transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] A bunch of major stories today. SpaceX and Cursor are partnering up. More news out of Images 2.0, a bunch of news out of OpenAI. And Mythos, a group of unauthorized users have been using Cloud Mythos since the day it was released. There's a big scoop in Bloomberg. We'll go through, there's a whole bunch of timeline. We can also pull up the lineup and take you through who's coming on. We got Adobe, Build Forever, AngelList, Zancar, Fast Data, Gradient. We're going through all the news of the day. Well, let's start with SpaceX and Cursor, who are teaming up in a very interesting deal. Is this a gong already?
Speaker 2:
[00:39] This is gong worthy because it's an option to buy the company, but a $10 billion breakup fee, incredibly, incredibly. Yeah, I think it's a win-win.
Speaker 1:
[00:51] Yeah, it's a win-win.
Speaker 2:
[00:52] I think it makes sense.
Speaker 1:
[00:53] It's a win, no matter what. Well, let's go through the facts first. So, SpaceX partners...
Speaker 2:
[00:59] Who needs facts?
Speaker 1:
[01:00] Who needs facts? Just immediate takes. We assume you already know all the industry.
Speaker 2:
[01:05] Post-fact.
Speaker 1:
[01:06] Do you know all the information? Do we need to give you any information? We'll see, but let's run through it. So SpaceX partners with Cursor to, quote, create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI. The deal gets Cursor, who's a Gentic coding model, Composer 2 basically operates at frontier level performance, access to compute from SpaceX's million H100 equivalent Colossus supercomputer. And that is the correct term for Colossus. It is a supercomputer. There were some other terms that Elon was throwing out. Fantastic terminology from the XAI team over there. What was the other one? It was like AI...
Speaker 3:
[01:44] Compute Gigafactory.
Speaker 1:
[01:46] Compute Gigafactory. They're all hilarious and very good. I like all of these. Computer Gigafactory.
Speaker 2:
[01:52] Were they saying computer?
Speaker 1:
[01:53] The XAI timeline, I was thinking about it and I was like, when did this actually start? Because it just came out of nowhere and just absolutely blew up. I wanted to actually review and reset on the timeline of events here because it's gotten so crazy to the point where it's like... The thing that started as Elon sort of being like, I want to buy Twitter, is now a Neo Lab with a massive super computer data center and a coding agent and code review for the age of AI because don't forget, they own Graphite now, or potentially will, and a social media app.
Speaker 2:
[02:29] Graphite, the space code review company? Exactly. I'm genuinely so thrilled for the Graphite team. I'm thrilled for the Cursor team.
Speaker 1:
[02:41] I'm thrilled for Scott Wu.
Speaker 2:
[02:44] Yeah, Scott Wu is licking his chops. He's like, what are you going to leave out in the wreckage?
Speaker 1:
[02:50] He really is going to have fun with it.
Speaker 2:
[02:52] I also think we need to take one moment and just send some thoughts and prayers to SBF.
Speaker 1:
[02:59] Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[02:59] Imagine, I don't know how this works in whatever prison he's in, but I imagine hopefully every few days he can go and talk to the outside world. Yeah. You can imagine him going, making the call, and he says, sir.
Speaker 1:
[03:17] What would the mark be?
Speaker 2:
[03:19] How's Anthropic doing? How's my baby doing? It's like, sir, it's traded up north of 800.
Speaker 1:
[03:26] It's almost a trillion.
Speaker 2:
[03:28] It is quite possibly going north of a trillion. Then he's like, thank you. He comes back the next day. I haven't checked in with cursor a little bit. How are they doing? Sir, you may not want to hear this, but there's a $50 billion acquisition. They've agreed to sell for 60. If they don't sell, they're going to get 10 billion of non-dilutive capital.
Speaker 1:
[03:50] Absolutely wild.
Speaker 2:
[03:51] Anyways.
