I see a large IPO on the horizon.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Overnight success.
The place of $3,000.
Double.
Right?
There's misinformation.
Market clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll.
We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Come on. Get up.
Trust the experts here.
We are experts.
Founder Mel.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby.
UAV online.
Blaze win.
Double blaze.
Triple blaze.
Double kill.
Finally.
Is.
Wins.
Team Deathmatch.
We are experts.
Triple blaze.
Let's just roll. Right.
Market clearing order inbound.
Come get up. Triple glaze.
We are surrounded by gentlemen. Take your position.
Strike one.
Strike two.
Activate golden retriever mode.
Market clearing order inbound.
Five.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by.
Founder.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Tuesday, March 31st, end of Q1, 2026.
Boy, we're live TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place.
Yeah. I got a new sound queue. I know you were pulling for me. I got three now. Dangerous. I got three now. Watch out. Uh, I'm not going to go too crazy. I'm not going to overdo it. We've been there. We learned. We changed. We evolved. We became better as people as did our linear lineup. We have a banger show. Let's pull it up. Linear of course is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear using agents.
Alex Pradhan coming in from Project 11 going to be talking about uh Google's uh quantum uh news.
The crypto quantum crash. Say that three times fast.
Crypto quantum crash. Then we have Quasar from Applied Intuition.
Yes. Excited to catch up with him and Absolute Dog. Then we have Sebastian Mallaby. Yes.
Uh releasing his new book, The Infinity Machine, An Insider Account of DeepMind.
Tyler's got it pulled up right there.
Superintelligence.
I'm a huge fan of Sebastian Mallaby. You might have read More Money Than God. You might have read The Power Law, the history of Silicon Valley. It's the definitive account of how venture capital became what it is today. Highly recommend that book. This is a very interesting departure from that because it focuses on a single person, a president's biography, not a history of an entire industry, but very excited to talk to Sebastian Mallaby.
And then we have Forrest from Somos raising a $40 million round.
Uh then Dino from Seronic, Will from Whoop, Janick from Public, Ryan from Crosby, and Chris U.
Who's working on a spinout from Rivian.
Very exciting.
Already has a billion dollar valuation.
There we go. Well, uh, friend of the show, our president here at TBPN, Dylan Abriscado, uh, headed up the TBPN newsletter, which you can sign up for at tbpn.com, and wrote a fantastic essay summarizing, uh, a trend that we've been discussing with him around how AI is changing meme making. And I found it very interesting. I'm glad that he wrote this piece. And so, we'll read through this and then discuss it, debate it, and see uh, where we can take it further. And then obviously...
And Dylan's from Long Island. Yes.
Uh New York. So John is going to be...
I'm going to do it in a Dylan Abriscado impression.
Memes are changing. That became abundantly clear during the Oscars a few weeks ago when Conan tried to create a new Leonardo DiCaprio meme accent.
That's just like UFC announcer.
Uh to go alongside the classic Leo memes. In doing so, especially by using TFW, that feeling when, and the blocky white font that defined early internet memes, he inadvertently demonstrated that the meme templates millennials grew up with have become increasingly stale, even cringe. It's a good point. Uh, instead, AI generated videos are the new meme template that every network and studio should be focusing their launches on. Look at what happened. Uh, look at what's happening with the Harry Potter reboot. When the trailer first dropped, the reaction to the new Snape played by Ghanaian... sorry, he's from Ghana.
Ghanaian-English actor Paapa Essiedu was predictably and unfortunately negative. According to the LA Times, he received death threats since being cast in the new role. But after a few incredibly viral and well-produced AI videos, uh, one an original Snape versus Black Snape MMA match and another AI generated rap video and another Dripped Warts, the School of Drip, the narrative has started to shift. Have you seen any of these? I think I've seen Dripped Warts, but can we pull up the quote-unquote original Snape versus Black Snape MMA match because I have not seen this one and I think it is illustrative of what uh Dylan is talking about here. Snape v Snape in the UFC ring. While we pull that up, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And let me also tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multistream, go to restream.com. So, let's take a look at Snape v. Snape in the UFC ring.
Any luck?
Here we go. I just dropped it in.
Cool. Uh, and we have a few others here. The videos have amassed tens of millions of views and on Dylan's timeline at least. Sentiment around both the character and the reboot has done a complete 180.
Here we go.
Really photorealistic.
Does this... does this uh...
Are there any uh red flags here as a UFC enjoyer? Does this feel like a proper UFC?
The actual video quality is...
So bulky. The video quality is insane.
Wait, but Old Snape won uh in the fight.
Yeah.
Okay.
Wow.
But I think it just... Okay. Wait, how do you know that? Um, I think uh it just sort of like makes the characters more entertaining, more fun. Shows you that this is just creativity at the end of the day. This is just like you should not be so up in arms about something that's a movie, like it's entertainment, and here's some more entertainment, and so you're adding entertainment to the discussion and uh people are enjoying that. Uh there's another AI generated rap video about the new Snape, uh which we can pull up a little bit of here.
Uh AI meme videos are inherently viral and driving real awareness in a way traditional memes no longer can. Not just because they're novel and more entertaining, but because a single AI clip can travel further and compound harder than traditional meme formats in social feeds that now heavily favor video. This suggests... Yeah, that's interesting. On X, it's still very easy for an image to go viral, but if you think about, you know, Instagram, YouTube, like a standalone image just can no longer actually get that escape velocity.
Uh, I mean, what about uh dripped out Pope? Remember that?
Yeah, a little bit. But people are just spending so much time in the short form feeds and it can go in there, but they're certainly...
Yeah. Yeah, I mean I guess even some of the dripped out pope or what was it? Was it Balenciaga Pope? I don't remember what the name was. But that pope...
This suggests a new playbook for marketers, especially in entertainment. If you're about to drop a trailer for a new movie or show, you need to be thinking about your rage bait character, the one people will latch on to, remix with AI, and build around. Uh Conan tried to force a Leo meme down our throats at the Oscars. I didn't see that because I was sleeping. But this might have worked 12 years ago. That playbook is over. Today, enraged fans and communities will, if you're successful, take your characters or moments and turn them into something much bigger. Entire cinematic universes.
Yeah.
Yeah. I'm just very impressed by the overall quality of those outputs.
The Oscar selfie, I remember this. This I think became the most liked image on Twitter at the time in 2014 briefly. That image. This is the canonical clout bomb. If you're a fan of Bradley Cooper, you like it. If you're a fan of Meryl Streep, you like it. If you're a fan of Brad Pitt, you like it. And so, you're amplifying all of it. It's the ultimate collab post. And this has become a format that's been used time and time again. Uh it's effective. We did a little bit of it at the Super Bowl. It was fun. It works. But now the future is AI. Let's pull up the Dripped Warts School of Drip video. I want to watch this one because I saw a clip of this. I didn't see the whole thing. Let's see if we can play this.
That's Harry Potter. Are you really Harry Potter? My G.
Type. Type.
Type. Type.
None of that. None of that, broski. We're all here on the Maybach Express for one reason and one reason only, and that's to go to drips, the school of drip.
The Maybach pulling the train is pretty good.
Hey, check this out.
Run.
And there's the new Snape character. So, yes, very effective. Um I was reflecting on this and thinking about how um it's not just AI videos that are unlocked as the new meme format. Like, uh 20 years ago, video editing was extremely difficult. Like, you had to do it on a desktop. You had to have a piece of software that probably cost a lot of money. It was not widely accessible. And so these image makers, image memes, uh I was talking to Brandon about this, like Good Guy Greg was one of these or like uh the Insanity Wolf and it would just be like a picture, one image of a duck and the duck would be on sort of like a solid colored background and that would be the template and then somebody would put white text with black block text, Impact font, on the top and the bottom and that was like the image meme and that was accessible in the sense that it could be like generated on MS Paint. It was free to generate it basically. Then...
We got video editing, you know, CapCut, Instagram Reels has an editor called Edits, and all of a sudden it became easy for someone to take a vibe reel and put different text over it. I send you a bunch of these where I'll find some crazy vibe reel and I'll just recontextualize it with a new laughing thing, new caption basically. Uh, and so the classic one is like those four jets in the new Top Gun and it's like when you and the boys all drive somewhere in separate cars or something like that, you know, as an example. Um, but now you can generate, you know, full AI videos that can express the joke of the meme. And I think the next version of this is like software as a meme, S-A-M, something like that. And we've been experimenting with this with the simulators. There's TBPN simulator, Jeremy Gaffin simulator. There are more simulators coming. And all of a sudden we, you know, the idea of building a video game, becoming a video game studio was like an impossible challenge. It would be months and months of time, maybe millions of dollars to get anything reasonable. So, you had to be commercial about it. You could not do it as a comedy bit. Uh but now you can, or it's getting closer. Certainly our organization is set up to where we can turn Ben or Tyler loose for a few weeks and say, 'Yeah, like you know, work on this vibe coding project for a few days, a few weeks, like it's okay. You don't have a lot of other responsibilities that are going to creep in.' Um but increasingly, it's going to be more and more just like a few prompts on your phone to get the piece of software that is that meme. And you can think about the Jmail suite from Riley Walls as another software as a meme moment where he's making a commentary on the Jeffrey Epstein saga and all of that, but he's instantiating the humor, the commentary in a piece of software that actually works. Although, of course, the feature set is a little bit boiled down from the full Google suite, but the UI is familiar and the UI is part of the joke. And so, uh I think that's a little bit of where this goes.
Well, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And let me tell you about Labelbox. Oops, sorry. Labelbox, RL Environments, Voice, Robotics, Evals, and Expert Human Data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So, uh there is a whole bunch of Hacker News going on. We're in a very weird week in terms of the news cycle because it's spring break and so a lot of uh executives at big tech companies are like, 'Don't launch while my kids are out of school and we're going on vacation.' I actually think this is my real theory. Um so we're in a little bit of a slow news week and you can see that like the Journal is covering announcements that happened last week. They're talking about Sora. They're talking about Disney. They're talking about, you know, things that are more like reflective in strategy. Ben Thompson has a sort of 50-year retrospective on Apple. It's not driven by a news item. Like, it's not like Apple launched a new product this week. Uh so Ben Thompson is taking a step back and reflecting. It's a great piece, but it's not exactly news-driven because there isn't that much news coming from big tech companies, coming from the labs, etc. But there are a ton of crazy hacks. Uh starting with Axios. Uh there is an active supply chain attack on Axios, one of npm's most depended-on packages. So if you have been vibe coding, Axios is a package that uh helps with HTTP requests. So it gets sucked into all sorts of different projects. Uh and if you upgrade it to the latest version, you basically got a virus with that. And if that's running in the cloud, it's building and that's probably maybe bad because it could uh steal API keys or SSH keys. It could do a lot of things. Could wreak havoc on your system. Also, if you built this piece of software and you included the contaminated Axios installer or package locally, it could potentially weasel its way out of your local environment and get onto your desktop. It's a virus. So, uh be careful out there. Uh and uh I'm sure people will be responding. Uh the recommendation from uh Feross who uh sort of broke the news over at Socket Security is that if you use Axios, pin your version immediately and audit your lock files. Do not upgrade. Um so analysis confirmed that this was malware. plain-crypto.js is an obfuscated dropper loader that deobfuscates embedded payloads and operational strings at runtime, dynamically loads fs and execSync to evade static analysis, uh executes decoded shell commands, stages and copies payload files into OS temp and Windows program data directories, deletes and renames artifacts post-execution to destroy forensic evidence. So very risky.
I would say like if you have installed this, you should just like freak out basically.
And if you break your computer, that's like the first thing you should do. Just like try to slam...
Yeah. Take the computer, throw it in the lake, throw it in the ocean.
That's how you should start. Um...
I concur.
I mean, practical. Yeah. Uh I mean there is going to be some sort of like power law response here where of the people that are victims of the attack, they will go after the most vulnerable with the highest like ransomware potential and I think we're seeing that with uh one company, I believe Merrow was targeted, but I don't know if that's...
But I don't... my understanding is that yeah, the crazy thing is you have this like Claude Code leak.
Mhm.
That was completely separate. Nothing... even though I do believe they use Axios in Claude Code. Saw something on that.
And you have the Merrow leak which is uh...
