way behind China 00:47:34.440 |
is if we played without open source and they had it. 00:47:47.000 |
where I can get in and see and analyze what's going on. 00:47:53.520 |
talked about LLMs, or AI competing both in the B2B side 00:48:07.320 |
the Google Gemini model was much more similar to something 00:48:11.160 |
autocratic that you might equate with a communist society. 00:48:16.080 |
Like, it's intentionally limiting the information 00:48:19.440 |
you can have and painting it in a very specific way. 00:48:23.680 |
And so, yeah, I'm more afraid of the proprietary. 00:48:27.840 |
Yeah, they're effectively imposing a worldview 00:48:35.840 |
And I just find it ironic in this moment in time 00:48:44.400 |
we're critical of, Washington was pretty critical of a couple 00:48:53.240 |
He's going to have hundreds of thousands of B100s. 00:48:56.720 |
You need somebody who has a business model that 00:49:32.360 |
What are the odds that our government could put together 00:49:37.360 |
a piece of effective legislation that would actually 00:49:53.480 |
But again, how the node frames it, what I get worried about, 00:49:58.280 |
I have no problem in him having an active defense 00:50:03.720 |
and wanting to do everything in open AI's best interest. 00:50:07.000 |
I just don't want to see us attack technological progress, 00:50:16.200 |
Just compete against them heads up and win heads up, 00:50:23.320 |
by taking their knees out before they even get started. 00:50:26.440 |
So back to what I was saying, speaking of government's role 00:50:30.680 |
in business, a couple of weeks ago, the state of Delaware, 00:50:33.720 |
the chancery court, this judge, Kathleen McCormick, 00:50:37.400 |
she pretty shockingly struck down Elon's 2018 pay package. 00:50:42.840 |
Remember, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. 00:50:47.520 |
where he took nothing if the company didn't improve. 00:50:51.880 |
he would get paid out 1% tranches of options, 00:50:55.360 |
I think over 12 tranches, which because the company had 00:50:59.600 |
this extraordinary turnaround, he achieved his goal. 00:51:03.600 |
So now she's kind of Monday morning quarterbacking. 00:51:07.200 |
And she says his pay package is unfathomable. 00:51:10.120 |
And she said the board never asked the $55 billion 00:51:14.680 |
question, Bill, was it even necessary to pay him this 00:51:18.520 |
to retain him and to achieve the company's goals? 00:51:22.480 |
So of course, this can be appealed to the Delaware Supreme 00:51:26.800 |
But in response to this, Elon and I think many others 00:51:35.600 |
The state of Delaware has had this historical advantage 00:51:39.240 |
in corporate law because of its predictability. 00:51:42.160 |
And its predictability wasn't because of the code, 00:51:46.800 |
There was a lot of precedent in the state of Delaware. 00:51:49.920 |
And this seemed to turn that totally on its head. 00:51:56.520 |
We're starting to see other companies follow suit 00:52:14.560 |
I don't actually think it's just an outlier event. 00:52:17.920 |
I think it's so unprecedented in Delaware's history 00:52:22.040 |
that it really marks a moment for everyone to pay attention. 00:52:25.480 |
And there's a couple of things I would pay attention to. 00:52:27.800 |
One data point you left out, which came up recently, 00:52:38.680 |
And it turns out when you bring a derivative suit in Delaware, 00:52:45.360 |
there have been cases where people ask for a percent 00:52:50.200 |
And if you step back and look, this is a victimless crime. 00:52:57.120 |
And I think that's the thing that makes Delaware look 00:53:08.800 |
but it's kind of silly because it's so small anyway. 00:53:16.880 |
lead to a multi-billion dollar award to a lawyer? 00:53:20.160 |
And that's only true if you've created a bounty hunter system, 00:53:29.640 |
There's something in California called PAGA that's 00:53:43.400 |
So I think we've all become accustomed to when stock price 00:53:46.840 |
is going down, these litigators grab a handful of shareholders 00:53:57.800 |
But to attack companies that go way up, I would-- 00:54:07.480 |
I looked at it in detail-- to any CEO I work with, 00:54:21.880 |
I think the biggest problem with compensation packages-- 00:54:29.160 |
where people are getting paid when the stock doesn't move. 00:54:34.920 |
By the way, that's the standard in corporate America. 00:54:38.120 |
We have this grift where people make a ton of money, 00:54:42.380 |
Look at the pay package for Mary Barra at GM. 00:54:45.760 |
So the first tranche here was if the stock doubled. 00:54:50.680 |
I would also say, if any other CEO took a package like this, 00:54:55.800 |
in a public company, I would be very encouraged 00:55:01.320 |
And so it may be one of the most shareholder-aligned incentive 00:55:06.600 |
