I see a large IPM on the horizon.
You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position.
Overnight success.
The place 3000 double right there.
Clearing order inbound.
Let's just roll. We are surrounded by general. Hold your position. Come on. Get up. Trust the experts here.
We are excellent founder mode.
I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online.
Blaze. Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill.
Is win. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blade. That's just wrong. Right.
Clearing order inbound. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Strike two.
Activate golden retriever mode. Here. Clearing order inbound. 52.
I see more journalists on the horizon. Stand by. Founder.
You're watching TVN. Today is Thursday, January 29th, 2026. We are live in the TVP Ultradome, the Templar of Technology, the forces of finance capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more. They got Super Bowl ads, too, in just a few days. We're counting down the days to the Ramp Super Bowl ad. We're very excited for it. Yeah. Also, not the Super Bowl. Counting down the days.
Yeah. I Super Bowl. I learned a fun fact. I think I put it in here. Apparently, they had a Super Bowl back in 2001.
Okay. Have you heard of this? Tell me more.
So, I got followed by this account that's called 2001 Live. 2001 Live. It's 25 years ago Live. It's a cool account. And in here, they flash back to like what was happening, you know, 25 years ago. Every day they post what happened 25 years ago. Kind of a cool account. It followed me. I followed it a while ago, but it followed me and I saw a post in here that said 25 years ago they did a Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida. The Baltimore Ravens beat the New York Giants 34-7.
This is the Ravens' first Super Bowl title. I guess people are not happy about that. I don't know. But anyway, very excited for the Super Bowl. In other news, let's run through the linear lineup.
Pull it up. Meet the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents and we have a fantastic show. We have Anton from Lovable coming in studio in the Ultra dome. Then we got Christian Delian from Hill and Valley breaking down what's going to happen at the Hill and Valley conference in just a few weeks. And then we got Eric.
We need a nickname. No, we love Eric. Of course from Mobile Dev Memo, Heracles Capital. And he's coming out at 1. We're going to talk about ads chat ads. How's roll out going? Also obviously earnings makes a ton of sense. And then Kevin from Open AI is coming on again returning talk about science.
AI and science. AI and science and if we're seeing a clawed bot type moment and feeling the AGI in science what we should be looking for there in 2026. In other AI news of course we will go into earnings and whatnot today. If you're tracking earnings make sure to head over to public.com investing for those that take it seriously. stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So,
in the news today, Apple said this morning that it has acquired Q.AI, an Israeli startup working on AI technology for audio.
Yeah. Apple didn't disclose the terms. The company was backed by Matter Venture Partners, Kleiner, Spark, Exor, and GV. So nice nice little lineup and great outcome. The Financial Times reported it was worth nearly two billion, so pretty meaningful deal. Apple is not known for,
you know, really paying up on a lot of different M&A that they're kind of folding in to their road map. We had Mark German on yesterday talking about how Apple uses M&A effectively to accelerate their road map. So according to Reuters, Apple did not say how it will use QI's technology, but said the startup has worked on new applications of machine learning to help devices understand whispered speech and to enhance audio in challenging environments. QAI last year filed a patent to use facial skin micro movements to detect words mouthed or spoken.
This is we've seen a couple startups that are you know doing like the whisper like tra what do they call it? It's like telepathy almost. It tracks your mouth movements. So you can just then it like will track what you're saying. Really really crazy.
So facial skin micro movements will be used to identify a person and assess their emotions, heart rate, respiration rate and other indicators. Very sci-fi. Qi's 100 employees including the CEO and co-founders will join Apple. So the founders,
Javad Meiselle founded three-dimensional sensing firm Prime Sense and sold it to Apple in 2013.
Absolute dogs. They're doing call. The Prime Sense deal eventually helped Apple move away from fingerprint sensors on its iPhone and toward facial recognition technology.
Interesting. Said joining Apple opens extraordinary possibilities for pushing boundaries and realizing the full potential of what we've created. So very wild to be going back to Apple for a second time.
And pop quiz for Tyler, why does Apple acquire companies?
I mean, why questions are usually pretty open.
Okay, good answer. But Mark German told us, why does Apple acquire companies? To accelerate the road map. Accelerate the road map. Yes. And it's funny because I asked him like why are we going to hear Tim Cook say that? And he was like, "Oh, because earnings, but we're basically hearing them say it today with this surprise acquisition that's obviously the line from Apple." And it makes sense. This is something that is uniquely acceleratable because of the Apple hardware ecosystem. They can deploy this through AirPods. They can deploy this through the phones just like they did with Face ID. If you have that technology and you're like, "Oh, well, in order to log into your computer with your face, you're going to need a third-party device that you plug into USB." Like, no one's going to do that.
But if you're just like, "Yeah, it's going to get baked into the hardware. We have the patents. We have the And haven't you been wanting them to make more moves in specifically audio and transcription for a while?" I've been like an audio interface bull forever, like since I worked at a startup that competed with Siri in 2010 or something like that. And it was actually a good outcome. I didn't get any equity because I was just an intern, but it was actually a great outcome. They sold to Dragon, naturally speaking, and everyone made a bunch of money. But Siri, here we go. But Siri was like the hot kid on the block back then. And Siri came out of Stanford so they were much closer to Cupertino. These guys came out of MIT very similar natural speech recognition, you know, machine learning pipelines for understanding speech doing dictation their main platform was Blackberry because Blackberry was really really big. They had a BlackBerry app store. They did a deal so that you would get like pre-installed so you get a big check from Rim. They did a very interesting out of home campaign where they bought billboards right outside of Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry's headquarters because they were advertising. Yes. AdQ didn't exist then, but they should have used Adqu. They because they were basically they only had one customer effectively. I mean they had every customer that could go buy the app, but then all the other apps that were on either Google and Android quickly rolled out competitive features with Google Assistant. Siri got acquired and so it was very clear that like Apple was not going to be a really fertile ground for playground for them and so they needed to get sort of like the attention of the BlackBerry execs and so they put up a billboard right outside their headquarters which I still like as a strategy. I think it's very fun. But yes, I've been very bullish on this. I was thinking back then that you know people get their wisdom teeth out. This is very weird in cyberpunk, but if you got your wisdom teeth out, you could potentially like create like add a like a port for storing a microphone.