It's not a leak. It's ransom.
It's ransomware.
Someone stole some data.
Yeah, they stole a bunch of data and now they're trying to, you know, get bids on it. Uh we'll get to that in a little bit. Okay.
Uh and then there's this Axios supply chain attack. Anish had a little bit more context. He said, 'A tiny piece of code called Axios runs inside almost every app on your phone and every website you visit. Developers download it 100 million times a week. A few hours ago, someone poisoned it with malware that hands an attacker full control of your computer. If you've never heard of Axios, that's normal. It does one boring but important job. It lets apps talk to the internet. When a website pulls up your feed or an online checkout processes your card, Axios is probably doing the work underneath. Over 173,000 other code packages plug into it. It's everywhere. The attacker stole a lead developer's login for npm. Think of it as an app store, but for code that programmers use. Once inside, they swapped the developer's email to an autonomous Proton Mail account and uploaded the poisoned version by hand. That jumped past every security check the project normally runs before new code goes live. And this was not a rush job. The attackers staged the malware at least 18 hours before pulling the trigger. They built separate versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. They poisoned both the current version and an older one within 39 minutes of each other, casting the widest net possible. Once the malware ran on a machine, it deleted itself to cover its tracks. The trick was smart. They never touched a single line of code inside Axios itself. Instead, they tucked in a fake add-on called plain-crypto.js. Built to pass as a well-known trusted library, it copied the real library's description and author info, so nothing looked off at a glance. When a developer installed Axios, this fake package quietly ran the malware on its own. When a smaller package called ua-parser.js got hijacked back in 2021 with about 8 million weekly downloads, the security world treated it like a four-alarm fire. Axios has 100 million, over 12x the exposure, with 173,000 packages depending on it. Socket, the security firm that flagged this, caught it in about 6 minutes. That's fast, but six minutes is still plenty of time for automated systems at companies everywhere to pull and install the bad version before anyone can react. If you or your team run Axios, freak TF out. Now, lock your version to 1.14.0. Change every password, API key, and access token on any machine that installed the compromised update, and check your network logs for connections to sfrak.com or the IP address 142.112.67.3.'
Uh Karpathy had some context if you want to go through this, John.
I will, but first I'll tell everyone a very important message from CrowdStrike, which is super relevant today. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And I'll also tell everyone about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So Andrej Karpathy said, 'New supply chain attack, this time for npm Axios, the most popular HTTP client library with 300 million weekly downloads.' That's a lot. Scanning my system. Andrej Karpathy says he found uh a use imported from Google Workspace CLI from a few days ago when I was experimenting with Gmail Gcal CLI. Uh the installed version luckily resolved to the previous version, the unaffected 1.13.5, but the project dependency is not pinned, meaning that if he did this earlier today, the code would have resolved, everything would have updated, and he would have been pwned. It is possible to personally defend against these to some extent with local settings, e.g. release age constraints or containers or etc. But I think ultimately the defaults of package management projects, pip, npm, etc., have to change so that a single injection, usually luckily fairly temporary in nature due to security scanning, does not spread through users at random and at scale via unpinned dependencies. So very, very crazy, crazy story. Um Scott Woo said that Devin review caught the Axios supply chain attack for multiple Cognition customers before the attack was publicly known. These attacks will be 10x more frequent in the age of AI. It is critical that repo maintainers start using AI for defense as well. Showing one example below where Devin review caught the attack within an hour of its release. Text minorly edited for anonymization. So uh I was debating this with Tyler earlier. The question is like, how does this update diffusion of coding agents, diffusion of vibe coding? Uh I was sort of saying, is this bullish for Cursor, Windsurf, you know, code reviewers, because you would see an organization that said, 'Hey, we were having a great time vibe coding, but going forward we have a standard in this organization that we're going to have more humans in the loop.' Does this make people be more inclined to put humans deeper into the situation? Tyler's counterpoint. I'll let you explain how you were saying that maybe this is actually bullish for just more token generation, more code gen.
Yeah. I mean, clearly like there just needs to be more code review, right? Okay. The package was still seen within seven minutes by an automated system, right?
That's true.
Um, so like yeah, I think people will just like there's going to be much more of an emphasis like, okay, you use a coding agent to write the code. You also use a coding agent to review the code every time. And like right now that's kind of a thing you do maybe later if you're in a big team you have code review, but if you're just doing it solo maybe you don't do as much code review, right?
But it just becomes, you know, more embedded within the agents, right? You talk to Codex, you talk to Claude Code, there's already like every single...
I just think it's bullish overall for cybersecurity. Like I think every cybersecurity company will probably do well. People are on edge already.
And even though this type of attack has happened for years, long before the popularity of vibe coding, it just feels like there's a bunch of new solutions that are needed. The kind of incumbent cybersecurity players will do well. They're going to release a lot of new products. I think the question that I have is like, why seven minutes, right? Like if um...
Why not check it before it's merged in the first place?
Yeah. Yeah. Or just like, you know, these are machines so theoretically they can be constantly monitoring versus like...
Yeah. I don't know. And the question is, uh, we're going to be digging into this story more over the next few days, but I'm interested to know like, it's found in seven minutes. When is it actually rolled back? If you look at 300 million weekly downloads, like clearly there are people that were downloading it at that moment in time at all seven of those minutes. There's probably like thousands of downloads, if not, you know, tens of thousands, um just doing like a rough ballpark on what seven minutes means over a week of 300 million per week. But the question is, uh, like how quickly was it rolled back? So is it only if you're in that seven minutes or was it discovered in seven minutes and then it took them another 20 minutes to roll it back and stop serving the contaminated package? Um understanding the scope of this because it's very clear that as Andrej Karpathy explained, like he was actively using it every single day and yet was not caught in that seven-minute window and so he was clean. And understanding the scope and scale of the impact is very much uh determined by how many um uh just how broad and how many installs happened during the contamination. Anyway, Will Brown has a good take. He says, 'I hope someone at Axios is reporting on this.' And I completely agree. It's going to be uh it's going to be confusing when they do. Anyway, let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses. And let me also tell you about ElevenLabs. Build intelligent real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human-technology interaction with ElevenLabs. So, moving on.
Uh last night...
More leaks. What's going on? Last night, Claude Code source code uh was leaked via a map file in the npm registry. There's just a link to...
Wait, someone's just actually... do not click a link. If somebody ever says, 'Hey, I got some really great source code here. Just click this link.' Probably don't click it. Let other people screenshot it. Uh there's plenty of meta analysis over here. Um seems uh seems messy, seems unfortunate. Uh heart goes out to the folks who are dealing with the situation at the same time.
Uh Codex is open source. It's not the end of the world, but it did reveal a bunch of things about the roadmap and also some of the internal April Fools. That is the worst part. We love a secret surprise April Fool's joke. I love a good joke and uh nothing spoils a joke like hearing about it a day early. Um but much more importantly, there are lots of uh there are lots of other critiques of the way Claude Code is implemented. What are the bad? I don't think this hurts their business at all because people are...
Using Claude Code to make other products and then also having to take basically a fork of Claude Code, maintain that, try to be shipping features against it, which is again, I think it's not uh seems to not be legal at all to just fork the codebase just because it's out there. Oh yeah, you can't just... people are converting it into other languages and maybe there's some argument there, but still I don't think this hurts...
Understand some of the secrets, what's special, but at the end of the day all of these tools, especially something like Claude Code that's so new, like it's more of like the process and...
It's more bad for the overall brand of vibe coding.
Totally. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. It's rough. Um...
And the irony here is that every time Anthropic has released any feature related to cybersecurity, all the big cyber companies have been selling off, you know, tens of billions of dollars.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The question of like, yeah, does this build trust in like using vibe code?
So overall it hurts some trust, but again, you know, very obviously going to get through this.
Yeah. So the how it started, how it's going is of course landing like a ton of bricks. In the last 30 days, 100% of the contributions to Claude Code were written by Claude Code. And uh the how it's going is that it leaked the source code, which is uh not what you want to have happen.
Yes. Angel says Mythos is so good at security that Claude Code source code got leaked.
Okay, let's uh I don't know. Should I... This is like uh you know, you didn't get to watch the Super Bowl. You have it DVR'd at home. Do you want spoilers? Should we review the April Fool's joke or should we leave it unspoiled so that we can enjoy it tomorrow?
What do you think?
I mean, it's not... it's cool. It's very cool.
You've already read it.
I read through it, but it's not to my... I don't think we're getting a knee-slapper out of it, but it's very cool. I think it'll be cute.
Okay. Well, uh then we can move on. Um what else did we learn? Uh Tuki summed it up here. Uh do you understand what just happened to Anthropic? Someone on their team ran a production build of Claude Code. The compiler generated a map file, which is literally a blueprint that reverses the entire codebase back to its original source. And then they published it straight to npm for the whole world to download. And it really does show you how fast the npm downloads. Like there are people that are downloading it every single minute. And so even if it's only up there for a minute, someone's going to get it. And then all they need to do is send it to somebody, zip it, and post a link on X and it goes viral. Um it's like locking every door in your house, installing cameras, hiring armed guards, then accidentally uploading your floor plans to Google Maps. Does that matter? No. That's a bad analogy. I don't like that analogy because um floor plans are not why I lock every door in my house. I install cameras. I hire armed guards.
Aren't floor plans public on like Zillow?
Oftentimes they're not. I would say we can probably skip over this. John, if you scroll down, this account just kind of posts like the same format every single time. So, we can skip this. Let's go over.
There's a red alert emoji. You got my attention.
Let's go over to Lean. I'll get you.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
A few takeaways from the Claude Code leak. Anthropic is actively using Mythos for development.
Okay.
Uh they are already at Capybara V8. We learned last week that Capybaras are...
Extremely deadly.
But can be deadly in the right context. Capybara still has issues.
The foreshadowing is crazy.
The foreshadowing is crazy. We were talking about how the Faustian bargain that is uh getting a Capybara as a pet seems so cute, but it can bite you and it seems like that might be what happened.
Capybara has 1 million uh token context window and fast mode.
Um...
Numbat is another interesting code name tagged with at model launch. Remove the section when we launch Numbat. Uh Fennec seems to be the Fennec fox. Fennec fox is very cute, but also not a domesticated animal. How about we get some uh golden retriever code names? How about uh Big Fluffy Poodle? That's a good code name for your animal-themed uh AI model. Anyway, let me tell you about Conductor. Conductor builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and fine-tuning that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.
Arid says, 'Hot take: Anthropic leaked Claude Code intentionally to get a Nerdosphere code review it would have never gotten if they had just open sourced it.'
Oh, that's actually true. Way more... you don't leak your entire feature roadmap and...
You don't... I mean it's funny and I'm sure they'll make the most of this. This is 4D chess right here.
But uh I'm not seeing the 4D chess.
I'm seeing the 4D trust now. I'm convinced this is... I mean we're in completely uncharted territory for marketing stunts and pre-releases and sneaky footage that goes viral and maybe was planted. You don't know. And it's like some leaked account. Like I don't know. I think everything's... I think the gloves are off. Everything's on the table. This could be an April Fool's joke. This could be a stunt to drive attention to an open-source move. Although uh Tyler, you said that Dario is not a fan of open source at all, right? He's like against it unilaterally.
He doesn't want to do open source.
I feel like isn't there some steelman there where if you open source like I don't know, like Opus 2 or something that's like really old, it's entirely commoditized in the research community. So all of those secrets that went into like making Opus 2 good, those have been commoditized, they've been discussed at the house parties in SF, the researchers have moved from one place to another so everyone knows these, they've implemented, they're available as open source. But by open sourcing your model you can uh share with more of like the up-and-coming academic community. Like if I'm a computer scientist...
Yeah, but if all the research is already commoditized and...
Yeah, I guess you could just use the other ones. It doesn't really have a benefit. Maybe...
Has anyone at Anthropic commented on this at all? I haven't seen anyone.
Yeah.
What is undercover mode?
That is a way to contribute to projects without letting people know that you're using...
Claude Code.
Oh, interesting.
Um, uh...
That's a hack.
Gergely over at Pragmatic Engineer says this. Gergely, sorry. This is either brilliant or scary. Anthropic accidentally leaked the source code of Claude Code, which is closed source. Repos sharing the source are taken down with DMCA. But this repo rewrote the code using Python and so it violates no copyright and cannot be taken down.
