Why Specialized AI Beats Frontier Models | Anthony Pompliano

If we process 500 million tokens via one of the frontier models, it's about $5,000. If we process those same 500 million tokens on our own fine-tuned models on our own hardware, it's about 97% cheaper.

But it's not just cheaper, it's also lower latency and it's better performance. So, if you show up to a business and you say, "It's going to give you better answers faster, and it's going to be 97% cheaper for you to run this," of course, every business is going to be interested.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, look, I wrote — this is volume two. So, volume one was basically I wanted to write a book that explained to people like you have agency in the world. Everything in the world right now seems to be trying to program you into thinking that you're a victim, that the world happens to you and you have to take those results. And so, for years, probably 10, 11 years, I have a note on my Apple Notes that anytime I would hear a good idea, I would just write it down. I could listen to a podcast. I could be talking to a friend, maybe something I experienced myself. And for the first volume, I basically wrote down about 65 of those ideas. And I was trying to figure out how do I explain these ideas? And so I wrote them as letters to my children. But I wrote them in a way that whether you're 75 years old or you're, you know, 15, you can get value. And I try to explain here's what the ideas are, here's how it impacted me personally, and here's what my takeaway is that you can go and impart into your life. And so for volume two, I joke that when you first start writing a book, like you have no clue how to write a book. I've written a lot of words online. But writing a book's very different. And so I give myself maybe a B plus for the first book. I think that the second book is an A. And so I'm excited for people to read it. It's 50 new ideas that are highly impactful to my life and hopefully they find it valuable.

It's kind of like tough love a little bit, right? You know, if you go to the gym and you see someone who's out of shape, well, like that's just the receipt of the decisions that they've made over the last year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years, right? And you can feel it with your own body is if you start eating unhealthy for a prolonged period of time, you start to feel worse. You start to realize you're putting on some weight, etc. But vice versa is also true, right? If you haven't been working out a lot and all of a sudden you start working out, you start to build momentum. You start to realize, hey, maybe I'm getting in better shape. Well, same thing happens whether it's in your personal professional life, your financial life, like good habits stack up. And I think that this idea of, you know, the things that you are experiencing in your life are almost always a direct response or direct outcome to the decisions that you've made. And when people start thinking that way, then they start asking themselves, well, how do I change what I'm doing? And you know, a good example in volume two is I talk about this idea of success is being excited about going to work, but it's also about being excited about going home. And you know, this is not a new idea. Almost none of these ideas in this book I came up with, you know, kind of from scratch. There's things I found out in the world. But if you think about this idea of going to work, am I excited? Well, if you're not excited, then go change your work environment. Either start your own company, go get a new job, you know, go find a new team, etc. But also, if you know, you're dating someone and you're, you know, prolonging leaving work because you don't want to go home, well, maybe you're in the wrong relationship. And so it just comes back to this idea of, you know, your actions can create change in your life for positive or negative reasons and you need to be aware of it and intentional.

One of my favorite ones is, you know, the reward for good work is more work. And if you think about, you know, a business where if you are successful in serving your initial customers, that means that more customers are going to line up. Word of mouth is going to spread. And so by doing good work for the first set of customers, you earn the right to do it for more people. Same thing is true in your personal life or financially, right? You know, if you're good at managing money, then you earn the right to manage more money over time. If you think in your personal life, if you're really good at, you know, dating someone, well, then you earn the right to marry them and be with them forever. And so, this idea of like the reward of good work is more work, I think ultimately tells you it's not about some end state or some finish line really. If you're doing something that's amazing, that's great, that you're proud of, you're likely just going to keep doing that for the rest of your life. And that's actually maybe the thing that you should be optimizing for.

Well, well, well, look, look, if you look at some of the mainstays in media, they've just been doing it a really long time. You know, one of the examples I always remind people is I think that my generation and those that are younger than me, they kind of maybe sort of understand who Charlie Rose is, but like the guy just put in reps. He did it every week, year after year after year. And eventually people were like, "That guy is consistent. That guy's high quality." And so with each one of those interviews, if he did a good job, he earned the right to do it more. And he did it for a long time. You know, Larry King, right? I mean, just go through all of these different, you know, kind of legends of media. And they all pretty much have the same story of consistency and high quality for prolonged periods of time.

No, I think that that's always been kind of a problem. You know, if I forget all the details, but there was one of these ancient scrolls that was recently deciphered, and I think that it's like a 14-year-old boy was basically writing to his mother complaining that the clothes she sent him weren't of the same quality as his friends. And so there's something about human nature of, you know, comparison, the mimetic nature, maybe also kind of the grass is greener or envy and jealousy, etc. But at the same time, I think that right now is easier to be more human than ever. You know, people look at social media and they're like, "Oh, everyone's just doom scrolling." Well, like that is one way to look at it. But at the same time, you know, I know a lot of people, they would have no friends. They wouldn't have their significant other. They might not even have the job they have if it wasn't for social media. And so it comes back to this idea of like if you have agency then you are responsible for viewing whatever the thing is like social media through a positive lens that actually can help you rather than hurt you. Now does that mean that me or you or anybody else doesn't, you know, sit and doom scroll from time to time? Of course. But it doesn't mean we should just all be like, oh, social media is bad. And so you can go through a bunch of stuff throughout your life and I think it comes to the same idea of AI is awesome and it's accelerating and all this stuff, but a lot of the principles in the book are timeless and they've been timeless before the internet was around, before the telephone, before electricity, right? These are things that you're going to continue to see persist regardless of what technology looks like. And so it's probably a pretty good idea to, you know, one, understand them, but two is also figure out how am I going to implement this? This book's got 50 ideas, right? So, you're not going to go implement all 50 of them tomorrow. Pick the three that you think can have the biggest impact. Go figure out how do you implement it and then you move on to the next one once you've actually seen the positive kind of reinforcement from being intentional.

100%. I completely agree. When I was 20 years old, you know, I was serving overseas in the army and there was a situation where one of our fellow soldiers was killed and I remember distinctly being like, "Oh my god, like, you know, this thing ends there. There is an expiration to the time we have here on earth and it really was probably one of the most formidable moments of my life." And I remember years later reading Marcus Aurelius and he's talking about, you know, the day you realize you're going to die, it like frees you and you're like this 2,000 years later, nothing changed. Like it is still this human experience. And so I think that, you know, we all like to think everything is brand new and we're some geniuses that are figuring something out for the first time, but usually it's the exact opposite. And we'd be better off just finding what are the timeless principles and then just embracing them.

Yeah.

There's even like if you think about the cover of the book, I wanted to do something that felt timeless versus like, you know, people put all these kind of crazy stuff on their covers, like all this kind of stuff.

Yeah. By the way, you're like, I don't know, does that sell more books if you put your face on it, right? Like you kind of go through all these things, but you realize that some of my favorite books, they're just very clean, very kind of straightforward. And you know, I could have gone and done a deal with some big book publisher and done all this media and, you know, all this kind of crazy stuff, but I ultimately think that the books I find the most valuable throughout my life have been books that they're recommended by a person who's like, I read this book, the information in it stuck with me, and I'm recommending it to you. And so ultimately I think this book in particular is going to be judged by the merits of is it good or is it not. You know, we got some amazing reviews from people I really respect. We've got a lot of folks who have, you know, gone and checked it out. But at the end of the day, 10 years from now, it's, you know, either the book was valuable to people or it wasn't.