Speaker 1:
[03:53] What a wild, wild turn of events. Anyway, let's go through the timeline because it's interesting to revisit the flurry of news that has come out of Elon in Inc. over the past just four years when this all started. April 14th, 2022, it's April 22nd now. So we're talking four years to go from just proposing buying Twitter. He made an unsolicited offer to acquire the company. He closed that acquisition after a bunch of back and forth saying, hey, maybe I don't want it. It was very clear that the stock would have traded down significantly from that $44 billion because this was when the interest rate hike happened and the end of Zerp and basically all software companies sold off significantly. And so we saw declines in Snap and Pinterest and basically anything that was even meta sold off like 40, 50 percent post, although that was like an anomaly and they built back up. But the question about like, okay, well, Reality Labs is a 10 billion, tens of billions dollar bet on revenues that might come in like 10 years. Like it was so far away and the revenue ramp on VR and metaverse projects was so slow that the market just had to discount those future revenues, even if they were still bullish on the idea of meta winning the VR race, winning the metaverse at some point, it just wasn't going to happen anytime soon. So you got to discount that back at 6 percent instead of 3 percent or whatever your risk free rate is in your DCF. And so everything sold off. And Elon had locked in that pre end of Zerp price. And there was a big question about, could he get out of it? Were they going to twist his arm? There was a little bit of arm twisting. The arm was a little bit twisted. But Morgan Stanley came on board and a bunch of other.
Speaker 2:
[05:39] It was almost broken.
Speaker 1:
[05:41] But the people whose arms were twisted, Morgan Stanley and all the VC backers who came in, they wound up with SpaceX stock. And so they wound up doing very well because they wound up with XAI stock and then SpaceX stock. And so it's all looking like, you know, as crazy. It was never bet against Elon. Like that was the thing. It was like, surely this is the time to bet against Elon. He's buying Twitter for $44 billion. It's a crazy idea based on the market and where things are, but everything's sort of penciled out. So he closed the Twitter acquisition on October 27th, 2022. And he took control of the platform at the end of that month. That was sync day. Of course, he comes in with a sync. Something about the, what was the joke about the kitchen sink?
Speaker 3:
[06:16] It was like that sink in.
Speaker 1:
[06:17] Oh, let that sink in. Okay. It wasn't, it wasn't like I'm doing the whole, the whole, isn't the whole kitchen sink another phrase as well?
Speaker 3:
[06:23] Yeah. Like throw the whole kitchen sink at it.
Speaker 1:
[06:25] Okay. Yeah. Well, he did that too. Cause he threw everything together. Yes. Good job. Yay. So XAI came later. He publicly announced XAI on July 12th, 2023. And that's only nine months after Chachipiti, maybe eight months after Chachipiti. Google quick followed with Gemini. And it was like, it was a very fast following, I think, to get to XAI off the ground.
Speaker 2:
[06:50] And that was like, just for context, that was right around the time you first publicly talked about the potential for a tech live stream, right?
Speaker 1:
[06:58] Oh, yes. Yes. I do.
Speaker 2:
[06:59] 2023.
Speaker 1:
[06:59] I think that was, I think that was actually very close to the date. Yeah. I was making YouTube videos. I made a whole YouTube video about the Elon Twitter acquisition. And I was sort of trying to justify it as a desire for free speech than anything else. Like you shouldn't look at it in financial terms. I think that still probably holds. But there wound up being a whole bunch of other knock on effects for Elon's strategy. He was coming out on July 12th, 2023, saying I'm back in the AI horse race. I'm competing directly with the big labs. I'm going to go up against DeepMind. Still remember that's why he founded OpenAI. He wanted to push back against DeepMind. I'm going to go up against Anthropic, going to go up against OpenAI. And so the first major product milestone came just a couple months later, November 3rd. That's when they introduced Grok. November 3rd, 2023. So it's been almost three years. The first real integration with Twitter happened on December 7th, 2023, when Grok started rolling out inside of X for Premium Plus subscribers, which was a new tier. It was, it's actually crazy.
Speaker 2:
[07:57] Everyone got verified.
Speaker 1:
[07:59] Yeah. I mean, that year on Twitter was insane. Like just product feature, product feature. And they were shipping stuff that had been clearly developed beforehand. Like I think the Community Notes idea had been workshopped and even like engineered in the pre-Elon era. But he just got there and was like, ship that tomorrow. And like there were a lot of things like that that happened. And there were other things that got pulled back and review. And like there were other pieces of the puzzle that were like not doing so well. And he was just a cut, cut, cut. And so he sort of like put it back in startup mode and it felt a lot more agile. And it still does. That was the moment Grok finally became a part of the X product experience. In early 2024, XAI started shipping updates quickly. March 17th, 2024, it open-sourced Grok 1. March 26th, 2024, Grok Access expanded to X premium subscribers. Two days later, they announced 1.5. Then on April 12th, 2024, they announced 15V, which added multimodal capabilities. Then Grok 2, Grok 2 Mini. By the end of 2024, Grok was available to all X users. And so 2025, XAI moved from being connected to X to absorbing it at the product level. On February 19th, 2025, XAI announced Grok 3 Beta. Then March 28th, 2025, so over a year ago, for some reason this feels more recent than that, XAI acquired X in an all-stock deal. So March 28th, 2025, effectively merging the AI company with a social platform. After that, X kept releasing faster model updates. They did Grok 4 fast, Grok 4.1. Then came the SpaceX deal. That was February 2nd, 2026. So the clean sequence is that Musk first proposed the Twitter acquisition, then founded XAI, then brought Grok into X, then merged XAI with X, and then SpaceX bought XAI. And so now Cursor is joining the team.