Okay. And there's a warning. Do not store the code even though it has leaked. Do not store it because you might get DMCA'd. Uh according to The Prime, uh the last time Anthropic, uh in their infinite PhD-level wisdom, leaked their own source code, February 25th, that happened. I missed that entirely. They DMCA'd all repos that had their code. Careful storing the code because Anthropic will have no mercy. Uh 40,000 users forked it. So uh maybe unfork it if you did that because it sounds like you might get a legal letter. Again, a DMCA is not like an actual lawsuit. It's more just...
Unfork, unfork.
Unfork it. Uh and people are of course making a joke that uh the Codex source code has been leaked in full here and they're linking to the GitHub because Codex is open source, uh which is cool. I don't know, it's interesting. Uh and more and more people are building their own harnesses. Uh there was some interesting data that uh Opus performs extremely well, better than in Claude Code, in Cursor on some benchmarks. And so there is this new paradigm of like, you know, how can you add different value when you're building a harness. So um what else?
Yeah, certainly there's plenty of other companies that are building harnesses that are going to be able to dig through this and get some benefit, be able to improve their products. That's not great, but at the same time Codex's source code is already open source.
Yeah.
And so that hasn't been hurting Codex's progress and growth. So...
Yeah.
End of the day, ultimately I would say, I'm assuming very, very embarrassing for the individual that ultimately uh contributed to this, but uh they will get past it.
Well, uh we will put the blame squarely on the AI model so they can take it. Uh Dax is getting line-of-code mogged because Claude Code source is 512 lines of code whereas OpenCode, his project, is only 118 lines and so he's got to get those numbers up.
And GT mogs everyone with over 50 billion lines of code.
He doesn't have 50 billion lines of code. GT, uh Garry Tan will be coming on the show hopefully this week, uh and we will get the full scoop on how he's using GStack and other models, uh which should be fun. Before we move on, let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies pick channels, uh advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales. Just like on Meta...
Zach says, 'NDAs are a great way to keep your corporate secrets safe from one or two beers, but not three beers.'
Why is there a community note on this? Oh, this joke was posted before on Instagram. It's a little joke theft. Interesting. Interesting. But it's a good joke and I'm glad that he brought it over to X where we could enjoy it along with 36.
The original post was, 'An NDA is a lock and three beers is a key.'
Okay. Well, yeah, he toned it down for the timeline. Anyway, uh there is news out of Google. Uh a Google paper warns crypto on quantum risk ahead of 2029 timeline. So, we've heard about the risk of quantum computing affecting uh the cryptocurrency industry, crypto projects broadly. Uh there is some new uh research out of Google that provides some more perspective. So Google researchers have warned that future quantum computers may be able to break some of the cryptography protecting Bitcoin and other digital assets with fewer resources than previously thought, adding urgency to the debate over how the industry should prepare. The researchers did not indicate such a machine exists today, but said new work suggests the computing power needed to carry out that kind of attack may be lower than earlier estimates had suggested. In a Google research blog post, this is from Bloomberg, uh the researchers said that a future quantum computer could break elliptic curve cryptography, a form of public key encryption used across much of the market. Their latest estimate points to a 20-fold reduction in the quantum computing hardware needed to break what's known as ECDLP-256, a mathematical problem that helps secure crypto wallets and transactions. That does not mean Bitcoin and Ethereum are suddenly exposed. But the researchers in a white paper dated Monday said the clearest defense is a shift towards post-quantum cryptography or PQC. I'm sure this will be a hot topic over the next few months. A newer form of security designed to withstand attacks from powerful machines. They also urged the crypto industry to cut avoidable risks in the meantime. 'We urge all vulnerable cryptocurrency communities to join the migration to PQC without delay.' Google cast the paper as a warning meant to give the industry time to act, not as a prediction of imminent collapse. Last week, the tech giant introduced a timeline to fully migrate its own security systems to post-quantum cryptography by 2029. Fears around quantum computing as a realistic threat to crypto have swirled for years. In January, Coinbase established an independent advisory board to study what quantum computing could mean for the blockchain. That same month, Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies, removed a 10% allocation to Bitcoin from his model portfolio, citing fears that the advent of quantum computing could undermine the token. On Tuesday, Bitcoin shrugged off the news of the Google paper uh making the rounds, rising as much as 2.6% to $68,300.
I'm not sure where it is today, but Jordi, I'm sure you can pull that up. Even so, the researchers said the time left before such machines arrive still appears longer than the time needed to move public blockchains to post-quantum cryptography. However...
BTC is currently at 67.
67. So, slightly off of yesterday. Uh a lot of this stuff has been discussed ad nauseam in the crypto community for years. I remember hearing about quantum potentially uh breaking Bitcoin as far back as 2016.
So you're saying you were already in that kind of like post-quantum?
Yeah, exactly.
Yes, 100%. I was locked in. No. Uh uh. Yeah. I was aware I was aware of it.
One concern that people in the community have had that I've seen talked about is this idea that if you did have a computer powerful enough to crack these encryptions, you would, unless you were like Google and you already had, you know, billions and billions and billions of dollars of cash flow, you wouldn't exactly stand up and say like, hey, I have cracked Bitcoin, because the incentive for a certain team would just be to go around and find these wallets that were maybe maybe didn't have any activity for a long time and just start cracking those individually, because if you just stood up and said, hey, I have a quantum computer that destroys Bitcoin, the price would go down and then you the the hack, you know, the the hacker wouldn't get any benefit from it.
Yeah, it's interesting. Uh, what are quantum stocks doing on this news?
Uh, quantum probably ripping. They rip on everything. Is that one of them quantum? Uh, Rigetti's up 8%.
Okay, there we go. Oh, Scantum's privately held. Uh, there's another one, D-Wave, right? D-Wave, are they public? Yeah, they're up uh 10% today, but they're down 12% over the past five days, but and 25% over the last month and 42% over the last six months, but they're up 88% over the past year. Let's go. Uh, D-Wave is a $5 billion company. Yeah, there's apparently a bull market in Nick on our team's email inbox. Oh, yeah. Quantum companies that want to come on and talk about.
Well, we do have someone coming on, right? Uh, we have Alex Prudin from Project 11 uh coming on to break it down for us at noon. Uh, so Nick Carter uh was talking about this. He said, 'Many are wondering what Google saw that caused them to revise their postquantum cryptography transition deadline to 2029 this week. It was this and it's from uh research Google research.google Google, which we will uh go through. Max the VC says Google's basic basically saying we've we've cut the quantum resources needed to break Bitcoin's encryption by 20x. We can now break it. We can prove it. We're just not going to tell you how. We've slowed down research to give crypto a chance. You have until 2029 to figure out a solution. Good luck.' Uh, Elon chimed in and said, 'On the plus side, if you forgot your password, the password to your wallet, it will be accessible in the future.' Also to everyone else.
Yeah. Um, yeah. I I I don't know. I mean, it uh how do how do property rights if somebody if somebody does have a quantum computer and they crack your Bitcoin wallet that you forgot the password to, but you can prove that you owned and then they get busted for stealing your Bitcoin, you could potentially get it back.
Do you ever really own code?
Uh, Nick also said, and the craziest thing is that the quantum AI, the Google quantum AI paper, is maybe not even the most concerning quantum paper released today from Project 11, uh who's coming on. Shor's algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic cubits. So this will be interesting to dig into uh further. Uh, the uh within minutes with the 500,000 physical cubits, Google is now more confident on a 2029 postquantum transition. Well, speaking of Google, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And let me also tell you about Graphite code review for the age of AI. More important than ever, Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So, um, there's a lot of news about this quantum story.
Nick said, 'Good morning. Now is not the time to panic. The time to panic is if Bitcoin devs read these two papers and double down on their chosen solution of hoping it goes away, then panic.'
Uh, Dan Shipper says, 'The first thing I've seen that could make Bitcoin go to zero or allow competitive coins to to to catch up.' So, uh other other uh uh other coins clearly have at least like a very clear like marketing story to tell if they are like the quantum proof or the first to be quantum proof or the most seriously regarded in the quantum proofing race. Uh, will be interesting. Uh, Ariana Simpson uh chimed in and said except all or most other coins have this problem too, but that is the opportunity that someone can uh maybe change something. So, uh the chance that NASA lands on the moon, we were tracking this yesterday. The the missions are starting to happen before 2028 on Kalshi is now at uh 14%, before 2027 is at 4.7%. So they are racing. Of course, this Artemis 2 mission is not boots on the ground on the moon. It is rocketing around the moon. Uh, we'll have more about this tomorrow.
They're just going to check it out. They're going to be gone for 10 days. They're going to be in space for 10 days.
Um, and uh we'll be will be very interesting. Uh, Brenda Gell was doing some deep dives on the technology, the streaming technology, what we really care about here that will be on board. Something like 20 cameras, 4K live streams, laser beams to make sure it's low latency. Should be a lot of fun. Super chats would be good. We got to get a chat going. I'm sure there might actually be because they usually stream on YouTube and so I wouldn't be surprised if
Is it going to be a 24/7 like perpetual stream that's always on?
Even when the astronauts are taking a sleep.
Okay. Yeah. It's going to be funny. There's so many all the conspiracy theorists are going to be sitting there watching it very closely and then pausing and
There was a glitch there. Did you see that glitch? That was that was VFX. That was AI. No,
this is my mark. It uh I will believe that it's real if I see an astronaut put three fingers in front of their face.
Because this is the one thing that the AI can't do right now. If you're ever on a Zoom call with someone who you suspect of being fake, a scammer who said, 'Hey, let's get on Zoom. Let's talk about some financial investment opportunity,' and you and it looks like someone you think is the person but you suspect that it might not be, and they will be able to show you, look, look at the fingers, the fingers are perfect, it's fine, it's fine. That's because this part is not AI, just the face is AI. This is the deep fake stuff that's happening. So what you have to do is you have to ask them to hold up three fingers. They'll be like, yeah, three fingers, this is fine, right? I satisfy the task. You got to say, no, put the three fingers in front of your face, because if you put the three fingers in front of your face, the AI gets confused and it breaks the deep fake that's happening underneath. So, you got you got to go like this. Show some depth of field. You got three fingers in front of the face. This is the trick. This is the only way you'll survive in the in the future. Be careful out there.
Um, Merkore had a breach. This is crazy. Uh, the design language for the uh hacker is very hacker coded. The the the the hackers that are putting out a bounty created like an image that looks very aesthetic to me. They the the design of this, I didn't realize hackers um did stuff like this. This is very interesting. But you know, it's like you think about the hackers, you know, cosplaying as hackers. They are, but they have
they've like adopted like the green like the green text in the black terminal. It's like they're they're they're they're living the it's uh it's like life imitates art. That that type of thing.
Anyway, it seems like a very rough leak. Very unclear what's actually happening. There's a whole bunch of different uh questions in here. There's a database of candidate profiles, source code, uh video, all sorts of stuff, Tailscale VPN data. Unclear how much of this is real. They could be faking it. I don't know where the comments are, but um the risk is that uh if there is some sort of Equifax style payout, that could be extremely costly, because if they have millions of people in their database and they got to pay everyone 400 bucks like Equifax did, uh because they have sensitive information, that could be very very expensive. Well, uh we have had the Merkore folks on the show uh many times and are hoping that they get through this smoothly and uh everyone's
Yeah, absolutely brutal. I mean, it's it sucks. It sucks first and foremost for all the individuals whose PII is now potentially floating out there.
Uh, it's probably quite bad for their customers who paid for uh paid for the, you know, some amount of this data and now it's just floating out there. And then uh obviously, you know, unfortunate for the company, but uh still unclear. I was uh looking up Lapsus, which is uh the hacker group styled as Lapsus with a money sign, classified as by Microsoft as Strawberry Tempest and more recently identified as or a part of Shiny Hunters, is an international extortion-focused hacker group known for its various cyber attacks against companies and government agencies. The group was active in several countries and has had its members arrested in Brazil and the UK in 2022. Wow. According to City of London police, at least two of the members were teenagers.