Any of these? I should have got that. Yeah, exactly. Because a lot of people get them out and then you could just put a port there and you could insert basically the tip of an AirPod. very very small device that you would charge and then you put it in and then when you're whispering you can just hear it can only hear that and it goes dictation straight to your phone. Obviously that's unnecessary because you can you know do bone induction. You can just also just have a you know an AirPod in and just talk out loud and not care what people think. There's those crazy muffled things. You've seen that where you put on the headphones and then it puts like a cover over your mouth so you can talk in public. Oh yeah, it's silent around you.
Caner says, "I want my iPhone to unlock only if I silently mouth the words open sesame." I think could be in the future.
I was wondering about that would actually be nice if there was some other element because you still have this like wearing sunglasses trying to unlock your phone. Sometimes some pairs of sunglasses I have it oneshots it others it's it's like you know pretty annoying. I was wondering about the quality of whisper transcription these days. Like if I just open up whisper on the chatbt app, put my phone in my pocket and just talk, can it just hear through my pants pocket and just dictate perfectly now? Because like AI is so good at transcription that it can be really muffled. Like you can have music playing in the background and talk to whisper and it just won't Yeah, it just won't mess up. So, there is a world where you don't actually need like a separate pin. You just have something anywhere on your body and it knows, okay, this is what John sounds like that. Let's kill all the background noise. Let's kill all the other people talking. Let's isolate that with AI. Like, it seems pretty pretty good for that. Anyway, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. One more thing on this QA acquisition. They're using going back to their patent using facial scan micro movements to assess emotions, heart rate, respiration rate, and other indicators. You could imagine where a world in the future where you have Apple smart glasses that effectively have like health monitoring because it's tracking respiration, heart rate, all these different things. And just basically integrating the features you're getting from the Apple Watch today. Yeah. seems but I wonder what it's really unlocking that the watch can't do. There's always the question when you pitch a new device, it's like, well, your phone does have a camera on it, so you're not This is like the smart glasses aren't the first. Yeah, but it's a new device, but it's a Lindy form factor, right? Like this something we've talked about in the past. It's like the, you know, the new hardware that's taken off is an existing form factor. It's like headphones, eyewear, you have watches, right? Creating these pendant things so far hasn't hit, right? Because it's like a It's fair. I just think like on the heart rate issue specifically, there was an app before the Apple Watch existed where you could put your finger over the camera of the iPhone and it would use the light the flashlight which was right next to the camera at that point to light up your finger. So your finger would turn red and then it would take the sensor data from the camera and measure the pulses of the red and give you your heart rate just from touching your camera. It's pretty cool. like it was completely outside of the Apple ecosystem, just a just an app that you could download or pay for. And so the phone can take your heart rate, the watch can take your heart rate. If you give me glasses and you say, "Those glasses can also take your heart rate." I'm like, "I got enough heart rate measurement. I can also just go like this and estimate it." Like there's a bunch of ways to know that your heart rate's spiking. Maybe tracking is in different, but it feels like they need to go farther. And the real opportunity is something more around audio interfaces, link it to Siri, have more ways to triangulate what the person's trying to say, what they're saying in a noisy environment, whether they're trying to be quiet and you still want to isolate what they're saying, having a back and forth, reducing latency. All of those things are very critical to success in that category. Anyway, we are going to be in San Francisco on February 3rd, next week for Cisco's AI Summit. is bringing together leaders from Nvidia, Open AI, AWS and more to discuss the future of the AI economy. The whole thing will be live streamed and we'll be there for a gig stream.
Did the fireworks get longer? I think so. I think they got longer today. There's a lot to celebrate, John. Let's go earnings. Microsoft. So, Microsoft shares have taken a dive as data center spending overshadows earnings surge. Let's give some numbers here. So, Microsoft's Q4 revenue was $81.3 billion, which was higher than the consensus estimate of 80.23 billion. So, they're making money. There's no lack of demand for Microsoft services. Q3 2025 revenue was 77.1 billion, up almost 5% and year-over-year group growth was 17% for Microsoft as a whole. But the stock sold off by 12% and Microsoft is now just a tiny little $3.15 trillion company. Not bad, but it's still only down what 6% over the past 5 days. It was a rise. Yeah, I mean people have been excited about the OpenAI investment which did show up in earnings. So OpenAI owns roughly 25 27% of the new forprofit entity. Sorry, Microsoft. Microsoft owns 27% of OpenAI's new for-profit entity and that value is actually reflected in Microsoft's earnings. And of course, more importantly, the GPT models are truly frontier. Like we've seen it again and again. There's like this horse race over this model's better at this thing, this model's better today. But it's just very clear that OpenAI is on the frontier and in the conversation for pretty much every application possible. And so you can just imagine you take GPT 5.2 Pro, you vend that into knowledge work pipelines for Microsoft users. That sounds really useful. They aren't behind on coding. We've heard great stories about how codec is a great model. Maybe it's a little slow. Maybe they need to speed it up, but people are having a lot of luck with codecs. And so you can imagine that Microsoft's is capable of integrating codecs into all sorts of different pieces of the Microsoft empire to create agentic workflows. And then they also have a deal with Anthropic. They also made an investment. So they are multimodel, multiplatform. But the problem is that Microsoft seems to be constrained on the data center side. So the CFO Amy Hood said on the Microsoft earnings call that limited availability of artificial intelligence hardware is affecting how quickly Microsoft's cloud business can grow and it's capping Azure's revenue potential. Not good. They need to take another trip to Abalene. They need to build more data centers. But it's tricky. It takes time and right now maybe it's just a data center capacity issue. What's next? Is it going to be an energy bottleneck? Is it going to be a chip bottleneck? These are stories that we're tracking. Ben Thompson is starting to sound the alarm bells around TSMC capacity constraints and what is TSMC doing on the capex front? Are they investing enough? Are they at risk of holding the bag if AI stalls out? Are they taking enough risk so that if the AI boom continues that they can continue to deliver and ramp up or will Samsung and Intel need to step up and will companies like Microsoft need to put pressure on those companies. That's another point of debate.
Yeah. So David in the chat is referencing this, but basically obviously it's amazing that Microsoft owns such a big slug of OpenAI. That's great. But the challenge is so much of their backlog is Open AI and they're actually getting less credit for that. Right? The same way that Oracle had gotten punished for it, now it's Microsoft's chance to actually get punished.
And Microsoft, if you actually zoom out a little bit and just look at the last 6 months, down 17% in the last six months and down 4% over the last year. So, it's funny like in a year where it feels like the last year Satia and Microsoft have just been on this insane run, they've fully, you know, round trip.