Speaker 2:
[09:48] It makes so much sense, right? Cursor needs compute. They need the resources. They need the capital to train a frontier coding model.
Speaker 1:
[09:55] They've also never done a pre-trip, I believe, whereas the XAI team has, right?
Speaker 2:
[10:00] And the big, big thing is that the Grok brand has been through so much. There was an idea being thrown around last year that it had been banned in more workplaces than it had been adopted. So more people had said, like, you cannot use this product in the workplace than we're actually using it in the workplace. Cursor is a great brand, right? It's a brand that I think can probably expand outside of coding, right? I would say in the announcement. Best to create the world's best coding and knowledge work AI. So we're at a point right now where everyone is building the exact same thing. We got everyone on earth building a box that you can tell to do things.
Speaker 1:
[10:44] Oh, so you just want one company to do it all? Communist?
Speaker 2:
[10:47] No, no, I don't. I think the competition is great.
Speaker 1:
[10:51] You want the government to have it.
Speaker 2:
[10:53] It's bringing out the best in the world, but I think Cursor is like... Cursor has always had a great brand. I saw someone else...
Speaker 1:
[10:59] SPF replied to SpaceX's tweet. It's like, that's me. Pull up the first post here and then scroll down. The SpaceX and Cursor are now working closely. Is that it? Look, SPF is somehow on Twitter. How can you be on Twitter from jail?
Speaker 2:
[11:16] All these people in jail on X, I don't understand. No, it says it in his bio. It says it in his bio. It says, we can use BOP-approved phone calls, emails to tell others what to post on our socials. I think it would be a free speech violation to say like, if you are in jail, you cannot distribute information in the outside world in any capacity, but it feels like this was maybe some legislation that was created pre-internet because it seems like having a ghostwriter on your account is a really good way to start kind of like influencing public perception, right? I think this is... Elizabeth Holmes has had enough kind of moments where it was like she, you know, her proxy posted something that was mildly kind of entertaining, and over time that just wears on people, and eventually people are like, maybe she isn't so bad after all, right?
Speaker 1:
[12:10] Well, Richard Wu broke down the structure of the deal. He says the structure of the deal is pretty interesting here. I think what's happening is, one, XAI is having trouble training a state-of-the-art coding model, hence co-founder departures. They might have a bunch of idle GPUs. Cursor doesn't have capital to blow on a $5 billion training run to compete with Codex and Claude. XAI, three, XAI says to Cursor, use all the GPUs you want at cost and get to a state-of-the-art coding model as long as we have the option to buy you. Four, Cursor also gets a free option. Train a model better than Opus and get bought out for $60 billion, or get $10 billion that pays for all the GPUs you rented. Win-win. I was reflecting on Michael Truell's fantastic entrepreneur, remarkably young, but his aesthetic is very much in the Stripe world, I imagine, because I feel like the one really cinematic podcast he's done is that one with, was it Patrick Collison? Is that the one I'm thinking of? And it's like them at the coffee shop and it's so welcoming and warming. It's like that is welcome in every corporate entity in America, right? Like, and to your point about like, you know, oh, like if your corporation is like, oh, what's going on with Elon and politics, blah, blah, blah. Do we really want Grok running around with Mecca and Aony and all this crazy stuff? But if it's just like Michael Truell from Cursor, he's so reassuring. Like I, if I'm like Coke or GE or Ford, I'm like, yeah, of course, like we love Cursor. That's great. Aesthetics do matter, vibes do matter, and I think makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:
[13:46] Matt Slotnick says he loves math.
Speaker 1:
[13:50] Okay. What is the math here?
Speaker 2:
[13:51] What he's talking about? Julian, he's so Julian says at a 30x revenue multiple at first glance, it appears that SpaceX is overpaying for Cursor. However, the deal is wildly accretive for SpaceX, given it is expected to go public at more than 100x revenue. A 70 term multiple expansion on 2 billion of revenue adds up.