Lapsus uses a variety of attack vectors, including social engineering, MFA fatigue, SIM swapping, and targeting suppliers. Once the group has gained the credentials to a privileged employee within the target organization, the group then attempts to obtain sensitive data through a variety of means, including using remote desktop tools. Attempts at extortion follow. Initially, the messaging app Telegram has been used for communications to the public, including recruitment and posting sensitive data from their victims. The first major cyber attack attributed to Lapsus was against the Brazilian Health Ministry's computer systems in 2021. Lapsus gained notoriety for a series of cyber attacks against large tech companies, including Microsoft, Nvidia, and Samsung. Following these attacks, City of London police announced that it had made seven arrests in connection to a police investigation into Lapsus. Although the group had been considered inactive by April 2022, it is believed to have reemerged in September 2022 with a series of data breaches against various large companies through a similar attack vector, including Uber and Rockstar Games, with subsequent arrests again by City of London police and Brazilian police. The group appears to have become inactive after September 2022, with members perhaps dispersing to other groups and a conviction of two British members.
It's also interesting because like they don't enforce they don't enforce like brand intellectual property around hacker collectives and so anyone can pick up the brand and use that whether or not they're in the organization. It seems very fluid. But uh good luck to everyone who's working on the response and hopefully uh a a good resolution that is resulting quickly. Uh let's move on to some good news. Um uh we will be having Sebastian Malibi join the show at 12:30 today. Uh but Colossus Magazine published an exclusive chapter from the book which Tyler has there. Uh the the biography of uh Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind. Uh and he secretly built a hedge fund inside of DeepMind trying to beat Jim Simons. Google shut it down. So there's this interesting uh there's this interesting screenshot that Colossus shared. Uh Hassabis for his part assembled a secretive hedge fund operation within DeepMind. He recruited a team of 20 researchers to train high-frequency trading algorithms and explored a collaboration with the Wall Street behemoth BlackRock. It was not a project of which Google approved, but Hassabis, a five-time world games champion at the International Mind Sports Olympiad, sick, found hoped he'd found another game that he could win. 'One day I asked about the story of this trading project. I was told that Hassabis wanted to beat Jim Simons, the mathematician who founded the wildly successful algorithmic hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. RenTech operated in secret, which Demis loved,' my acquaintance explained to me. 'Did the secret DeepMind trading team make money?' I wondered. 'No,' came the answer. 'Because of Google's wariness, it was quietly disbanded.' I heard about something. Maybe it wasn't this DeepMind team, but
Gabe says, 'But did they rip SIGs?'
Oh, yeah. Could have been the missing Simons. He also never wears socks and always speeds and just pays the tickets because his his like risk-adjusted value in terms of his opportunity cost is that he should never drive the speed limit, which is sort of a wild move. Uh true true wild man. Uh I I heard about the the potential of a Google hedge fund years ago. I don't know if it was related to DeepMind though, but just the amount of uh cash they have on the balance sheet, like they need a trading desk basically to move that money around. Even if they're just buying treasuries, they need a strategy, forex, there's so many different operations. And there was a pitch I heard about years ago that they were thinking about like, should we be more active? We have a lot of information. We have a bunch of great engineers. We should we could build a hedge fund here. But they decided that it was not compatible with like the don't be evil philosophy. It was not core to the mission. And that they, you know, at at some point there is risk associated with active trading. And so you could potentially blow up. Uh there are certainly uh plenty of examples of hedge funds that had fantastic teams but could not stick the landing and uh wound up wound up zeroed.
Sophie says Google shutting down a DeepMind hedge fund quit right before they were about to strike diamond.
It really is this meme. They they probably would have printed. Although it's not like the high-frequency trading firms are are not using AI or or not using I mean Jane Street invested in a uh in a a custom server company or custom silicon company, something along those lines, uh specifically for high-frequency trading. So they they they have a lot of, you know, AI researchers there and and you see this with a lot of the labs saying, hey, does anyone from uh the high-frequency trading industry or quant finance want to come work over here? Uh we can maybe start matching your salary, maybe give you uh a a more interesting project that you can actually talk about and people will be potentially excited about. I don't know. Anyway,
uh Bone GPT the rapper eater shared, 'I don't want this part of my brain to grow,' which is a quote from this. So, in the weeks after the presentation, the two sides finally converge on a fleshed-out version of the PCAI plan. Suleyman would lead DeepMind's applied side from within Google while Hassabis would run research as an independent global interest company. For Suleyman, this was a triumph. Google had finally signed a complex term sheet granting most of what he wanted. Hassabis was equally pleased. The plan guaranteed him an astronomical $15 billion in Google funding to sustain AGI research over the next decade and it would put an end to the meetings on corporate structure which he found screamingly boring. After two years of negotiations, he had hit his limits. 'I don't want this part of my brain to grow,' he often said when asked to get his mind around another legal document.
That's hilarious. That's a that's a great uh that's a great saying. I don't want this part of my brain to grow. Uh it's so funny that uh that that uh you know, you're you're going through two years negotiation and they're like, 'Okay, you're going to be you're going to be have so much funding to build AGI $15 billion.' You're like, 'Oh, so like a seed round for like a Neo like great.' Like, 'Oh, so like one data center from a NeoCloud or something.' Like it's like it's like the numbers have gotten so so big that $15 billion does not feel like anywhere near enough at this point.
Uh Colossus, hit me, John. Uh let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Uh, tell me about the
Elon uh Colossus shares, Elon has spent a decade trying to control an AI lab. He tried to absorb DeepMind into Tesla in 2014, then OpenAI in 2018 when that failed. An intern spoke up. It did not.
Interesting. Okay, let's read through this.
Uh, he also tried to control xAI to some degree.
Well, doesn't he control xAI? He controls it, but at what cost, right?
All all seven co-founders.
Oh, true, true, true. That's what you're referring to. Got it.
Anyways, from from the book, pushing back against Musk's obsession with the race against Google and DeepMind, Brockman added, 'It doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies.' Musk responded the next morning at 3:52 a.m.
He confronted Brockman with a proposal that recalled Pichai's pitch. OpenAI should spin into Tesla. Initially, OpenAI's team could accelerate Tesla's development of autonomous vehicles. Next, it could use the profits from self-driving cars to fund its AGI moonshot. 'Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google,' Musk declared. 'Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn't zero.' Back in 2014, Musk had Skyped Hassabis from a closet in LA,
What a funny what a funny answer.
proposing that Tesla or SpaceX should absorb DeepMind. Almost exactly four years later, the new version of this proposal played into Altman's hands, proved Musk's power hunger.
With little difficulty, Altman now persuaded Brockman and Sutskever to take his side.
Together, the three told Musk that OpenAI would not attach itself to Tesla.
At an all-hands meeting on the top floor of a converted truck factory that housed OpenAI, Musk announced to the employees that he was quitting the lab, scornfully adding that
I need Raptors. I need a I need a new Ford Raptor potentially every day. We got to put this lab above inside of a truck factory. This is amazing.
Uh, scornfully adding that OpenAI would have to sprint faster to stay relevant.
Hoping to lure away some researchers, he declared there was a much better chance of building AGI at a strong business like Tesla.
Showing courage or perhaps just youthful innocence, an intern asked Musk if speed might be reckless from a safety perspective. 'Besides, wasn't developing AI at a for-profit company like Tesla the same as creating it at a for-profit company like Google? Isn't this going back to what you said you didn't want to do?' The intern demanded. 'You're a jackass,' Musk retorted. Then he stormed out of the meeting.
No, that intern was Steve Jobs. Just kidding. That intern was Taylor Swift. Uh it is it is my interesting read on this is like it's it's crazy that uh Elon was interested in in basically buying all of DeepMind, absorbing all of DeepMind and then four years go by and he's like I'm I still want a lab. I want to absorb all of OpenAI instead of just incrementally adding to an internal lab at Tesla just one researcher at a time. Like he was able to
already working on self-driving.
Yeah. He and he was able to assemble eight co-founders at xAI, of course, like they wound up leaving. But if you just think about it as like, okay, there's going to be some churn. Maybe the churn will be higher even. But if you start the process in 2014 and you're and you're hiring researchers continuously and using cash flow from Tesla to fund that and then yes, researchers might leave, but then you get new ones and you're just building that capability. It's like the Supercharger network or you know Starlink, like you have to build a team and and you have to continually add. But instead Elon's been in this world where it's always like all or nothing, which is a very odd strategy to me instead of just like home-growing it. I don't know. Uh it it is just like an interesting it's an interesting strategy I suppose. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And let me also tell you about Figma agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents now create and modify your Figma files with design system context in beta starting today. And without further ado, we have our next guest in the Reream waiting room. Let's bring in Alex from Project 11 to the TV show. Alex, how are you doing?
I'm doing great. It's great to be here, guys.
Is it over or are we back? What's going on? How bad is it? Tell it to me. Give it to me straight. How long do I have?
Uh well, according to Google, you have until 2029.
That's forever in my mind.
Yeah. Uh although maybe not forever if you think about blockchains that take a long time to change. Bitcoin's last uh upgrade took four years and that's 2029 is less than four years away. So
yeah, that seems really risky. Uh take us through like what actually changed because I
well before we get into that a little context would love would love some background on on you and Project 11 and then we'll get into all the papers.
Yeah. All good. Uh yeah so me I'm a former Army Green Beret uh got out or I got really interested in Bitcoin working in the Middle East. Uh got out went to Thanks, nice sound effect. Uh got out uh went to Stanford then got a job working in venture first then uh entered the blockchain space at a company called Algorand where I was at for five years before getting really excited about solving this quantum problem that blockchains face and so that's what led me to found Project 11. So Project 11 I kind of gave it away, it's all about securing digital assets on blockchains into the post-quantum future, right? So uh the way I like to to frame it is the what quantum computers threaten is the underlying foundation of cryptography that all blockchains are built on, right? So it's that level that we have to fix and then ultimately everything on top of that as you guys know from tech like there's all kinds of dependencies at each layer of the stack and we have to rebuild the whole stack and that's what Project 11's all about.
Uh just to put it into perspective when did you found Project 11? You said it was five years you spent five years at the last company. When did when did you actually get started on this?
Uh October 2024. So just over I guess almost a year and a half ago.
And what was what was the general dialogue around quantum and the risk to crypto at that time?
That it wasn't real, that quantum computers were always going to be 20 years away, that uh you know that no one had to pay attention, there were bigger things to worry about. Uh honestly I feel like that's slowly changed and I think today's not just so there's a paper from Google, there's another paper out of Caltech, both dropped on the same day, both effectively lowered the bar massively that a quantum computer had to clear to be considered cryptographically relevant to threaten Bitcoin. Right? So that was the breakthrough and I think this is a watershed moment where really at this point when Google, the head of the Ethereum Foundation and a Stanford cryptography professor all pound the table and say we cannot wait to migrate anymore, then people are going to start paying attention.
Okay. What actually changed? Because it doesn't seem like the like the number of logical cubits or physical cubits like that seems to be growing exponentially. But even when you trace out the curve, you're 5, 10 years away from what we thought we needed. Uh so is this a new algorithm, a new stack of code, or is it new math? Like what changed that we got this 20x increase in efficiency in terms of cryptography breaking via quantum computers?
Yeah, a couple things. So, first off, these two papers are not necessarily about a quantum computer that's bigger or more capable, right? So, this they're about what is what it takes to break cryptography, right? And so, what changed? So, one of the things that changed was that interestingly physicists and you know, kind of quantum cryptographers that looked at this problem for a long time studied an algorithm called RSA. It's not worth defining, but it's kind of an older cryptographic algorithm, but that's not what really any blockchains use, right? Because you know RSA keys are very large, right? So it turns out, and this was kind of the key one of the key upshots of the Google paper, it turns out that if you actually focus on the cryptography used by Bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks, it's actually way easier to break than they thought it was compared to RSA. And so that is that is one of the major things. The other big breakthrough, and this is from the other paper from Caltech, is that you know quantum computers as as you guys may or may not be aware, as your audience may not be aware, are kind of you know they're very fragile generally. So to be useful, they need to have what's called error correction applied, and that error correction can kind of result in a lot of overhead. You need to have tons of physical cubits to get to you mentioned logical cubit to get one logical cubit. Well, this Caltech paper basically showed, hey, we have some new ideas to do error correction. And it turns out if we apply those, we don't need hundreds or thousands of physical cubits. Maybe we just need a handful to make one logical cubit. So that the title of their paper actually the headline is you may only need 10,000 physical cubits to break Shor's to run Shor's algorithm. And by the way, they demonstrated last year 6,000 cubits.