Totally. Totally. Yeah. Before we move on to Meta, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken. It helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So, Meta also reported earnings yesterday. 59.9 billion in revenue in Q4 of 2025, beating expectations of 58.5. Revenue's up 16% from Q3 of last year, which was 51.24. The company's growing its revenue 21% year-over-year. That's higher than Microsoft's 17% topline growth. Stock popped 10% after hours and the market cap is now 1.84 trillion. So Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on the earnings call in 2025, 'We rebuilt the foundations of our AI program.' That should be obvious. There's so many, so many acquisitions, so many hires, so much, so many experiments, so many different, so many different strategies and discussions and changing of the guard and restructurings, layoffs and Reality Labs. It's the compute desk. There's been so many stories about Meta really rethinking their AI platform, rearchitecting the foundations of it. So he continued to say, 'Over the coming months, we're going to start shipping our new models and products.'
Very excited for that. He says, 'I expect our first models will be good, but more importantly, they will show the rapid trajectory we're on.' And I think that we all have high expectations. I don't think anyone's expecting them to jump way, way out in front of everyone else. But if they can just be in the conversation with DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI, I think that will quell a lot of the...
But also, what are they doing with them?
I think that matters. I think that matters more.
Really, really important. Yeah. Because you just look at, you look at, this is why I'm excited to talk to Eric later today, but you look at Meta's business and the way in which GenAI can accelerate everything from generating more content on the platform to having better ads, to better targeting, all these things, right? And not to mention like where they can just vend it in at the product level, right?
The product level stuff is tricky.
I mean, like, I've bumped into Meta AI in Instagram many times. And you do get reasonable, you know, natural language responses, but it clearly still has the knowledge cutoff. It's not searching the web as effectively. It's not pulling together the... it doesn't feel completely native to the platform. Like if you go into Meta AI in Instagram and you ask it to go and hunt around in Instagram for a specific creator or reel based on some clues, it doesn't feel like it has the hooks to really go in and understand, okay, based on what you've watched and what I've showed you in the past, this is probably what you're thinking of. Like that is sort of a superpower where, you know, there's so many times when you're on the timeline and you're like, 'I saw this post, I didn't bookmark it, didn't like it, what was it?' And you want the search products to be empowered magically. What are we laughing at? What do you think?
You going to flash back at me again?
Close. Continue.
Anyway, I think that there's the basic case of they got to get an LLM that's frontier, that has the big model smell, fun to talk to, good vibes. Then they need video and audio models that are rock solid, and then they do need to vend those in. I think just having an API or just having a place where people can generate, you know, photoreal videos or even things like Sora where it has the aesthetics and pacing and cuts of an Instagram reel, that doesn't feel like it's enough. It feels like to really empower the Instagram creator, it needs to be built into the platform like the, you know, like the captions are or those like, you know, the face filters on Snapchat that started there, like augmented reality stuff, replacing backgrounds, just letting people still bring what's personal to them, their family, their experiences, their car, but take a couple photos of their car and turn it into a really, really awesome drone shot of them driving their car. I've seen a lot of really sweet edits where people will fly a drone over a car, then they'll have a first-person GoPro on their chest while they're driving their car, and then they'll use AI to interpolate between the drone shot and their first-person view because they can't actually, like, if you have a multi-million dollar Hollywood budget, you actually can fly the drone into the car, have someone sitting in the car, they grab the drone, and then they hook it on a crane, and the crane takes it out and does a different shot with it. But that's like a multi-million dollar, experts, tons of equipment. There's all these crazy things where someone will be on a Steadicam, on a cherry picker, this crane comes down, then they start walking into you can do these really elaborate shots. But with AI, you can interpolate and like make those transitions. And so even just like AI-powered transitions would be a really, really cool thing to bring.
Yeah. Not to mention they own Manus now, which is a fantastic product team. They've built some great agents. You can imagine them integrating...
Like basically like prompt to short-form video, right? Where you can just describe the video that you want to make, insert real, like basically like generate B-roll for this, pull footage from around the internet, whatever. And so there's so many things that they can do. And again, they've just been using Meta AI as a sandbox for the most part. But I'm just excited for them to start shipping across. The remixing thing is so underrated because there's a lot of people, like the number of people that have like true inspiration for new formats is pretty low. People always do the stitch.
Think about the remix functionality. You see a funny video...
And you can just like basically do a character swap...
...in there, right? And it's like that's new content that...
...that's going to be shared and a bunch of people engage with. So...
Tyler, what's your take on Meta's new plans for 2026?
Yeah, I mean, I definitely think the image and video models are much more important to get right than the LLM. Mainly just because it seems very natural for them to vend it into everything compared to OpenAI or Google who are like right now fighting it out in image or in video.
So it seems like if they can kind of do really well, you can get OpenAI and Google out of that race basically.
And then the LLM, it's unclear what the actual use case will be in the short term. Eventually you want some cool like, you know, Claudebot-style agent somehow vended in, but it's unclear how that's going to work out. So I think in the short term I'm very excited on the media model.
Yeah, I mean, I really like that model of like the LLM going around and just like seeping into the cracks of all the different product experiences, but in these like really subtle ways. Like YouTube now has AI-generated summaries on videos and you can chat with a video. So if you're watching someone build a PC, you can ask Gemini on YouTube, 'Hey, just print out the exact list of parts that the person used to build the PC.' And there might be a parts list at the end of the video. There might be a parts list that's, you know, randomly mentioned throughout. Sometimes a creator might actually link to a real parts list, but Gemini allows you to scrape the transcript and then just get that however you want and then transform it or, you know, add prices to all of it or see if it's available in Japan because I'm in Japan. All these interesting things. And I can imagine on Instagram being able to go to a post that has like thousands of comments and just say, 'Hey, I want the LLM to kind of summarize the sentiment, like what are the facts?' Like, you know, people were debating whether or not this is AI. Is there a consensus? Or people were adding context. What was the key context that people were adding? There's a lot of posts that are basically like rage bait or clickbait where it's unclear what's going on in the video. And so you go to the comments and people are like, 'I don't get it,' or like they put up that sign like 'context needed please.' Right. And so you can kind of do that.
Yeah. But I feel like that stuff can just, like, I'd rather just have that be in the recommendation algorithm, like sorted comments. If everyone in the comments is saying this is clickbait, just don't put it in my recommendation algorithm. Right. It's like also on X there's Grok, right? On every post you can ask Grok. I don't think I've ever used that.