Speaker 1:
[14:11] This is a notorious thing in corporate M&A, and occasionally it's gone poorly. But there is an old adage that if you can acquire earnings at a lower earnings multiple and maintain your current multiple, that is accretive to the stock. So there's a whole philosophy around that. But the smart investors should price each earning stream differently, and having a monopoly on launch capacity should be a higher multiple than a super competitive oligopolistic coding market, if that's what this winds up being. It's a tricky, tricky situation.
Speaker 2:
[14:44] Will Brown. Wow. Cursor just hit a $10 billion run rate.
Speaker 1:
[14:48] They did. It's guaranteed, right? There's no way that they won't make $10 billion this year. That's not even run rate. That's just like it's locked in. It's more than contracted.
Speaker 2:
[14:55] I don't know. Yeah, and it's very meaningful because it is effectively an exit and that it's by itself. They'll be in a position to actually reinvest that. That's like a nice little NeoLab Series A, basically.
Speaker 1:
[15:13] Ken says no. You got to multiply that $10 billion by 12. Because in that month, when they get the $10 billion check from SpaceX, it will be $120 billion run rate. It will be the largest AI company in the world, that month. And then they just have to figure out... They don't collect until end of year if they're still independent. Otherwise, it's more like $25 billion.
Speaker 2:
[15:34] Patrick is quoting Scott Wu.
Speaker 1:
[15:36] Oh, yeah. Last of the Mohicans. Scott Wu. I love it, because despite... This does not look like AI.
Speaker 2:
[15:42] Without images, too, we just... This kind of adds that. I actually think this might be done the old fashioned way.
Speaker 1:
[15:48] No, this is Nano Banana. This is Nano Banana.
Speaker 2:
[15:50] There we go.
Speaker 1:
[15:51] It's good at cutting out faces.
Speaker 2:
[15:52] Thank you, Watermark.
Speaker 1:
[15:53] He says, here we go again. Last of the Mohicans. Yeah, Scott Wu is the last one standing in this particular category and he's licking his chops thinking about who might want to hop over to Cognition, Cursor, Cognition, Windsurf, Devon, Cursor, Zombie Corp. As the ghost ships continue to line up on the shores of Scott Wu's territory.
Speaker 2:
[16:18] Some news from Space News Inc.
Speaker 1:
[16:21] This is very interesting.
Speaker 2:
[16:21] China backs Orbital Data Center startup with 8.4 billion in credit lines.
Speaker 1:
[16:25] They're pilled, they're pilled.
Speaker 2:
[16:26] Elon is interested.
Speaker 1:
[16:27] 8.4 billion in credit lines. That is a lot of money. A Beijing based space startup has secured early stage funding. Early stage funding to the tune of 8.4 billion? What are we doing here? An extensive credit backing is part of a broader Chinese push towards space based computing infrastructure. Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited. We don't know how to name companies like that in this country. Seriously.
Speaker 2:
[16:51] This is the new meta.
Speaker 1:
[16:52] Yeah. What is Cursor's real name? Any Sphere? This is a pretty good name. I like Any Sphere and I like Cursor, but it doesn't hold a candle to Beijing Orbital Twilight Technology Company Limited. Also known as Orbital Chengguang, announced the completion of a pre-A1 funding round, April 20th. Round saw participation from venture and industrial investors, including Hisong Capital, CITIC, Construction Investment Capital, Cathay Capital. They got everybody. It's a murderer's row over there. At the same time, Orbital State said that it has obtained strategic credit lines totaling $8.4 billion from 12 major financial institutions, including the Bank of China. Are they going to build rockets with this? I mean, I don't understand why this would be so capital intensive if they're not going to fab the chips and they're not going to launch the rockets.
Speaker 2:
[17:42] Well, they're going to put a lot of GPUs in space.
Speaker 1:
[17:44] I guess they're just going to buy a lot of Huawei chips or something. Are they going to go to Huawei and get some special stuff?
Speaker 3:
[17:49] Yeah, I mean, this is pretty interesting because I feel like, generally, the main bull case for space data centers is that the regulatory environment in the US is going to be so hard to build data centers.
Speaker 1:
[17:58] Yeah, super computers, but yeah.
Speaker 3:
[17:59] Normal land. Oh yeah, super computers. So you've got to send super computers to space because there's less.