Yeah, that's you know no one's can put a timeline on it, but how how fast do you think you can close that gap is the question.
Okay. Uh, is it possible Jordi was uh throwing out the idea of someone having a secret quantum computer going around the blockchain uh siphoning Bitcoin from, you know, cold wallets that haven't
I'm not wasn't implying that it exists yet. Just implying the incentive of if somebody were to create one of these, but but but yeah, the way you're reacting, I'm imagining it's like if if somebody does it, it'll be Google first, which is maybe a good thing. I don't know.
It's like look, it's really hard to know how it's going to play out. I I wrote a whole blog post on our on our blog on project11.com people can check out called Quantum War Games and it was really fun because it's exactly it's like the what-if scenarios, right? Um you know because why do people want quantum computers generally? Uh well, they're great for science. Two, like you can imagine governments that want to do espionage might want the ability to break cryptography too. They probably don't want to reveal what they have. Certainly not if it's China or Russia.
Right. And um you know but and private companies maybe not Google, maybe some of these pure-play quantum companies like how are they going to make money? Well, one way would be to recover Satoshi's Bitcoin as if it were buried treasure, right? Like oh buried treasure, Satoshi's not here, it's mine now, right? So I mean that could be another scenario. Um so look I think the there is just a whole bunch of uncertainty about how this is going to play out, about who's going to execute the attack, about how long a quantum computer will take. And again because blockchains like Bitcoin fundamentally rely on this cryptography, like it's existential for them. That's one of the reasons like I founded Project 11, we and we pursue this you know solving this problem very vigorously is because everything's on the line here and we have to solve it for these chains like Bitcoin to have a future.
Yeah. Uh is there generally low optimism right now that Bitcoin developers will be able to react quickly enough? Uh what what's the statement about like I think Churchill said about democracies or the Americans maybe where it was like they'll do the right thing when every option is exhausted.
Um I think this is look I think this is true of decentralized networks like Bitcoin. I mean their greatest strength is the fact that there's no single party that says how it works or how it should work, right? And this is this is encoded into how it was built by Satoshi as a as a reaction to the great financial crisis, right? Um so that's a great philosophical strength. In the face of a crisis like this that demands a massive technical effort to overhaul, um it's a daunting challenge because unlike say Google, which you know Google has said they're going to upgrade all their systems by 2029, that's just you know someone at Google can make that decision snap. Right? In Bitcoin because it's distributed community, everyone's kind of first has to agree there's even a problem, then everyone has to agree on the solution. But I think there's examples of of uh places where blockchains like you know I'll take Ethereum uh have done amazing things, right? So one is they they transitioned from an old system of consensus called proof of work to a new system called proof of stake. It took four years to be sure, but it involved thousands of people all over the world and they did it. They did it. The blockchain's been running. Ethereum is the second largest blockchain by market cap. So I don't think it's impossible, right? But I do think especially in light of these two papers, these two breakthroughs, you just can't stop or you just can't wait anymore before starting that process.
Uh what about the rest of the digital world? Because if if uh if if Bitcoin is having problems then so many other kind of core institutions and companies organizations I imagine would uh have issues as well. Maybe maybe uh because they are centralized there's you know easier to react easier to kind of lock things down but still need to upgrade overall encryption.
Yeah, there's no doubt that other institutions need to upgrade but in my mind there's also no doubt that you know blockchains and digital assets are just the most vulnerable. I mean one of one reason is obvious. I mean, Satoshi, uh, Satoshi's Bitcoin, so the founder of Bitcoin, who we think has gone away or died or something, you know, they have a bunch of their early Bitcoin that hasn't moved. There's a bunch of lost coins, you know, all in all, you know, that's about to maybe 15% of all of Bitcoin supply is estimated to be lost. I mean, that's hundreds of billions of dollars uh potentially in in, you know, in market terms. So that's just a huge incentive that like let's take let's take the counter example of you know if someone wanted to hack into a bank or something, you know, as you pointed out banks are centralized, they can kind of react. Also the cryptography the way that banks implement this cryptography is just kind of one of many layers of security, right? So it's kind of this breaks like theoretically someone tried to wire all the money out of my account, my bank call me.
Yeah, no, they literally have tape drives where you know they they have cold storage, they print things out and they have the ledger and they can potentially roll back which is crazy to think about but like they could if there was like a catastrophic hack they could be like look everyone's just going back to yesterday's accounts and you know that's better than the chaos that we were in.
That's it and that's not true for Bitcoin, right? All I need is one signature and all of Satoshi's or Coinbase's or Binance's Bitcoin is mine. There's no fallback, there's no anything. That's how it was designed, right? That's the point. That was the point.
Permissionless finance. That was so
So what is the state of the more faster moving coins, faster moving moving chains? Are you consulting or do you think you'll plan on launching something yourself that is uh uh quantum secure, quantum proof? Um how do you think this plays out? Because it does feel like uh you know, I'm optimistic that I'm rooting for Bitcoin. I hope the devs figure it out quickly. Uh you know, hopefully that happens. But it does just feel in terms of like the marketing of a new project, there is a bit of a white space to say we're the ones that are taking this particular feature most uh most uh most seriously.
Yeah. Look, I mean it's kind of hard to know how things are going to play out, but the white space that we're occupying is we want to be the bridge, okay, for digital assets to the post-quantum future right now. That doesn't necessarily rule out potentially having a platform to issue on top of at some point, but I think for now our priority is more or less, you know, people have already decided that things like Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana and stablecoins have value. Yeah. And I think overwhelmingly they would like to keep the things that they already value and just make them secure. So that's what we focus on, right? And there's no shortage of things for us to do because uh the protocols all have to get fixed, all the smart contracts have to get fixed, all the apps have to get fixed, and then all of the user wallets have to get fixed. And so again, going back to the fact that this is a stack, and you're breaking the bottom part of it. So I mean, we really focus all the way across. So we've done work with Solana, the Solana Foundation, we did the first post-quantum testnet for them. We've worked with a few other protocols as well. We designed actually a new novel post-quantum algorithm designed for blockchains with the founder of Zcash. We've done that too. We collaborate with EDF and we're doing we're getting ready to launch our own post-quantum wallet as well.
Yeah. Uh talk about the information flow. How much of the work that you do, the work that will be done by the Bitcoin Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, all the different developers, how much of that is open source by default or licensable or just can be understood by other parties and implemented very quickly? How should we expect diffusion once this problem is solved to actually roll out? Will it just be like, oh yeah, like we're just following the Solana standard and so we're just going to mirror that over onto, you know, whatever chain we're working on.
Yeah, I think there will be diffusion. I think there will be uh you know uh sort of sort of consensus if you will around a certain subset of post-quantum algorithms but I don't think it's just you know one and done because Solana is a very different system than Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin's digital gold, it's sort of meant to be slow, you know there's no apps on it. Solana is meant to be fast, right? Yeah. And so the cryptography that works for Bitcoin might not be the cryptography that works for Solana and this is actually was kind of the results of of some of the experiments we ran with Solana. And uh and look, this is one of the challenges, right? And this is again by why why we keep saying this is like time to start is now because we don't know how long it's going to take to migrate because you know these new algorithms, there's trade-offs that come with them. And by the way, even if you choose to implement one, you need to test it and you make sure it's secure, all this stuff. So, um,
have you tried to have you tried to quantify or guess estimate what the quantum discount rate is on Bitcoin right now? Because it's an interesting thing where like if you own a lot of Bitcoin, there's a bunch of people on the timeline today talking about this. They don't have an incentive to like really freak out and spread the narrative, but they have some incentive to say like, 'Hey, we need to have a conversation. We need to make progress on this.' But, uh, do you think that's that's factoring into price at all?
Totally. I mean, the way I would put it is uh I think if this risk didn't exist, Bitcoin would be priced significantly higher. So, I think exactly what you said is right. You like, 'Oh, I'm not going to sell my Bitcoin because, you know, it's maybe not right around the corner and I'm hoping people fix it,' but I also think there's people that would maybe enter uh and they're like, you know, Chamath has said this exact thing. He's like, 'Hey, is this really digital gold uh without with this quantum threat hanging over everyone's head?' So, I think if that threat was removed, then you know, you remove this cloud over that ecosystem and potentially, you know, you'd have a lot more people coming in and therefore price would be up.
Yeah. The the it's easy to imagine as you approach that 2029 mark more selling pressure, more concerns if meaningful progress isn't made in the next two years. Um uh what what what countries uh have the most kind of advanced quantum projects outside of the US? I can guess, you know, China's, you know, investing heavily here. Uh do they have their own retail quantum companies that are trading like crazy?
Yeah. Uh first off, I I think it definitively the leaders uh both companies and research is American. So I think we should, you know, proud to be an American here. Uh but look, I think one interesting thing about the way China has chosen to attack this is uh they've made quantum computing a priority. And what that means in China is, you know, it's like there used to be a lab at Tencent and at Baidu and a few other places. And at some point a Chinese Communist Party official came in and said, 'Guess what? You guys all work for us now.' And guess what? You're all working together now. And guess what? You're not allowed to talk about it anymore. Uh, and that's the state of things. It's it's kind of a I don't want to say Manhattan Project, but it's like that level of secrecy in China. Uh, and there's a legitimate question around how far back they are. So, the best estimates that we have from quantum like we have a quantum physicist who's an adviser to Project 11 that, you know, tracks generally resource estimates across the world and and their view is that China may be six to 12 months behind at most.
And so, this is Yeah, exactly. That's not that far.
Yeah, that's really quick, you know. And so, can we expect, you know, a quantum computer in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party that maybe is more willing to crush dissent in places like Hong Kong to uh care as much about the philosophical principles of Bitcoin and decentralization uh if it serves their purposes to do otherwise? I don't think we can. And so, I think again back to the fundamental problem, uncertainty, right? And it's better to be safe than sorry. So, we need to basically prepare today to prevent the crisis tomorrow to keep the trust in these systems.
Well, thank you for everything that you're doing. Thank you for your service both here and before. Uh project11.com is the website, correct?
Yeah, all spelled out. Yep.
Fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon.
Great to be here, guys. Thanks. Cheers.
Goodbye. Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And without further ado, we have Qasar Younis in the Reream waiting room from Applied Intuition. He's the founder and CEO of the company. And we'll bring him in in just a second. Uh we are running.
We need a little bit of time.
A little bit ahead of schedule. A little bit ahead of schedule.
We need a little bit of time.
And it's hard because there's not all that much short-term news. There is one news item that we can go through quickly. Allbirds just sold for $39 million. The company was once worth over $4 billion with DTC darling. Followed this company closely uh because I was building a DTC company at the same time. I was like, 'Wow, they are really getting big.' Um but it seemed like it did not particularly scale. It was more of a niche product potentially. Uh and of course, you know, margins and cost of
sales creep in and then everything collapses to private equity multiples. Did you ever wear a pair of Allbirds? Would they ever pull you away from Bayga, get you in some Allbirds? You know, it's Australian wool, you know. It's kind of like Italian leather, Australian wool. Yeah, there's something like that.
No, I never, I never owned a pair.
Not even if you're visiting San Francisco. It's a great, it's a great sign of respect.
Did you ever, did you ever have a pair? I probably did.
I think I had one pair at some point. Um, they were okay. They didn't, I don't know. They, they sort of like look okay and were comfortable on day one, but then they sort of deteriorate a little quickly.
This would be probably a two to three trillion dollar company if the shoes had aura.
But they, they had, they should have released a lot. It seems like they potentially had negative aura.
Yeah. And they got, and the, I mean, the, the stock suffered. They, they had to pay the aura tax, the aura discount.
Massive loss. Yeah, I mean, still a very interesting launch, very interesting go-to-market telling the story of where the materials are from. That was certainly a playbook that was adopted by a lot of companies. Showing, putting the supply chain on display basically, it was the right fit at the time, but people are not into it. The chat is not happy about it.
Let's ask, let's ask our dear friend Queser Unice from Applied Intuition because he's here. He's in the TBPN Ultra Dome now. Queser, how you doing?