I use that. I find the little, like, you know, where you add a little bit of AI here and there. I basically never use anything.
Maybe that's just, you know... I'm a fan. I do see posts where there's, you know, a list of companies that someone's talking about. 'Oh, here are all the cool companies that I like.' And I can click and just get a little summary of each company and I don't need to pull it out, go to a different model. I don't know. I feel like once a day Grok will share context on something that is actually valuable.
Like in general in the comments, add it. Somebody added it. Like I remember Eric Seufert yesterday was responding to something. Somebody was basically saying like shareholders voted against the Tesla xAI investment and then obviously they went ahead with it. And Eric responded and he was like, 'Hey, was this real?' And then Grok just shared kind of the history on it. And it's like somebody else could have shared that and provided the context, but it can do it instantly.
It's helpful to have a little bit extra context there.
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Suspended Cap says, 'I got to really respect Zuck. Willing to spend over 50% of revenue next year when they still haven't delivered a single compelling AI product. Hell yeah.'
Yeah. I mean the capex is crazy. No, the whole thing, $200 billion in revenue in 2025. That's...
So much revenue. It's a lot of ads. But now they're going to plow 135 billion according to the Wall Street Journal. The New York Times said 115. But either way, it's like more than half the revenues.
I think posts like this are funny and I think you can definitely agree that Meta has not shipped a super compelling AI product yet. Even though MetaVibes has traction, not necessarily in our world, but certainly has some traction. But you have to like, this is the guy that owns the world's largest trough or one of the world's largest troughs, right? And so he knows that it's working. He knows he can see the future, right? He has all the data. He knows that people say they don't like AI content, but in reality, they actually do. They engage with it. They watch it. They make it. The engagement must be growing exponentially even though it's very small. It started at a base of zero and then you got Harry Potter Balenciaga and now you have 10 videos a week that are going. So...
So I look at this different than some of the metaverse bets just because Zuck is one of the biggest beneficiaries of GenAI and so it's totally warranted to say like, 'Hey, we should invest an obscene amount of money in this. This is clearly the future.'
Yeah. Yeah. I mean there's so many different ways that no matter how you play out the AI future, Meta is a beneficiary of that. So it makes sense that they're investing so heavily. But it is a remarkable shift in the financial structure of the business. If you go back to thinking of previous years, spending more than half of revenue on capex feels like a lot for a software company, right? It's like high margin whatnot. Anyway, Vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta.
Tesla reported revenue at 24.9 billion. And this beat the consensus estimate just slightly. Consensus was 24.78 billion.
But down 11.4% from the previous quarter when revenue was 28.1 and a 3% decline year-over-year. And Tesla's down 2% this morning. There was also a 61% drop in profit, and they're shuttering the high-end models of production. So they're stopping production of Model S's and Model X's, which I think the Model S and Model X features will be sort of rolled into trim levels. Like we've already heard about the... So I was debating Jordi about this earlier. I thought that the Model Y and the Model X were the same length. The Model X is in fact almost a foot longer, so it is a bigger vehicle. They both have the option to have three rows. They both have very similar specs, but the Model X is bigger. But in China, we've heard that they're working on the Model Y L, which is a long wheelbase version that will be, I believe, longer than the Model X. So you have the ability to get a big Model Y. And then they're already doing different trim levels with Long Range Plaid. So if you take the Plaid badge and you put that on the Model Y L, and then you add different specs and you say, 'Oh, I want to spec my Model Y with gull-wing doors,' maybe all of a sudden you're back in Model X territory and you're dropping 100K. But there's just no denying that the Model S and X sales have slowed, and there's a whole bunch more competition at the high-end EV market from Lucid, Rivian, and so Elon is fully thinking about what's next. He broke out subscriptions for Autopilot self-driving for the first time. He's talking a huge amount about Cybercabs and robotaxis. He's making that cash investment in xAI, and of course, he's really focused on Optimus humanoid robots. And it seems like he could be scaling up production there very, very quickly. And so...
Million, million subs of full self-driving.
I think you can look it up.
I think I remember it's $89 a month.
Yeah. But analysts, how much is it?
I guess $49 a month for vehicles with enhanced Autopilot. Okay. There are a few tiers, but I mean if you build up the subscription...
What is it? How much is it?
So, you know, you got a billion dollars a year coming in from that. Not bad. And of course, very high margin because you don't need to manufacture it. Analysts thought Tesla was going to be cash flow negative for the quarter, but they actually were positive. They generated $1.4 billion in free cash flow, and this was down just 30%. So there's plenty of cash to keep the aggressive investments going, especially as Elon shifts the business towards autonomy. He's not shy about making the change aggressively. He said, 'We would expect over time to make far more Cybercabs than all of our other vehicles combined.' So he's fully, fully going all in on...
Yeah, it's a little... I think it's a little jarring for some people just because historically car companies have thrived by creating the perfect car in each category for every different consumer, and Elon is basically saying, 'Actually, I know what you want and I'm going to give you it.'
Yeah, it's, you know, you don't need that many options. Yeah. Where you're going to be able, like you said, to just leverage the different trim levels and spec out the car to satisfy. And probably, you know, I do think over time like less and less trim levels, and then eventually it's just Cybercabs and no one's buying cars anymore. If it really goes that way, I think this rollout will be slow. I mean, the original rollout of the electric car was 20 years, right? For Tesla to actually get to saturation where you're seeing electric cars all over the roads. It'll probably be the same with people giving up their cars and going all in on, 'I only drive, I only use Waymo and Tesla Cybercab,' or maybe I just use one. But Elon's certainly thinking in decades and not afraid to cut an entire business line that is still popular with a lot of people. I mean, I was just talking to somebody yesterday who was singing the praises of his Tesla Model X and how much he loves that and how he would never get a Y because the X is so much more premium. Everything about it is better. It cost a lot of money when he bought it. Still loves it. But, you know, Elon's thinking to the future. Anyway, Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State-of-the-art reasoning, next-level VOD coding, and deep multimodal understanding. I love that sound so much.
I know you do. Tesla also announced a $2 billion investment into xAI.
Yeah. Didn't they just do 20? Is this part of the 20? I wonder. I don't know. But yeah, so there was a non-binding Tesla shareholder vote on authorizing an investment in xAI that failed. Although 1.06 billion votes were in favor versus 916 million against. Abstentions...
Like, abstaining, yeah, not one or the other, counted as no under Tesla bylaws, leading to rejection. So they had run this as a vote. It got rejected, but Elon said, 'We're doing it anyways.'