Speaker 1:
[18:04] No, we can do data centers in space. If it's on the ground, it's a super computer.
Speaker 3:
[18:09] OK, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1:
[18:10] Because we don't want any more data centers on Earth. It's Earth Day, by the way. Congratulations, Earth. You've done fantastically.
Speaker 3:
[18:16] Yeah, but the whole thing in China is like, you can just build things there, right? There's very little regulatory overhead. So I feel like the space data centers, it's a lot more sense for the US. If the bull case is regulatory, which it seems to be, that's generally consensus, I think.
Speaker 1:
[18:31] I was laughing about how there's all this fear about data centers using water in America, but over in China, they have the Three Gorges Dam, which generates electricity from water, and it technically uses a lot of water. The water's not destroyed or anything, it just passes through the dam, generates electricity, but-
Speaker 2:
[18:47] They're using the entire ocean of water.
Speaker 1:
[18:49] Exactly, the Hoover Dam, that's a nightmare. If you just, like, there's one frame where you don't want the water to be destroyed or made unpotable so you can't drink it anymore, but there's another one where you think, like, water has individual rights and should not be used at all. Like, it should not be used, it should not flow through a water wheel, it should not flow through a dam and generate electricity at all, it should be left to its own devices still and just chill. Maybe. Anyway, Orbital has incubated, was incubated by the Beijing Astrofuture Institute of Space Technology, which itself is backed by Beijing's Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the Science Park Administration. The Institute leads a consortium of 24 organizations. The rationale for the constellation in November briefing. So, large scale data centers have expanded rapidly worldwide, and further growth faces major obstacles, including heavy land use. Weird. Soaring energy consumption. Weird. Limits on atmospheric cooling. These things usually don't apply in China, but maybe they are skating where the puck is going, and maybe they're thinking that they will need to change their direction. They're planning a dawn-dusk orbit about 700, 800 kilometers above the Earth, aiming to achieve a large scale space data center to support space-based computing by 2035. Wow. Thinking in decades over there. An initial phase spanning 2025 and 2027. Wait, why are they talking about last year? We'll focus on core technology changes and the first computing.
Speaker 2:
[20:12] They're manipulating time, John.
Speaker 1:
[20:14] The experimental satellite was slated for launch in late 2025 or early 26, but it does not appear to have launched. They have decent launch capacity with the Long March rocket. I think that they just are not amazing at landing it, but you got more money. You can just YOLO more rockets up there, I guess. Problem solved, although I would be surprised if there's as much pressure to not build supercomputers next to the Three Gorges Dam. Moving on. More images out of ChatGPT, images two, image gen two, ChatGPT images V2, these are crazy. Has anyone done that rune test of the guy driving the car into the whole thing where he was like, it's AGI if it can understand this meme? I guess you can't because like that particular meme has been saturated on the internet and so it no longer is a challenge.
Speaker 2:
[21:07] I'm gonna have it make an image. This is a crazy image. I am a tiny man.
Speaker 1:
[21:11] What is this? My space.
Speaker 2:
[21:13] My son was born.
Speaker 1:
[21:16] This is truly.
Speaker 2:
[21:17] They handed me to him.
Speaker 1:
[21:18] Never forget where you came from. Blink 182, it really packed so much stuff in here. It's almost too much. I have been noticing Gabriel over there is pushing the model into chaos and seeing what happens. Cows are flying, horses are flying, trampolines are flying.
Speaker 3:
[21:32] The next one by Ethan Molek has every image benchmark in one.
Speaker 1:
[21:36] You were asking about this. You said, and explain the history of this.
Speaker 3:
[21:40] Originally, when Dolly first came out, the image that everyone was like, oh, this is crazy. It was an astronaut riding a horse on the moon.
Speaker 1:
[21:48] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[21:48] Then it's like, okay, that's very easy. Then it became-
Speaker 1:
[21:51] Well, it's very hard to Photoshop that. It's very hard to go get an actual picture. Because if someone's just like make a picture of a dog, and it's photo real, everyone's like, who cares? We have a picture of a dog. We don't have any pictures of astronauts riding horses on the moon.
Speaker 3:
[22:04] There's people riding horses. It should be able to process. It doesn't need to fully understand everything that's going on because there's a lot of references it can pull from.
Speaker 1:
[22:13] Totally.
Speaker 3:
[22:14] Then it became, can a horse ride an astronaut? Yes. It's like the reverse.