I'm doing great. How about you guys?
We're doing great. We have to ask you, do you own a pair of Allbirds? What's your preferred shoe when you're walking around a factory like that?
I don't own any Allbirds. When you're in a factory, you have to wear steel-toes.
Yeah, exactly. You have to have a steel. There's no Allbirds at. Maybe they should, maybe that's the comeback story for them. So they just, they were worth four billion, now they're worth 40. Maybe the steel-toe Allbirds are what gets it done.
A steel-toe Allbird would look fantastic.
We seem to be having a video delay. I think the team will work it out, but we can't hear you. Can you hear us? Okay.
Okay, great. Yeah, I can hear you and I can see you. Okay, so fantastic. I know exactly what's going on.
Well, great to have you back on the show. I'd love for you to just reset with us for the shape of the business, where the company is today, how big are you, give us, you know, the broad strokes, and then we'll go into the partnership today.
Yeah, thank you. Thanks again for having me. The company, Applied Intuition, we're a $15 billion company still doing what we were doing before, which is taking intelligence and putting it into physical machines. Today we have our first ever physical AI day where we're bringing lots of investors together, bringing industry analysts, you know, bringing everybody who's kind of relevant in the field to talk about all the things that are happening in physical AI. We're pretty strong believers that the future, you know, the next kind of big thing is AI going out of screens and going into the real world.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Talk about the most recent partnership, LG.
Yeah, LG Innotek. We just announced this a couple of days ago. I don't know how many of your viewers know, but LG provides...
You're putting AI in TVs. That's what you're doing. The AI is going in the TV and I'm going to be able to ask questions.
No, that is not, that is not what we're doing.
I mean, what's happening in the self-driving space is there is now, the models are basically working and they're figuring it out. So really there's an aggressive downward pricing pressure of how to make self-driving cheaper. The research kind of question is done and now it's just an engineering question and that's just another way of saying it's a cost question. So companies like LG who are doing, you know, sensors at really, really large scales and really, really cheaply, you know, they're entering the space as well and we're working together with them on self-driving.
Yeah. So take me through, when people think self-driving they always think Waymo, Tesla, but the market map of like products that need autonomy that would be defined as vehicles. Give me some examples. I mean, you're standing in front of something. I know that it's very broad. What's in this partnership and then what else are you focused on? What's adjacent? And what's, you know, on the roadmap?
Yeah. So I think what's different about us versus let's say vertical players like a Waymo or a Tesla is we provide this, you know, AI across all types of machines. So you see machines behind me if you guys were here for physical AI day. We take the same models and we put them in defense. We put them in commercial trucks. We're running driverless trucks in Japan right now that are going into commercial operations in the next quarter. We are running in mines, so all the way from, you know, Arizona to Australia. So our hypothesis basically is these technologies, whether it's self-driving or the underlying operating system, they're so expensive and they're so complex to build and maintain. The only way that you really make this a viable business is that you actually spread this across lots of manufacturers and lots of industries and lots of use cases. I mean, our kind of crazy claim to fame is, you know, our company's almost 10 years old and we've preserved basically all the capital we've ever raised.
Which is kind of, you know, it almost sounds like BS, right? Because the whole mantra is, you know, raise a lot of capital. And we're a real AI company. We have real AI bills and we figured a commercial model which is allowed to scale. We have over a thousand engineers and so we're one of the, if not the biggest physical AI companies on the planet that's obviously also commercially viable. But it all goes back to that simple thing is like you want to distribute all this cost across lots and lots of companies, lots and lots of verticals.
What about shared learnings? Like is a team that's working on mining, are they able to find a breakthrough or discover something you can apply to trucking in Japan? Like is there a lot of...
Absolutely, that is the heart of the company. And so there's all the what you described as like shared learning kind of broadly, but there's also technical advantages. What we've seen is taking data, which is just obvious, also not obvious, but taking really, really diverse data from a mine actually makes our self-driving car system better. And taking, you know, data that we have from our software and car in Germany, you know, makes our defense work better. And so it really is, it really is...
Yeah, I've heard so many stories about that where like there will be like exactly one instance of a chicken being chased by a woman on a tricycle in the training set. And so it's very hard for the machine learning system to actually understand that if you see that exact scenario, you got to slow down. But that's the nature of big data and machine learning and these scaled systems. And it's not, it sounds crazy, but it's not that crazy to imagine some weird scenario that you see in a mine actually teaching you something that you could use just on a normal street.
Yeah. Maybe getting a level lower just so because I always, me being an engineer, always bothers me to talk in pure generality because I tend to miss things. Just getting to a level lower, what you're really talking about is anomaly detection and it's not necessarily like, you know, you need to see the chicken running across the road in Thailand and that's going to make the mine better. But what's really happening is models are getting a better understanding of the physical world around them and the kind of parameters around them. If you look at, you know, kind of the last kind of generation, I'm crazy to say last generation, but really large language models, large language models really improve with diversity of data. That is really like, you know, a kind of a big breakthrough and of course scaling laws, all of that stuff is being brought into the physical world. And we're powering that.
Yeah. I mean truly no one would have predicted, or I mean of course some people did predict, but I would have never predicted that like including poetry would help a model get to like solving math. Like I would just see those as different things and say put the poetry team over there, put the math team over there. But actually bringing all these things together worked really well. Play out the counterfactual for me. You haven't been a high burn company. You haven't been super capital intensive. If you'd done vertical integration and built the tractor behind you, that would have been extremely capital intensive. Correct. Is that like impossible?
Well, nothing is impossible. But you know, my undergrad was at this obscure school called the General Motors Institute and as the name implies it's really about automotive. It's like the West Point for automotive and when you spend a lot of years in factories as I have, there are some deep lessons that get imparted into you and one of those lessons is holy crap these factories are extremely capital intensive and they're extremely complex and the strengths of Silicon Valley actually don't quite overlap with the strengths of building a large factory. Now in terms of the core question, we had Marc Andreessen here today and we talked about this. Marc was one of our first investors and has kind of been along with us with the entire ride. I mean all the way to the presentation today and we asked him this question about vertical, horizontal. What do you see happening in AI? What do you see happening specifically physical AI? And the punch line is, you know, all of our values at Applied Intuition can be reduced down to two words: radical pragmatism. And if there are verticals that we think that we should be a bit more vertical in, we'll do that. And I think it's kind of a false trade-off to say what we do in, you know, trucking is what we're going to do in construction, which what we do in agriculture is what we're going to do in mining. What we're really trying to do is bring intelligence out into the real world. And each of these verticals are facing really, really different problems. You take a, you know, with a tractor behind me, the average American farmer is 58 years old. There's nobody coming to replace that person. And so what is going to happen because, you know, if you take that person, their kids have left and they're often not coming and taking over the farm like maybe in previous generations. So that farmer needs, you know, we don't need to teach them how to use Claude Code. That's not what's going to change the farmer's trajectory. What's going to change the farmer's trajectory is the machines are intelligent and they're working harder and smarter on their behalf. So he can run an entire farm with a, you know, with a swarm of machines. And that's not, you know, that's not too far into sci-fi. One of the key components here that, you know, we're doing and we believe is you need to abstract that hardware and software away. We as technologists, you look at like your laptop and your phone and you kind of take for granted the miracle that exists. Android runs on thousands of hardware devices flawlessly. So that's also something that Applied does. We're just abstracting hardware and software. Once you do that, you can make every machine, you know, intelligent.
Have you tried to estimate the economic impact assuming you guys, you know, stay at the current kind of improvement rate or accelerate as the technology kind of starts to diffuse in some of these industries like trucking and mining and agriculture? Like what are the downstream impacts? I mean, there's such a debate right now around what impact will AI have on the economy. So much of the economy is like moving physical things around, producing things, shipping them.
Let's separate a little because economy is such a generalization. So when you're talking about like, you know, code complete and white collar work is very different than, you know, trucking where there is a huge labor shortage. It's very different than in mining where, you know, people don't want to go live in kind of remote areas doing 12-hour shifts. I mean literally labor shortages are preventing construction companies from, you know, collecting billions and billions in revenue. So these are industries where AI can't get there fast enough.
It's a very different calculus than a kind of, you know, I think what the normal narrative is and then we're super obviously excited about that. Let's take defense as a particular example. It's a very salient example. We don't need more warfighters in harm's way. We need less warfighters in harm's way. And no warfighter wants to go out into that ecosystem where autonomy is really becoming the dominant thing. And so I think the way to think about this impact in the physical world is it's a lot less resistance. There's a lot more pull. Now the first question you asked is the size of impact. I don't want to, you know, sound like I'm pitching my own book here with the...
I'm asking you. I'm asking you. I want the biggest number. I want the biggest number.
The numbers are absurd and ridiculous. But I can tell you this much, if you think about, you know, the way I think about it, I used to be at Y Combinator before I was a COO and ran the firm and funded lots of interesting companies and one of the analogies I used to use to help founders understand market potential, market sizes, yeah, I grew up in Detroit, you're sitting in the Detroit Metro Airport and you're sitting in a gate, you look around, how many of those people are like really deeply using Claude Code? I mean sure, frankly speaking, not many. A lot will be using something like ChatGPT, some variant of that, maybe Gemini. But how many of those people drive? How many of those people work at construction sites? How many of those people ride in buses? How many of those people serve in our armed forces? The point is a much, much larger group. And I feel a little, again the engineer in me feels a little awkward saying these kind of, you know, pitching these things, but I think the market for physical AI is way, way bigger purely because the surface area is much bigger and it's compounded by the way that the way technology diffuses with phones and laptops creates this like rapid, you know, competition that you see in, you know, that you're seeing in all these kind of subspaces, right? In physical AI you got to kind of know what's going on in the car business. And I'm not saying, you know, I'm not, you know, gatekeeping and saying you got to go to the General Motors Institute to build technology for the car business, but you bet your bottom dollar it helps. And we're doing that across a bunch of industries. I think it's, you know, I'm as confident about the company as ever before. You know, the question we always get asked, this question, why the hell did you raise all this money, you know, almost a billion dollars? You're just going to keep plowing it away in the bank account. We're doing it for a simple reason because we can. If we need to, we can invest very aggressively to take opportunities that we think we can accelerate, you know, beyond just traditional organic growth and so far that's worked. It's not to, you know, promise the future that we won't, but those are kind of debates we have every single day.
Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much.
I just want to say I can see the path to a hundred and then a trillion dollars in run rate. I agree.
Well, I mean, Waymo, you know, a company that we love, they're local, you know, we're also in Mountain View now, Sunnyvale. That company, you know, is a great company, but is burning a lot of capital and is a smaller revenue base than us and just raised at $126 billion. I mean, I love those guys. I mean, we have so many friends there. I'm not trying to talk poorly about this, but...
No, we love Waymo too. It's very impressive what they're doing. You know, 15 that we're at and 126. I think we got room to grow.
Massive. Massive. Yeah, we got room to grow.
Tell Marc. Tell Marc you're ready. You're ready for the big...
Believe me. Everybody wants to, you know, I feel like it's faux where they want to keep putting money, you know, money into the company. We don't need anybody.
That is the best analogy for a venture capitalist. They are the farmers stuffing the goose.
We have our own farm, you know, and we're making our own money, so that's really great. And frankly speaking, I mean, like I said, Waymo is great, but it's just robotaxis.
So much. Go to Warren, Michigan.
And you just go to the party shop in the corner and say, 'Hey, aren't you excited about Waymo?' I don't think you know, it's not hit the masses yet, which just shows obviously Waymo's growth potential, but also shows I think how big physical AI is going to be.
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
Fantastic talking to you guys. Thanks.
Let me tell you all about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. We got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And we're talking to them later today. But first, we have Sebastian Mallaby. He is the author of The Infinity Machine. Sebastian, how are you doing?
I'm doing great. Thank you.
This has been, you've been on John's radar for a long time, dream guest list for a long time.
We met maybe four years ago at a talk you gave around The Power Law and it was very fascinating. I love that book. This book goes in a different direction. And after that conversation, I asked you probably the worst question you could ask to an author. I asked you what's your next book going to be about because you had selected venture capital. Venture capital had done very well and I presumed that whatever you would pick would be a great investment category because you seem to be a good picker. You told me that you were thinking about biotechnology, biotech investing. You went a different direction with AI. Is there anything I should read into that?