packages ever, which is exactly what you would think Delaware 00:55:13.160 |
And ISS as well, which is a whole other subject. 00:55:29.560 |
And so I think everyone has to pay attention. 00:55:42.040 |
at the actual corporate law code in the state of Delaware, 00:55:59.680 |
that's so much different than every other state. 00:56:01.920 |
What has set it apart is it has way more legal precedent, way 00:56:11.880 |
is very shareholder-aligned, shareholder-friendly. 00:56:16.160 |
And letter-- and they're known for letter of the law. 00:56:24.360 |
because it's at odds with all of the precedent 00:56:31.720 |
We left out they had 70% shareholder approval. 00:56:34.520 |
I mean, and there was a high-low probability event 00:56:42.480 |
and say, oh, it was obvious this was going to happen. 00:56:50.240 |
so I imagine corporations right now are in holding patterns. 00:56:59.100 |
will stay pending the Delaware Supreme Court appeals ruling. 00:57:08.880 |
then I think you may be back to the status quo 00:57:15.960 |
I mean, I think Elon said, despite all the goodness that's 00:57:19.040 |
occurred, saving the company from bankruptcy, 00:57:31.000 |
going to see significant flight from the state of Delaware 00:57:34.480 |
by people reincorporating in these other states 00:57:41.480 |
So if it's upheld, and if these lawyers are paid anything 00:57:47.440 |
as a percentage, anything other than maybe just 00:57:49.680 |
their hourly fee, so if those two things happen, 00:57:53.140 |
I would make the argument that every company in Delaware 00:58:00.640 |
because they could be sued in a future derivative law 00:58:04.600 |
suit for the risk they've taken by staying in Delaware. 00:58:18.200 |
I have to warn them that if they stay in the state of Delaware, 00:58:21.920 |
then they're knowingly and negligently taking 00:58:30.160 |
Let's just wrap with this, a quick market check. 00:58:34.600 |
One of the things I like to do is be responsive 00:58:42.400 |
we had put up on the market checked on the last show. 00:58:50.120 |
We said on the prior pod, prices have run a lot this year, 00:58:55.120 |
and the background noise around macro has not improved. 00:59:06.400 |
So just a quick check on the multiples of companies 00:59:11.720 |
Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google, and NVIDIA. 00:59:14.600 |
And I just want to walk through this really quick. 00:59:18.240 |
the multiples between March of '21 and March of '24. 00:59:28.240 |
There are multiples gone from about 20 times earnings 00:59:37.600 |
Its multiples has gone from about 25 earnings 00:59:45.680 |
We've been having this debate about whether or not 00:59:48.840 |
Google's search share is going to go down and the impact 00:59:52.880 |
And so this is just the market's voting machine at a moment 01:00:01.680 |
were in March of '21, which makes a lot of sense to me. 01:00:06.920 |
And by the way, on that one, I mean, the Gemini release, 01:00:13.520 |
and then you release this thing, and then you trip. 01:00:29.800 |
Well, and now you're seeing the drumbeat starting. 01:00:33.520 |
You and I are getting the text, the emails, the drumbeats 01:00:41.040 |
I mean, listen, I think boards have one job-- 01:00:43.560 |
hire, fire the CEO who leads the company forward. 01:00:49.280 |
And I think that if I was on the board of Google, 01:00:51.320 |
that's the question I'd be asking at this moment in time. 01:00:53.280 |
Not is he a good human being, not is he a smart product guy, 01:00:57.760 |
what's happened over the course of the last 10 years. 01:01:06.280 |
Is this the CEO who can lead us through what is 01:01:12.000 |
Just to finish it off, Apple's multiple is a little bit lower. 01:01:27.040 |
In the case of Microsoft, their multiple is a little higher. 01:01:29.680 |
But again, these multiples are all in the range. 01:01:42.240 |
I actually think the retail business is doing better. 01:01:44.800 |
I actually think the cloud business is doing better. 01:01:52.880 |
And this goes back to where we started the show. 01:01:56.920 |
to start the year bill, so hover there right above December 23, 01:02:08.440 |
Because earnings exploded last year from $5 to $25. 01:02:13.360 |
Its multiple has obviously come up here a little bit 01:02:24.160 |
we're big NVIDIA shareholders-- like in other people's minds 01:02:27.920 |
is, is this earnings train durable for NVIDIA, right? 01:02:42.360 |
of compute and supercompute of B100s of everything 01:02:49.560 |
you see that note out of Klarna last week, Bill, 01:02:56.680 |
At the end of the day, are companies and consumers 01:03:00.080 |
getting massive benefits out of the models and inference 01:03:06.360 |
If the answer is no, then all of these stocks are going lower. 01:03:15.760 |
maybe we'll do this at the end of each of them, 01:03:31.000 |
As a reminder to everybody, just our opinions, not