Speaker 1:
[22:19] Yes.
Speaker 3:
[22:19] Early image models would always just do the flip. They would just put the astronaut on the horse.
Speaker 1:
[22:22] Yes, because that's more logical. Yes.
Speaker 3:
[22:25] There's a number of these things where if you ask a person to draw it out, it's like, okay, you just think logically, this is how it would look, but there's just like no reference images online. So another one was like a full wine glass.
Speaker 1:
[22:34] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[22:35] So you think of a full wine glass is like, it's still only like technically, you know, halfway, three, four.
Speaker 1:
[22:39] I never understood why that one didn't work. I saw the whole video for you.
Speaker 3:
[22:42] Because there's just very few images online of a full wine glass being like.
Speaker 1:
[22:45] Oh, full to the brim because people typically fill them halfway. And so in the training day, okay, got it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[22:50] And then there was the, you know.
Speaker 1:
[22:52] What is this image? This is not the one. This is not the one for the timeline. That one's way more aggressive than the, this is the one. This one looks aesthetic and it still looks weird.
Speaker 2:
[23:04] The only thing is, would a horse's belly really look like that?
Speaker 1:
[23:08] It is sort of like a humanoid horse.
Speaker 2:
[23:09] It kind of looks like a human that-
Speaker 1:
[23:13] But it does have the wine glass completely filled. And then explain the clock.
Speaker 3:
[23:17] The last one you pulled up was Grok, I think.
Speaker 1:
[23:19] Okay. Explain the clock. What's going on with the clock?
Speaker 3:
[23:22] That one says another understanding thing, where if you give it a time, can it do the clock, like the correct time? There's also one where you do a bunch of clocks on different time zones.
Speaker 1:
[23:31] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[23:32] And it couldn't do the clock.
Speaker 1:
[23:34] It couldn't do the clock. It has two hour hands.
Speaker 3:
[23:37] Yeah. This one.
Speaker 1:
[23:37] You know what that means. We're moving the goalpost.
Speaker 2:
[23:39] Do it.
Speaker 1:
[23:40] Moving the goalpost. The goalpost.
Speaker 2:
[23:43] We also do it. It's time. It's time.
Speaker 1:
[23:47] It's time. We're moving the goalpost. We got one shot. It's 99% over. But it's not complete yet. It's not complete yet.
Speaker 2:
[23:58] You guys have more work to do.
Speaker 1:
[24:00] No. Sam was talking about this with Ashley Vance. He was saying that he thought the job was finished with like chat GBT images because it was really good. And then they worked a lot harder and they realized that there was more to do. And this is like the car pathy thing about like, yeah, you get the self-driving cars to 99 percent and then takes another year to get add another nine and then takes another year to add another nine and then another nine and it just takes forever to improve these things because we demand perfection. We do not accept two hands on a clock. Keep grinding, folks. Keep grinding. Anyway, there are a lot of other fun posts. Semi-analysis, I thought this was just a real image of Dorkhash taking a selfie and then it was recontextualized via a meme. It is in fact an AI image.
Speaker 2:
[24:43] This doesn't even look like the new model though.
Speaker 1:
[24:45] Hi, I'm Dorkhash. I grew up all over the US and now SF-based and always down to nerd out about AI science and history. A little about me. I host the Dorkhash podcast, study at UT Austin, just published a book on the history of AI scaling. Let's grab coffee or do a fun activity this summer. Of course, this is a meme template that is very popular and has gone viral with a lot of new people that have been hired and moved to San Francisco.
Speaker 2:
[25:10] So the other thing I've noticed with images too is that I think it has fully, the new model actually has taste.
Speaker 1:
[25:17] I agree.
Speaker 2:
[25:18] And it has fully democratized like high quality lifestyle and product imagery. And I'm shedding a tear just a little bit because you used to be able to tell, somebody who's working on a CPG company, you could kind of clock their ability as a founder based on the quality of their images. Because maybe they're not super creative themselves. Maybe they haven't raised a bunch of money, but if they're scrappy, they can meet the right photographer. They can put stuff together. And now it's like everyone just has a great product photography and I saw this morning with, there's that Andreessenbach company that does like electric scooters. They were just ripping out a bunch of images that look like they spent tens of thousands of dollars doing them, but they're clearly like images too. Which is cool, it's just funny that we've entered a world where anyone can have great images.