Timeline reactions here. I don't know where you want to start, but Tech Take has a good one if you want to start there with Microsoft. Wherever you want. I wanted to pull up this video of Optimus learning it has to make up for S and X sales after they were cancelled.
This one's... This is such a crazy video. Taking off the VR headset and just smashing down. I love that.
This is really a Tesla Optimus, isn't it?
At the same time, the motion is remarkable. And the force with which the Optimus just smashes a water bottle open is crazy.
It's amazing. This thing is going to be super powerful. The insurance business that will be built around having a humanoid in your home is going to be remarkable. Remarkable. You're also going to need to secure these things. So let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops...
Okay guys, this was one of the standout moments of the earnings call for me. Elon and Tesla are transitioning their Fremont facility to make Optimus, and they plan to scale that facility up to be able to make a million of these things a year on a relatively near-term time horizon. So very, very significant. He talked about how the robot would be able to basically learn on the job. It's going to be able to do a number of valuable tasks. And yeah, I think, I mean, the big question for me is like, what happens?
That's the big question for me.
Well, they have an ad-supported... You have the Tesla walking around your house and it sees you pull out some sort of random credit card and it's like, 'Are you not on Ramp? Like, what's going on here?'
Or it sees you like having like... 'Would you like a smoothie from Athletic Greens?'
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But yeah, we'll see. So the question I have is, at what point will humanoids actually be like ROI positive for consumers in the home or even just everyday businesses? And I would just judge that based on like, okay, you're buying this thing up front. Maybe a business finances it, maybe somebody finances it, or they just pay cash. But is it valuable? Is it valuable enough to actually replace a human? Because you're competing with... Optimus is going to be competing with jobs that are maybe like 40, 50, 60k a year, like somewhere in that range.
And so that's a pretty high bar to clear.
Yeah. And the risk-reward calculation of, okay, you have this thing, it has cameras and audio, it's on all the time. Is it safe? If it falls over, is it going to crush my dog or hurt someone or smash something? Even just like doing the dishes. We've seen some incredible demos of humanoid robots doing the dishes. But you have to imagine that every once in a while it's going to break a dish. If it's breaking dishes at 10 times the rate of humans, like it needs to be superhuman at not breaking dishes. Because if it smashes a wine glass while it's doing the dishes, that's... And can it clean that up? Is it going to be able to do that on day one?
There will be, you know, like a slow ramp of people feeling like, okay, it's good enough, I'm getting a lot of value. Obviously there'll be a lot of novelty. There's already a lot of novelty. Like, Optimus is deployed in most of the Tesla showrooms. Some breaking news from Reuters 21 minutes ago, exclusive: Musk's SpaceX in merger talks with xAI ahead of planned IPO.
SpaceX and xAI ahead of planned IPO. So this was something that we obviously were talking, predicting. So no huge surprise here. This always felt like it made sense. I'll read through the article. I don't know how much context it actually has. So they're in discussions ahead of a blockbuster IPO planned for later this year. The combination would bring Musk's rockets, Starlink satellites, and X social media platform and the Grok AI chatbot under one roof. Imagine, imagine owning X, the internet's dive bar, and space in one ticker.
I mean, the companies launched like a couple years apart. I think like 2007 and 2005 or something. Flashing back to 2007, 2010 being like, yeah, Twitter and that space company that hasn't successfully launched anything, they're going to be part of the same company one day. That is a wild future. Yeah, I am curious to see if they end up at some point just spinning X, the social platform, out again. Like, does it really need to live?
I think Musk's holding company just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and it all goes together into one because there's a lot of efficiencies there. Shyam Puri from My First Million had a post about this, how he thinks Elon should IPO his personal holding company. So you get stakes in everything that he has stakes in. And he was proposing it like a Berkshire-type structure. But instead of Berkshire Hathaway, it would be like Musk Holdings or something, or Musk's initials. I think a lot of people would be buyers of that. But it'll be interesting to see, the S-1 is getting more complicated by the day as the investment banks prepare for the June IPO for SpaceX. Now, is June the day? But it's late in June. It's June 29th or 19th or something.
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we'll see. I mean, expected this to happen. I think it builds a... you know, again, some people will be frustrated with the narrative, the data centers in space narrative, but it's real. We saw this sort of organized narrative shift around SpaceX being the data centers in space play. So that was the bridge. Like, without that, it didn't make any sense. And then once, if you can get behind, okay, data centers in space is maybe possible, maybe you want some on land too, then it starts to make sense that the merger fits a little bit more. The other interesting data centers in space thing, xAI SpaceX thing, I just... I don't know. There is a fair, like, odd history of telecom companies owning media companies. So Comcast, NBC, Universal, right? Comcast was the... of that history.
Yeah. Rhyming. And so there is this world where you have the pipes, and then you need something to push through the pipes, and so you own a media company that pushes content through that pipe, and it sort of rhymes, right? It's like you have Starlink internet connections, and then you need something to go over those internet connections. So X, the social network, pipes over those. If you squint, it's not the craziest thing. The other interesting thing that I want to do, or we should talk to some of the folks who have done some of this data...
Center and space analysis is how powerful are the Starlink satellites right now? Like they have some onboard compute. They don't have, you know, NVIDIA GPUs. They don't have whole racks in space, but they probably have some compute just to run the network. And I'm wondering, like in terms of energy draw, are they one order of magnitude off, two orders of magnitude off? Like how underpowered are the current Starlink satellites? Because that could be an indicator of, okay, well, they need to scale them up by this much. They need to add this capability. They need to do X, Y, or Z.
Really quickly, ElevenLabs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with ElevenLabs.
Speaking of ElevenLabs, ElevenLabs is the new sponsor of Audi F1.
Yes. John, you sent me a picture the other day of Audi out, I think, testing. You were like, "It's insane that they don't have an ElevenLabs logo on there."
Exactly. Now, the sponsors were looking pretty sparse, but I think they're just adding them kind of in real time. So it's fun to roll them out. Super, super exciting. I love the new Audi livery. It looks very unique.
MKBHD responded to the news that Tesla is discontinuing the Model S and Model X and said, "Oh, Roadster is so cooked."
Elon just responded a little bit ago, said new Roadster will be incredible.
And MKBHD is in the process of getting community noted. Elon said on the earnings call they are aiming to unveil in April and production will commence in 12 to 18 months.