Well, I always kick the tires on a few ideas before I settle on one. And I think it took me from The Power Law coming out in February of 2022 to somewhere around the summer, maybe August, when I really settled on AI and then it took me another, I don't know, three months to get the courage up to go and pitch Demis on the idea of giving me a ton of access so I could write this book. And then I got lucky because I pitched him and one week later, guess what? ChatGPT came out. So what I thought was maybe a fringe subject...
Went mainstream super fast.
Super fast. What was the response with the team? What was the process? Obviously, he's extremely busy. He also sleeps at very random times. We can get into that. But what was your actual interaction? How much time did you spend? What was the research process like?
So once he agreed to be in, he was really in. It took about six meetings, two with him, four with his team to get them to agree. And you know, my pitch was, hey, if you say in every speech you give that artificial intelligence is the greatest invention in history...
That means you're way too important not to have a book about you and it's going to happen. So you better get used to it.
And also, if you're going to upend our lives, you know, change the way we think about ourselves as humans because it's a rival form of machine intelligence, you know, you better explain your motives to people, otherwise they're not going to accept it. So, that was the pitch. He agreed. And then once he agreed, we would meet like for two hours at a time. We would go to a pub near his home in North London and there was a kind of secret staircase at the back, go upstairs, kind of dusty little room with nobody else there and we would sit there for two hours usually and he would just riff, you know, talk about philosophy, movies, computer science, neuroscience. I mean, he's such a range of a person. By far the most fascinating person I've ever written about.
Wow. That's high praise. How do you think about balancing the biographical timeline, the history, the financial impacts which you've covered in the past? When I think about the stories that you've told in The Power Law about venture capitalists, there's a little bit of their philosophy, but it's a lot of how the deals came together. Fly on the wall. I love that type of storytelling, but this goes a little bit of a different direction. So how did you think about balancing all the different perspectives that you could bring to his story?
Yeah, I mean, I always want to do the personality, the figure, but then the landscape behind as well. So it's always a mixture of, you know, you need a character who drives the story, but the story is boring if it doesn't mean anything.
So you have to link it to larger stuff that's going on in capitalism and how society's going to change and all that.
And I mean in this case because Demis is who he is. And he would just riff in these extraordinary paragraphs of like storytelling and theoretical stuff and you know it's just so fascinating that I did give him the microphone more than I have in any other book. I mean, I basically quote him at some length, you know, and it's broken up with me asking him questions. And so, I'm kind of the reader's lens through which to see Demis talking. And I'd never used the first person really before in my other books, but in this case, those 30 plus hours I had talking in a pub with this extraordinary man, that was the gold dust I had. So to really make the most of it, I did have these passages of us talking together which kind of intersperse the more analytical or narrative bits of the book. You know, how after the transformer model dropped, what was Ilya's reaction and why did OpenAI get ahead? You know, I cover all that stuff as well.
But I do have these passages where you see events through Demis' eyes because, and I think it's worth doing, because he's so unusual.
What was your understanding of AI or view on AI in 2022 before you meet Demis for the first time? Were you aware of the doom arguments? Were you a believer in the technology? Did you think it was 20 years away, a hundred years away, two years away? Like where were you before this book? Because I feel like it probably changed you.
Yeah. You know, I had met Demis before at tech conferences because of The Power Law and writing about venture capital. I would go to tech conferences in Europe and he would sometimes be there and I actually cheekily, you know, raised the issue of hedge funds and especially, you know, the one, Renaissance Technologies, the main CEO, Peter Brown, had done a PhD with Geoff Hinton about AI back in the day and of course I knew that Demis would know that and so I said, you know, do you know these guys who used deep learning and applied it to markets? And that got his attention. So I talked to him a bit. So I knew that he was amazing. I knew that the technology was ripe in the sense that he'd produced this string of breakthroughs. You know, AlphaGo defeating the human Go champion, then AlphaZero, which was even stronger. Then there was AlphaFold, which won him the Nobel Prize for predicting all the shapes of protein in nature. So there was a series of good models. And what they all had in common was they dealt with insane amounts of data, crazy combinatorial spaces. Like in Go, there's 361 first moves you can make. Okay, that's way more than chess.
And so unscrambling Go and the strategies in Go was much harder than chess. And I knew that these breakthroughs were not just cool in themselves, but they represented the coming of a time when machines could make sense of an almost infinite amount of data and extract meaning. And hence the term The Infinity Machine, the title of the book, and hence my enthusiasm for writing about it. And you know, so I knew it was breaking out. I knew Demis was amazing. What I didn't know is it was going to break out literally the week after I met him and pitched him on the book.
What has surprised you about how the industry overall has evolved since you started meeting with Demis? Because in some ways I have to imagine you kind of maybe it hasn't been that surprising at all even though a lot of the growth is impressive but do you feel like you had a view into the future from those first conversations in the pub?
Yeah, I mean I think you know I was lucky that the meetings were bookended by, you know, going to see Demis sort of maybe the third meeting or something. ChatGPT by this point had gone viral and him saying to me, 'Okay, this is war,' you know, and you could see his competitive side come out, right? This is war. These guys, he said, have parked the tanks in my front yard, you know, I'm fighting back. So you could see that. And then after that comes the merger between Google Brain in Mountain View and the DeepMind team in London. So the two kind of halves of Google's AI talent base are united and then I think you get what, you know, a business school professor is in the future going to write about is kind of like a textbook case in how you make a merger successful because everyone knows that mergers are hard and when you do it with eight time zones between the two teams, one in London, one in California, and you're doing it in the middle of this knockdown dragout, you know, capitalist fight over building LLMs. This is going to be, you know, most people said this is going to fail and I would come to Silicon Valley while I was doing the book, check in with my friends at, you know, different venture capital shops and they'd all say game over, OpenAI won. And you know, the surprise is that within two and a half years, Demis's, you know, Google DeepMind model Gemini was doing better on the rankings than the OpenAI model. So that was an incredibly fast comeback.
Yeah. How do you think about the importance of being like a business person or a deal guy in AI? It feels like Demis has this quote he doesn't want to grow that part of his brain referring to some legal negotiations that took a number of years.
Oh. Oh. Was that Mustafa? That was...
No, actually that was Demis saying I don't want part of this part of my brain to grow. Take away these legal briefs.
I completely get that and it seems incredible for him to stay in the research mode, build the research organization and yet because of scaling laws, we're in this weird regime, in this paradigm where sometimes doing a deal to marshal an extra 10 billion of compute actually does unlock a new capability and is almost in the research track. And I'm wondering how you perceive the relative importance or Demis's perception of the relative importance of these sort of like business dealings that might be more critical path to AGI than the Demis of 2021 might think.
You know, I would say that the single most important business relationship in the world today is between Sundar Pichai, you know, CEO of Google, and Demis Hassabis, who's running the AI brain trust because, you know, Sundar has Demis's back. He deals with providing the resources, you know, supporting the notion that you're going to spend all these tens and maybe hundreds of billions on compute, you know, that's Sundar's, that's what he delivers and he gives Demis the oxygen to then just go do the science. And sure he has to build products but I think, you know, he said to me several times, Demis, we've got to a point where building a product like Gemini is in fact advancing the progress towards AGI. There's no tension between the two. If you had stopped your AGI research 10 years ago and taken a sidetrack to build some widget, yeah, that would have been a waste of time. But now that it's so mature and you're actually to build the next LLM, you got to kind of figure out, you know, a reasoning model, then it's going to be agentic and then you're going to be scaling it even more and all this sort of stuff that we've seen. And this is genuine scientific progress as well as product advance.
Yeah. Do the products also help sort of shift the culture in Google? I'm interested in understanding this concept of like AGI-pilling, becoming a believer in the Demis worldview of the impact of AGI, what artificial intelligence will do. That mindset has to diffuse through Google. The ChatGPT viral moment clearly had an impact. I'm sure agentic coding has had a similar impact but what has Demis's role been in being the culture carrier of that belief in AI progress internally?
Well, I think he's used all his sort of visionary communication skills to unite the Mountain View team and the London team. And I think the one sort of organizational contribution he's made which is sort of super powerful is that from a long time ago, DeepMind had always two different cultures going on at once. There was a kind of blue sky research for scientists. You get a lot of freedom. You could publish papers and all that. You know, go find what you want to find. And then there were moments when Demis decided that if you pushed really hard on a particular product or a particular project, you could get a, you know, breakthrough achievement that would really shock the world. And so he did this repeatedly with, you know, AlphaGo and AlphaFold. And this was sort of like his judgment, scientific taste being applied to knowing when, you know, the moment was ripe to really go for it. And once he decided that, there was, you know, the blue sky research kind of bottoms up stuff, you know, that went out the window and it became a top-down strike team they called it. And in a strike team, there was a lot of top-down direction and kind of everybody had to work on the same code base. You couldn't just like go off and code your own experiment on the side. You had to be contributing to the main one. And that drives towards, you know, a team is driving in a united way towards an outcome. And I don't think Google Brain had that. Google Brain had, you know, much more of the bottom-up stuff and there was no strike team component. And so Demis brought this strike team idea and it came from video game design. You know, earlier in his life he'd been a builder of video games and he in fact started a company doing that. And so this was like how you ship product and that's been a key insight for Gemini.
Yeah, Google and Gemini have every advantage just due to the massive cash flows that they have from their other businesses. How do you think that has impacted the culture of DeepMind given that they have something very real to lose? Right. It's not just about the, you know, maybe Demis's personal desire to be at the forefront of this research, but if you're not successful, then you lose one of the greatest businesses. You have the potential to lose or have your kind of core business threatened. Yeah. Google search in such a big way.
And I think, you know, Google search stands for a more general point that, you know, Google's whole reputation stands on providing reliable information. And so the penalty for screwing up is very high. You've got this very valuable company. You don't want to support its reputation. And so I think they were more worried about, you know, releasing a chatbot fast. And so they had prototypes of a chatbot in the fall of 2022 and they didn't want to release and then OpenAI went ahead and did it. And so that kind of forced their hand but their first instinct was this is going to hallucinate. This is going to do bad stuff. We can't afford that hit to our reputation. And, you know, Demis was quite honest with me in saying, well, you know, the surprise was actually the public's quite happy to play with a tool that hallucinates. You know, it still went viral, you know, so we should be less inhibited, but that was an example of how being at Google could be a kind of inhibition in moving ahead.
How does Demis, he's always told a very optimistic story about AI. I love him as a science communicator, as an optimist. How has he interfaced with the effective altruist community, more of the AI doom crowd? Does he, because he doesn't talk about it that often, but does he think about it often?
He does think about it. In fact, you know, he met his co-founder Shane Legg at an AI safety lecture, right? They bonded in a safety lecture.
And so, right from the beginning, safety has been a big part of the agenda. And when Demis sold his company to Google in early 2014, part of the deal was you're not going to use this technology for weapons ever. And you're going to have a special independent oversight kind of committee, you know, which will decide on AGI deployment because we don't want that to be just up to the corporate board of Google. Now, you know, he's slipped on some of these things, particularly the military stuff. But he has been thinking about safety and, you know, the question is what has he got to show for it? It's all very well to think about something but what can you deliver? And I think, you know, this is why towards the end of my book he's talking to me quite honestly about how it's a sort of paradoxical moment. He's doing great as an AI inventor. He's doing terribly badly as a sort of AI steward, as making it safe. It's just it turns out that there's a race dynamic. The race dynamic includes China.
You know, how do you control this technology when everybody is racing to jam it out the door?
Yeah, it was interesting last week we were talking about how, you know, Bernie Sanders has come out with a push to pause data center development and he quotes Demis and some other lab leads talking about how they would agree to a pause if other countries were kind of in agreement on it. And Bernie obviously left out the fact that I don't think any lab lead could see China pausing on development. So, how has your personal definition of AGI evolved over the last few years because everyone has their own definition. Half the people that come on the show say it was six weeks ago. Exactly. And then yet we're still in so many of these kind of more high-level conversations. Lab leads talk about race. You know, AGI is six months away. You know...