Speaker 1:
[26:09] I've seen some people, I think that the end result will be like you will see more opinionated and creative and more people, like there will be a collapsing around like everyone will copy Apple or Linear, but then on the flip side you will see people that are doing things that are really unexpected and those things will be copied, but if the brand can run through and actually establish itself as like, oh, it has this unique aesthetic, it won't matter that somebody can recreate it. Because plenty of people did that with the Red Antler stuff. It was like there were brands that really owned that and carved that out as like their aesthetic and then there were a bunch of copycats and no one really liked those. I was reflecting on the fact that for a long time, Mid Journey felt like it had a very unique aesthetic, like ArtStation and Painterly and Sci-Fi really well. And then ChatGPT Images V1 and some of the other image models just felt like stock photography. And now I feel like I'm starting to see more stuff out of images with ChatGPT that feels more opinionated and has a stronger aesthetic. And it can do more of the Sci-Fi stuff. Although sometimes it leans in a little bit too much to the photorealism. I think you've got to get kind of crazy with the prompts to actually get something that's abstract.
Speaker 2:
[27:20] Post from Ben Heilach, the legend. It says, Nightmare Blunt Rotation.
Speaker 1:
[27:26] Oh yeah, it can do 360 images. I didn't know it could do these. It can do 360 images, which is really cool.
Speaker 2:
[27:31] You've got Sam, Hanson.
Speaker 1:
[27:33] So it generates a full equirectangular image, which is something you could view in VR. And then you can load that into a panoramic, stereoscopic image generator. The big question is, people are going to want to animate these. What's the downstream tool chain for actually turning this into video? Are we going back into video at some point? We will see. Anyway, people are having a lot of fun with it, and it should help with front end and a lot of other stuff. It seems like it's done very well on design and layouts and all this stuff. Well, I wanted to get your take on this. Imagine if Codex existed in 2005, and it's this very retro. People are doing, imagine if Codex existed in 2012, and it's the Apple design cues from the early Mac OS X, and then the Windows XP aesthetic. Do you think the Windows XP aesthetic is overdue for a comeback? This is in the middle of the GPT image 2 feed right there. This aesthetic.
Speaker 2:
[28:41] It's gotta come back.
Speaker 1:
[28:42] This in a Mountain Dew.
Speaker 2:
[28:43] That's all I need, baby. It would fix you.
Speaker 1:
[28:45] This would fix me. No, I have some more fond memories of XP.
Speaker 2:
[28:50] John, imagine playing Halo while you just look over, and this is just running there.
Speaker 1:
[28:57] I don't know.
Speaker 2:
[28:57] You're just drinking a Mountain Dew.
Speaker 1:
[28:59] There are a couple other important warnings in here. One of them, I know you had thought about potentially putting on a bear costume and trying to defraud your car insurer. If you in the audience were thinking about dressing up like a bear and attacking your car in order to collect an insurance payout that's up to $141,000, think again because humans, this is in the New York Times, humans who used a bear suit to defraud car insurers are sentenced to jail. You might be thinking, I'll just throw on this bear suit and I'll attack my car and then I'll call my insurer and I'll collect a check and it'll be easy, easy money. Easy money, get rich quick scheme.
Speaker 2:
[29:43] No, three Southern California residents were sentenced to jail after masterminding a scheme in which they staged fake bear attacks on their luxury cars, then collecting more than $141,000 in insurance payouts. To carry out the attacks, the residents had a person in a bear suit climb into the cars and use claw-like kitchen essentials to leave scratch marks. The Los Angeles residents then filed claims to defraud three different insurance companies. So I don't understand why they had to be in a bear suit. Like were they filming? Were they filming it?
Speaker 3:
[30:13] There is security footage. It's okay.
Speaker 1:
[30:15] Okay. Yeah, we're going to pull up the security footage.
Speaker 3:
[30:18] Yeah, I'm the Rolls Royce ghost.
Speaker 1:
[30:20] Yeah, 2010 Rolls Royce ghost. I know someone who has one of those. I don't think he's responsible for this, but they are dressing up like a bear to get into the car and rip everything and destroy it so that you can file an insurance claim.
Speaker 2:
[30:40] Hey, I'm just a bear. I'm going to just get in this car.