April. The shareholder deck notes the Roadster is in design development. Lars, VP of vehicle engineering, said the Roadster was definitely in development. So it will be pretty funny to be in something that hopefully will look like a hypercar, but then you're just self-driving in traffic. It's like effectively, depending on pricing, it's not going to be like price. I'm hoping it looks like a hypercar, but prices like, you know, a Turbo S or something like that.
Yeah. I think the secret to success is probably $200 to $300,000, but it looks like a cyber car or Cybertruck Huracan, like low to the ground, super insane performance. Self-driving, but it has like entirely new aesthetics that turn heads. Like the Cybertruck is kind of...
What was he saying on Joe Rogan? He was alluding to the Roadster potentially being able to take flight. Yes. Some sort.
That's exactly it. Yes. And we were debating with Doug DeMuro from Cars and Bids and his own YouTube channel. What does the definition of fly mean? Like we've seen the Xiaomi car jump. It can jump over a pothole. It can jump a couple inches off. There's that Mercedes-Maybach GLS that can bounce. So what does fly really mean? Fly a foot? Fly 10 feet? I don't think anyone's expecting that in the next year it will just actually take off and fly you from LA to San Francisco or something. That would be...
Never bet against. I mean, I would want that so badly. But there are a lot of other cool things that we could do. I think the one that I predicted, like basically, you'll be able to pull up to a parking spot and it will be able to use like fans or something like that to lift off the ground and slide into a parking spot. It'll have some like gimmicky...
It'll shoot the battery out so hard that it sends the car... shoots the battery down which pushes the car up into the air, and then there's an ejector seat. You will be flying, the car will not be flying. Who knows?
Insane. Hopefully, it's available on Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI.
Rounding out. Start really quickly. Tyler, I mean, this is about the question of like, can you run GPUs on Starlink?
Yes. So, like a current satellite, if you're looking at the V2 mini satellite, the peak power draw is like around 3,000 watts.
Okay. So if you're running an H100, right? So this is maybe a couple years old. It's only like 700. So you could put a few H100s on a Starlink right now.
Wait, wait, wait. Sorry, sorry. 3,000 watts currently. And an H100 is 700. Oh, okay. Yeah, you could put a couple in theory, but you wouldn't be able to do anything else.
Yeah. And I mean like three H100s is not useful really at all for serving any big model. But yeah, but we're not four orders of magnitude off from doing something. I mean, you can do inference on just a laptop, right? And that doesn't have the power draw anywhere near an H100. Granted, it's going to be slow. It's not going to be functional, but like we are in the ballpark.
Somebody just going to put... somebody should put a Mac Mini on a weather balloon.
The first... send it. You really could. Have you ever seen those trends of like we sent X to space? It's like a proven viral format on YouTube. I think someone sent pizza to space. People send like a piano to space and it plays a song. Basically, YouTubers figured out that you could get a weather balloon that you could just buy for like, I don't know, not that much money and just release it and it would just fly up, up, up, up, up, and then you would reach the sky and it would take pictures and time-lapse photos or video automatically.
You can get a weather balloon, a 22-foot scientific weather balloon on eBay for 220 bucks.
What should we send to space? It's kind of played out, but yeah, garlic bread to space. Bobby, thank you. Yeah, the garlic bread went to space. I don't know why. But yeah, sending Molbot to space. Molbot to space on a... I also don't know if you can get Starlink working.
I think, I mean, ideally, Tyler, what if we got a handful of weather balloons and we sent you up there with...
Then I could... like that Red Bull video. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just one-shot it. Just do it. Yeah. Just one-shot it.
Last thing on Elon. Looking at prediction market on Kalshi, when will Elon become a trillionaire?
He's at a 65% chance before 2027, just in time for the midterms. It's not like that will be used against him at all.
There's still a chance that it takes the pressure off the billionaires because like, oh, there's a new thing we got to focus on. Like no one's focusing on billionaires right now.
All the billionaires start ganging up on Elon. Hey, let's actually just do a trillionaire tax. This whole bill, why are we focusing on billionaires? Trillionaires have so much more.
Waste of time. Let's just narrow it down to trillionaires. Just the trillionaire tax. Anyway, Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Where else do we want to go? Do we want to go more reactions to earnings? There's a whole bunch of other stuff in here.
Yeah. Microsoft is on sale according to Jay Gatsby because Joe Weisenthal said, "Incredible day." According to Barclays' Alexander Alman, Microsoft has lost $441 billion of market cap today, marking it the second largest drop ever since Nvidia lost nearly $600 billion after DeepSeek. Wow. Yeah, it was the worst day for Microsoft since 2020, since the COVID selloff. Absolutely remarkable. I mean, I don't fully get it. It seems like Microsoft is very well positioned. I mean, maybe they're facing the same implementation question as Meta, but it seems like they have all the key ingredients. I mean, they certainly don't have the crazy team that Zuck just went and poached, but they got OpenAI, they have the partnership, and so they have access to the models in a way that Meta does not. And so Meta does need to build the team to build the competitive models. So anyway,
Worst sell-offs in Microsoft history: the crash of '87, then in 2000, April 24th. 30% in one day in '87. That... we don't know how to create selloffs like that anymore. Hopefully we don't.
Famous last words. Just like everything candles down 40% teach you a lesson. Yep. Yeah. There's some interesting history here.
Well, Microsoft is unfazed. Yeah. When you look at it this way, it is truly, you know, the 15th worst sell-off in Microsoft history. I think they're going to get through it. But Stan disagrees. Stan says it's over. Thanks for playing. Just zero likes. How did this even get... I'm going to like this.
We're going to like it. Good. Stan, I don't agree, but very funny post. Andrew Curran is sharing a post from The Information. Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon are all ponying up. Let's give it up for talks of $60 billion, as much as $60 billion in OpenAI.
We don't know what kind of talks they are. Are they early, medium, late stage talks, advanced talks, preliminary talks? There's lots of different talks. But this is on top of the $30 billion that SoftBank is in talks for, which means that the $100 billion target for the next round is almost met. And of course this is going to go back to is this circular blah blah blah blah blah. I don't know. It feels like the circularity narrative. We're just at a scale where if you want to raise $100 billion, like who are you going to? Who would be okay? Like it's governments and the hyperscalers. Like there just aren't that many funds that are saying like, yeah, I'd love to lead a $100 billion round. I don't have the money. Like it's just impossible. There's no... tapped out. Like yeah, all the traditional financial players are very much tapped out. And so,
Let's go to companymarketcap.com. While we pull that up, let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create, code back, prototype.