You're completely right. Everybody has their own definition. And so my solution is not to have that discussion. I mean, who cares what you know this like you could say right now Gemini is artificial, it's general, it's intelligent, game over. But, you know, just a definition thing. I think the other one which is sort of usually fruitless is, is AI conscious? Could it become conscious? What is consciousness? Nobody has a good idea. So let's just sidestep those.
I heard one good idea which was something around training a model specifically that would hold back all data and all training data related to consciousness and the idea of consciousness. And so it cannot just pull from the archive and reference or simulate consciousness. And if it develops consciousness from that and can talk cogently about consciousness without having any training data, ever seen the idea of consciousness, then maybe that's conscious. I don't know. It was just an interesting thought experiment. I don't know that anyone's actually run the test and I don't know that I would even accept it if they did, but it is something to think about. Did you feel an acceleration in your personal writing process due to AI?
I felt an acceleration in my learning process which is sort of what I do before I go interview people. So because all of the computer science papers are basically on arXiv and, you know, recently there's been less publication but, you know, certainly up to about 2022 you could go see a scientist either at DeepMind or one of the rival labs and just have a conversation with the model about, okay, this person has done four papers. What's the connecting thread? Why is this person different to the one I interviewed last week? That was a super efficient way of getting up to speed and I didn't worry that it might be wrong because I was going to speak to the human and cross-check it. But that was helpful.
Do you think Demis having a home base in the UK, in what ways do you think it would have helped or hurt the company so far? Like has it been beneficial from a talent war standpoint? I'm sure some of the other lab leads have taken a trip out to the UK to... Mark Zuckerberg's hosting nightly dinners for AI leads at his house which is just a couple blocks from all the other labs. Can't do that if the researchers are in the UK, right?
Yeah. I mean, there is movement across the Atlantic, but I think the deal is if you're in London, it's a little harder to recruit people, but once you've got them, they're probably stickier than they would be if you're in Mountain View or somewhere. You know, I think Demis has stayed in London because actually he is weirdly patriotic. You know, he comes from this mixed up sort of, you know, Greek heritage father, a Singaporean Chinese mother.
In a way that makes him a typical Londoner.
Yeah, because London is really a melting pot. But, you know, he stays there because he feels he wants, he believes in sort of British social democratic values. It's maybe ironic to an American audience but, you know, actually he thinks it's more egalitarian in Britain than it is in the US. You know, the US, if you go to the DeepMind office in London, you know, you go past the sort of public spaces like this kind of fountain with toddlers playing in it and there's a kind of free movies in the summer by the canal and then you get to this green space where the kids from the local housing project are playing soccer and then you get to the Deep office and it's hard to imagine you'd find that on the way to the, you know, the Apple headquarters or something, you know, it's just a different vibe.
Could you ever see Demis as CEO of Google or would he have to do too much...
paperwork?
You know, this gets to the heart of the dichotomy about Demis. It's so difficult because he's so many different things at once. I mean, you know, he is this Nobel Prize-winning scientist who would love to just do pure research. And he often would sort of fantasize to me about, hey, I want to retire to the Princeton Institute of Advanced Studies and do what Einstein and Oppenheimer did before me and go there. And that, you know, I think he really means it when he says that.
At the same time, he also wants to be in command of, you know, an AI lab, and he likes the capitalist competition.
So if he had the opportunity to be chief executive of the whole of Google, I suspect he's too competitive to say no. But who knows? I mean, there is that science side. So it's genuinely unpredictable.
He probably doesn't know himself.
Were you left personally optimistic after this process about just our AI future broadly? Net positive impact from AI.
I mean, clearly there's a lot of upside, especially in medicine and pharmaceutical discovery. I think you have to be honest and say there's also downside, significant downside. And as I continued to do the research for this project, you know, I became more worried about the downside because, you know, people like Geoffrey Hinton, I went up and spent two hours in his kitchen in Toronto and sat there debating not necessarily whether machines would be more intelligent than humans, obviously that they will be.
But whether machines have a motivation to harm humans, and he's very persuasive in arguing that they will. I mean, my point was, look, humans evolved over centuries to survive, to pass on their DNA. We're hardwired to survive. That's why we fight each other. Machines aren't like that. So why would they attack us? Why are you so worried, Jeff? And Jeff is like, well, you know, imagine you've got this super powerful AI and it's going to be attacked by the enemy AI and you have to defend it. So you tell the AI, if you see a cyber attack coming, you've got to fight back. You got to defend yourself. And now all of a sudden you've given your AI a survival instinct. And so don't tell me that evolution has to happen as it happened to humans. The evolution can happen in a machine way.
But these systems are going to want to survive and they're going to be more intelligent than us.
So we're in trouble. And I think you can't dismiss that.
I'm kind of both worried and excited at the same time. And I think that's how humans generally respond to all technology. And if we didn't take that trade and move forward with both the excitement and the scariness of technology, you know, if we didn't take that, we'd be still living in caves.
Yeah.
So, in some sense, the story of Demis is like, you know, the story of all of us, but magnified 10x. There's a documentary that was just released or might be releasing right now that features an interview with them, the AI doc, and it spends more time talking to all the different lab leads and voices in the industry. More focused on the doom question: can we be apocalyptic? Should we be optimistic? But what I found most interesting was that the creator of the documentary, you know, summed up his full takeaway and said that AI is a Ponzi scheme. And I'm wondering if you got any vibes that everything will collapse, that this is just not financially viable.
No, my view is that there's no AI bubble, but there's only just an OpenAI bubble. You know, in the sense that the technology clearly is getting better and better pretty fast, right? You know, we had the first chatbot in 2022 and it hallucinated, then they killed the hallucination, then they had longer context windows, then they had, you know, multimodal systems that could handle video and pictures, and then they went to reasoning models, and now we're getting agentic models, and now next there's going to be, you know, world models that will be built into these things. This is a lot of progress in just three and a half years. So I think it's accelerating in progress and therefore it's not a bubble.
But what is true is that it's super expensive to develop, and if you're not attached to a really deep pocket like, you know, Demis is attached to Sundar, you're in trouble. Because I don't think OpenAI can raise enough money to bridge from today, when they have a very popular chatbot but almost none of those customers pay for it, to some future where the product is stickier somehow and they can charge money. And so I think, you know, OpenAI has been running two simultaneous experiments. One is with a new frontier technology, and the second is how deep are global capital markets. And they already raised, you know, 41 billion last year, which was a record for any private fundraising, bigger than any IPO, by the way, as well. And so, you know, kudos to Sam Altman for raising that much money, but can you pull that trick on a bigger scale every year until 2030 when they hope to break even? No. And that's why they're cutting products like... except for right now.
Because they just raised the 20.
But if you look at the 100, it's kind of smoke and mirrors. That's, you know, a lot of that is contingent on you get this money if you go public, you get this money in the future, you get this money in kind in terms of, you know, compute or something. The 100 wasn't really 100.
Isn't there a little bit of a dynamic where you could wind up with like an anti-Google alliance? Maybe there's, you know, there's like a tension between the industry and Google. This is like the foundational myth of the AI industry and the AI labs broadly, although they of course have fractured many, many times at this point.
Yeah. I mean, you know, of course there's always rivalries. You know, one might say people will gang up on Nvidia. You know, that's the occupational hazard of being the leader, right?
I think they'll deal with it. I mean, I don't think it's a winner-takes-all market, by the way. I think that, you know, there'll be space for others.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Last question from my side, then we'll let you go. Did you have any takeaways or kind of ideas around the diffusion of physical AI and robotics? Did anything stand out? Do you have a strong opinion there? Right now it feels like we've entered the sort of software singularity. But we just had Kaser from Applied Intuition on and we were talking with him about how autonomy and AI is diffusing through the physical world, but I'm curious if you had any takeaways.
Yeah, I mean, look, I think that, you know, one thing sometimes people don't quite understand is that large language models and the transformer architecture that underpins them is super consequential for lots of applications, not just chatbots. And so robotics is being improved by this technology and, you know, I fully expect to see a huge breakthrough, you know, over the next two or three years with the capability of robotics. And so I think that's going to be the big story. I kind of agree with the guy from Kaser you had before that, you know, the movement of atoms is going to be affected as much as anything else. So that's part of why I don't think this is a bubble. I think, you know, the potential in, you know, this super powerful AI is enormous.
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming and joining the show. It was a pleasure talking to you. The book is The Infinity Machine. It's available everywhere books are sold. Thank you so much. And we will talk to you soon, too.
We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week.
Take care, guys. Bye.
Let me tell you about Fin.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai and we will kick off the lightning round. Let's see. Oh, look at this. We got everything. This is amazing. Let's bring in Forest.
Forest from Somos. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
Hello, guys. How you doing?
First time on the show. Please introduce yourself.
Armed with a bunch of nerdy stuff from the team, all the things we're building. No. Hey guys, I'm Forest.
Amazing. Yeah, kick it off.
Let's see. Where do I start? I'm Forest. I'm a fancy plumber building infrastructure from scratch down here in Colombia to make internet way better and make compute and everything kind of work well in Latin America and beyond. So very weird journey, but making the fastest internet in the world at the lowest cost is kind of the summary in a very short nutshell.
Amazing. You have a lot of fans. I got a bunch of texts from investors that were excited for you to come on. What were you doing before we get into so much? What were you doing before this?
Dude, I came to Medellin when I was like 18 years old. Basically just dropped out of high school. I started building stuff and ostensibly came to visit a friend for a couple weeks and that was eight years ago and here I am. So I made websites. I kind of took a very non-traditional path and it's led me to doing a bunch of weird stuff here.
That's actually a non-traditional path. Normally when somebody comes on and says they had a non-traditional path, it's like, you know, Stanford to a Meta internship, a Google internship, a VC internship. But very, very cool. What, yeah, break down like, you know, Somos, you're raising a Series B today. What, like how long have you been at it? What initially, I can kind of guess what the initial inspiration might have been. You're building digital products, it sounds like, and were probably frustrated with internet speeds, but what's the backstory?
No, I came to Colombia in 2018. I got roped into helping people build this like blockchain incentivized blah blah blah back when everything was going to be blockchain in like urban slums here in Medellin. And as those blockchain projects happened, everyone got bored really quickly. So they just left me with all the equipment and I just kind of became fascinated by how do you build connectivity in slums and didn't speak any Spanish, didn't know anything about telecom and just started tinkering. And the first couple years were me like literally living in a slum here in Medellin building internet, stringing stuff up in the middle of the street. And kind of bit by bit I just became fascinated by the concept of like internet is the most basic thing for the modern world and we just sort of assume that it's been solved and really we haven't done engineering in the last like 30 years. It's the same underlying architecture that like John Malone was building in Cable Cowboy days.
Yeah. Every time I travel to another country, I always look up like who the biggest industrialists are and who the richest people in the world are. It's always the people that built like the railroads, the mines, the telecom infrastructure, the Wi-Fi, the internet, the power lines. It's always like the stuff that once you install it, it provides value.
So, yeah, sounds like you're doing a lot. What is in your strike zone of things that you want Somos to take on versus where do you work with external partners? Like what is the kind of core path?
Dude, this is kind of the insanity of Somos. So we literally do everything from like we interface with the submarine cables. We built like a nationwide backbone crisscrossing the country. We like make the Wi-Fi router. So like the things that go inside of the thing here is all Somos.
Oh, that's a Wi-Fi? I thought that was just a pretty lamp.
So this is literally the router that goes in customers' homes. So instead of being some like ugly blinky box, it's like a beautiful lamp.
You're like, wait, does it have to be an ugly box? Or no one thought of this. Like the internet is like literally the most incredible machine humanity's ever built and we just relegated it to being this like ugly piece of infrastructure and kind of our idea is like, what if it was dope?
That's amazing. So yeah, like how does the coverage map spread out? Everyone's familiar with those like AT&T and Verizon coverage charts of like the map of America. Do you have to go city by city, block by block? Are there ways that you can like, how do you actually scale out to reach an entire coverage area?
So I literally have like a thousand plus employees cabling the streets. We have like linemen and installers and they all work directly for Somos. And this is kind of the insanity of what we're doing. It's been a bit of a like slow flywheel to get ramping, but then at the end of the day, you're building this actual moat because it turns out it's really hard to build infrastructure from scratch. So we literally are cabling the entire city from scratch with a new type of fiber to connect people to faster, cheaper internet.