Speaker 1:
[30:43] The schemes are really out of control these days. That is a wild, wild one. The California Department of Insurance began its investigation called Operation Bear Claw after an insurance company flagged a suspicious claim about a bear rifling through a 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost in Lake Arrowhead, California where there are in fact bears. So it's not that unreasonable. The defendants claimed that the bear had damaged the interior of their Rolls-Royce with photos they submitted to the insurance company showing scratch seats and doors. Video footage submitted with the claim and released by the department shows what appears to be a bear crawling around in the backseat of the Rolls-Royce and swatting at the dashboard. Investigators later discovered fraudulent claims submitted to two other insurance companies that claimed a bear had damaged the same interior of two Mercedes Benz's.
Speaker 2:
[31:32] Just scratching everything.
Speaker 1:
[31:33] That is like the most perfect scratch line. Like it's so suspicious. Like it's so clearly like, I feel like a bear's claws would be way more organic and like.
Speaker 2:
[31:43] Also hopefully doing more damage. That looks like the weakest bear ever.
Speaker 1:
[31:47] Yeah, because it's not a bear, it's a human. The department concluded that the culprit is not in fact a particularly nimble bear. The defendants were arrested in November of 2020.
Speaker 2:
[31:56] So I would, my first thought is not super believable that the bear walks up to the Rolls Royce Ghosts, opens the door and just goes around. But a few weekends ago, I was hanging out at a former guest of the show's house. He has goats, friend drives up in his car, harks and leaves the door open. Few minutes later, what's in the car?
Speaker 1:
[32:18] A bear.
Speaker 2:
[32:18] A goat.
Speaker 1:
[32:19] People do odd things with animals. People dress up as bears. Scientists also apparently have been giving salmon cocaine. I have no idea why. But The New York Times has a post, these salmon got high on cocaine. That wasn't the craziest part. Scientists in Sweden made an unexpected discovery. I think Tyler read this piece and can spoil the ending because-
Speaker 2:
[32:44] What are they doing over there, Tyler?
Speaker 1:
[32:45] What is the unexpected?
Speaker 3:
[32:46] I think they tested like what happens when you give the fish cocaine. I think the answer was that they swim much faster and they can swim for longer.
Speaker 1:
[32:53] Okay. That was unexpected.
Speaker 2:
[32:55] Imagine being the scientists that didn't get a grant for their research. They were working on something.
Speaker 1:
[33:01] I'm really close to breaking Alzheimer's.
Speaker 2:
[33:03] They're reading this article and they're like, wait, I was going to do Alzheimer's research and then these scientists just wanted to give hard drugs to fish.
Speaker 3:
[33:12] Nearly twice as fast.
Speaker 1:
[33:14] Nearly twice as fast. I guess that's somewhat interesting, but this does feel like something that could be one-shotted by LLM. Interesting discovery.
Speaker 2:
[33:20] There's no way, there's just no way you could have just-
Speaker 1:
[33:22] You had to prove it.
Speaker 2:
[33:23] You had to prove it.
Speaker 3:
[33:24] For science. This is a good quote. While it's unclear if swimming faster and further while under the influences harm these fish, experts say it's probably not great.
Speaker 2:
[33:33] Speaking of things under the sea, Red Lobster brings back endless shrimp for a limited time starting April 20th. Luke Metro says this is an EA Cause area, hostile takeover of Red Lobster. Make it vegan. Make it vegan. Make it vegan.
Speaker 1:
[33:53] No, they got to make a play to make it come back. This seems like something that customers were clamoring for. Have you ever been to Red Lobster?
Speaker 2:
[34:01] No.
Speaker 1:
[34:01] I don't think I've ever been to Red Lobster. I've done the Outback Steakhouse.
Speaker 2:
[34:04] There are things in life that I don't think I will ever do. No. Red Lobster, I believe is one of them. Ben, have you been to Red Lobster?
Speaker 3:
[34:11] I've been there.
Speaker 2:
[34:13] What's your rate?
Speaker 3:
[34:14] They're big in Minnesota.
Speaker 2:
[34:15] 1 to 10. 1 to 10. It's fine.
Speaker 3:
[34:18] I think they're all gone now.
Speaker 1:
[34:19] 1 to 10. What are you rating it?
Speaker 2:
[34:21] Like a 5.
Speaker 1:
[34:21] Like a 5.
Speaker 2:
[34:22] I think before it was perfect. No 5. Perfectly mediocre. No 5. You've got to pick a side.
Speaker 3:
[34:25] Perfectly mediocre.
Speaker 1:
[34:30] It's sub 5, in fact.
Speaker 2:
[34:32] We love you.
Speaker 1:
[34:33] Goodbye.
Speaker 3:
[34:34] See you tomorrow.