Okay. So at the $830 billion that this round is being discussed at, JP Morgan is slightly worth slightly more at $832 billion.
But then below that, OpenAI will be valued more than Samsung, Tencent, Visa, ExxonMobil, ASML, Johnson & Johnson, Mastercard, Costco. Yeah, a lot of them. Yeah. Yeah, you start being able to add up some of the biggest companies in the world and still not be worth more than...
Zero Hedge had some extra context. Q3 2025 Meta crashes on surging capex forecast. Q4 2025 Meta soars on surging capex forecast. Let's go.
Research and Invest pushed back though, said no, it soars on growth acceleration guide, capex held it back, or it could have opened at around $880. And it's because of the profit. A lot of people are chiming in. So we'll talk to...
Buo. Buo has continuously had great calls on Meta. I remember very distinctly when he shared multiple times over a few day period like Meta will start touching 600 and you need to develop the mental fortitude to buy even though everything in your mind will be telling you not to do it, just hit the button.
Suspected Cap says, "I gotta really respect Zuck willing to spend over 50% of revenue next year on capex when they still haven't delivered a single compelling AI product." Hell yeah. But Pythia Cap chimes in and says the ads are the compelling AI product. And this has been the under-discussed narrative with their capex. They do break it out and for a long time, you know, 50% of capex, more than 50% of capex was going towards core AI workloads for Instagram Reels recommendations, ad recommendations, running the core product. I mean, there is a specific chip for YouTube. Like there's capex that goes into just running YouTube, just running Instagram. And so it's not all AI, but it'll be interesting to see how that shifts. How much of this is, okay, this is generative AI workloads going forward? Is it more than 50% of this new boost in cash?
Brother Joe Weisenthal shares one of the best headlines that I've ever seen, which is Blackstone near deal to become new world's largest shareholder.
Just in general? No, New World is a company. Okay. Blackstone is in advanced talks to become the single largest shareholder of New World Development Company, according to people familiar with the matter, a move that would see one of Hong Kong's richest families relinquish control of a major asset. Under the proposed deal, the US company would be able to restructure the embattled developer. New World could continue to try to offload assets to shore up liquidity.
The family of Hong Kong tycoon Henry Cheng currently holds about a 45% stake in New World. We need to bring the word tycoon to the West Coast.
Tycoon. Sam Altman is an AI tycoon. Tycoon is good. We should do a list of the top tycoons.
Jensen is a chip tycoon. Yeah, tycoon's a good one. Satya is an enterprise tycoon.
We had tycoons during the railroad barons. It turned into a bit of a pejorative, but I think we can turn it around. I think we can turn it around.
It's such a fun word. Why should it be negative? Yeah, it sounds like yahoo or like, you know, it feels like you're wearing a cowboy hat on a horse if you're a tycoon. You know, you're running all over the economy. You're a tycoon.
Cowboy hat on a horse. Yeah, you love it. Well, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose database builds for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and rerankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next.
We have to talk about Genie. Genie. The Genie is out of the lab. Logan says, "Introducing Project Genie, a Frontier World model product powered by Genie 3 and available to G1 Ultra users in the US starting today." We were playing around with this this morning. We were playing around with this this morning. It is absolutely wild. You can basically prompt an entire world. It instantly turns into effectively a simple video game.
And you can create some really funny scenarios we will show you.
And they added the jump button. They added the jump button. You get to pick if it's third person or I guess what if you don't check that it's first person. But sometimes even if you don't check that, you can still wind up in a third person game if it's obviously a third person request.
They need to add this... Look at this dog. They need to add the crouch button. The crouch button next and then the flashbang button probably.
Whoa. Yeah, you're jumping. This is so fast. I mean, the previous Genie launch was still called Genie 3, right?
Well, no. I mean, yes. This is not like a new product. This is just making it public. Yes. Like so I think it was in August when G3 was originally released. Yeah, but it was basically just the paper. There were some demos, but no one could actually...
So cool. Yeah, I mean, it feels like more directable than V3 in some ways. And it's certainly more stable as you move.
Well, it's just way cooler too, because it's a world you can move around in. It's not like V3 where you're just creating a video. Yeah, the memory is really good too. You can upload an image and turn back. Upload an image. That's... I mean, get ready to play dinosaur.
You have the clip of... So we got access, we generated some now. It's in such high demand that you might not be able to generate these worlds for yourself immediately. There might be some rate limits going on. I'm sure the GPUs are on fire. It is going to be Genie 3 day on the timeline for sure. People are going to get crazy creative with this first.
You can't access the videos? No, because... Oh, no. We didn't download them because I think the site is being overloaded so much. Shame. It was just earlier today.
Hey, Tyler, take some responsibility. Take some ownership. You're 21 years old now. Take some ownership. You could have downloaded the video.
I'll try to as the show goes on. I'll try to make a new one. Yeah, we can... I mean, yeah. Yeah. This is a good point by Noah in the chat. Wait, can we just take a GTA 6 leak and generate the game so we don't have to keep waiting? So pretty much...
Like first, I mean, it's incredible that even a product at Google scale, they knew that there was going to be demand, that they are seeing rate limits. That's wild and incredibly bullish for AI and shows that there's so much more demand and we need more chips and energy and data centers and GPUs obviously. But on the flip side, we are going to move the goalposts. This is AGI, but it's not sufficient AGI because my definition is not just the jump button. I want mechanics. I want... we generated a video of my Boch driving on the Nürburgring. It was remarkably high fidelity. It was a little sluggish, but that might just be the dynamics. The driver... that's just... Oh, you think the driver... this thing on the road there was body roll. I was like, just put it in a straight line, Tyler.
Yes. But I want... I'm waiting. I'm moving the goalpost because I want Genie 3 or Genie 4 to be able to generate game mechanics. If I say I'm racing on the Nürburgring, I want a track timer. I want to be able to stop, change my tires. I want to be able to get a refuel, overtakes. I want overlays. I want boost pedals. I want DRS. I want shifting. I want the whole Forza simulation. I want... what's the one that people actually use for the simulators? I forget what it's called. Assetto Corsa. I want to be able to generate Assetto Corsa in two seconds. So mechanics are clearly next. This is obviously... we can pull this up.
Tyler said six months. We'll see. Pull up this video from you. In six months, you'll have full games. This is the new HI benchmark for... Move it. Move it. We're moving the goalpost. There we go.
Pull up this video from Ethan Malik. He had early access to G3 world modeling. Huge leap forward in modeling physics, but some issues remain. Here is a bit of an otter airline pilot with a duck on its head walking through a Rothko-inspired airport and an otter in a wingsuit flying through a city of Gothic towers. So this is why we have two and a half trillion dollars of capex for AI. We just simply... before AI, we would need, you know, a team of advanced motion graphics artists to work for, you know... you could probably vibe code something like this in Unreal Engine in a day if you were strong.
John, what? Don't try to pop the bubble. You could... I like the wingsuit though. This is fun. In a Gothic tower. It looks sort of like a Harry Potter world. Wow. It's really a full city of Gothic towers.
Yeah. And so... I like the... the thing that's wild is that it takes 20 seconds. Yeah. To go from idea to this world. Yeah. Super cool. So super, super cool. And you're just going to see this like unlimited... like the people are going to go and just generate Mario and you'll just be like, "Well, I could just download Mario." Like it's not like... I'm okay with that. It's like when you go to, you know, Midjourney and you say, "Make me a picture of a dog." Or Nano Banana. And it's just like that's just a picture of a dog. You just find a picture of a dog. What's cool is when it's like your dog in your house doing the specific mechanic that you wanted and it's a reenactment from a film that you're in love with and you're a mechanic and you're creating this unique thing and you're mixing together these interesting ideas. We're going to see a ton.
Okay. So Tyler took full ownership. Okay. While we... 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.
All right, look at this. Oh, yeah. This is... Wait, is this a new one? This is a new one. I just made this. The original was not two-tone. Yeah, this is a new... I just made this. Look at you barely keeping it on the road. It's really hard to... skill issue. You got to... So if you zoom in on this, the license plate does look a little AI generated. There are some artifacts, but that was decent at this distance. This looks... This looks... Can he hit the apex? This looks photoreal. This looks photoreal. It's... Can he hit the apex? Can he hit the apex? Oh, the body roll. The body roll. You're actually going pretty fast. You're getting some speed on this thing. I think I fall off. I get off the... OH NO, THE GRASS. OH NO. WAIT, WHAT HAPPENED TO... You're... Oh no, you're destroying the side rail. How'd you get on the other side of the side rail? It says... Yeah. Okay. Crazy timing. Tyler turns 21 and he can't even keep a car. Wow. That was... I don't see any happy dads over there. Dude looks in Hebrew. No, but it does... like when it was working. So earlier I think there were just too many people using it, but this took like maybe 15 seconds. That's remarkable. At first it makes an image and then you can edit it and then from there you can make the actual world play. Yeah. And it's like a minute long. It's like... Yeah. Incredible.
Josh Woodward has another clip he shared. Nano Banana Pro. He's the VP at Google, Google Labs, Gemini AI Studio. Nano Banana Plus, Project Genie, low-poly cowboy dreams, they've been fulfilled. Let's take a look at what Josh Woodward over at Google built with Genie 3. So he takes the image he's generated with Nano Banana Pro, drops it in, summarizes the environment, summarizes... and it's interesting seeing like what does prompt engineering look like in this... like what type of prompt do you want to put in? Because I think we just put in like two words. We put in like Nürburgring, track, Germany. What happens if you add a little bit more there? How far can you push this current state-of-the-art? The horse can... AGI achieved. AGI achieved.
Do you think this is bullish for platforms like Roblox and Fortnite that have the existing network and they can integrate world models so that the players that are already a part of these ecosystems and these economies can generate new worlds quickly, generate new games, new characters, etc.? Or is it... as these world models get better, do they become competitive, a bigger threat because anybody can just... I'm sure there's infrastructure providers that can say like, yeah, we're going to handle everything from account creation to in-game currency to things like that.
Yeah, I mean, definitely competitive in the long term. In the medium term, like super good for prototyping and communication. And this is a key flow to... okay, you have an idea and you don't just want to, you know, generate a basic image of the game that you're trying to build. You generate a demo, a prototype, and then you go from here into, okay, let's wire it up in Unreal Engine or Roblox or Minecraft or whatever we want to do, and then you have the full game.
I think Roblox and Fortnite will prove that they have real network effects. Yeah. And it's going to still make sense to create new games within these existing ecosystems. Yeah. Yeah. But it is a very different architecture if you... But yeah, I don't know. I don't know how it would interact. Like if you're in Roblox and then you want to go into a fully generated experience, like the persistence doesn't exist. You're not necessarily in the same world. Just building like multiplayer capabilities in here seems very difficult. That seems like a real research challenge.
I think broadly, the world model, like World Labs, seems much more easy to integrate at least in the short term to something like Roblox because I mean this is literally just like generating frames on the fly. You're not actually making a, you know, 3D rendering. But it seems like it would be useful for training data as well. Lots of opportunities there. Well, speaking of training data, let me tell you about Labelbox RL environments, voice, robotics, eval, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI labs.
Well said, John. There are a lot of those. Google DeepMind created this short film, AI is going to disrupt Hollywood sooner than most might expect. It's their short film, Dear Upstairs Neighbor. It's previewing at Sundance Festival. It's a story about noisy neighbors, but behind the scenes, it's about solving a huge challenge in generative AI control. Developed by Pixar alumni and an Academy Award winner, researchers and engineers. Here's how it came together, says DeepMind. And there's a community note on here. Let's see what they said. The quoted video explains that the short film was driven through human-made art with AI assisting and speeding up the process. OP is engagement. Poor Chubby always getting community noted. We've seen a number of these. I think that's like at a certain point some people assume that things are happening, but you know, the point still holds that you know this is disruptive. Who knows if it's completely disrupting? There's certainly... I mean, there's demand for movies that are shot on film still. So how quickly will all this roll out? But if you have a vision these days for, you know, an animated movie, you should just go try and make it. At least you have to imagine that even if you want to use a more traditional process and go through the traditional Hollywood pipeline, showing up to a pitch meeting at an agency with a pretty much polished AI version of your film is going to resonate in a way that a script might just get sent back in the mail room. Yeah.
So I don't know. I could imagine this in like the prototyping, the storyboarding phase really, really taking off.
Staying in Google land, please. Addy Osmani over at Google Cloud shared some big changes to Gemini in Chrome, Agentic Browsing with Auto Browse, Nano Banana, and more. Let's pull up this video. If you can see it here, it's a huge day for tech news today. We had so much earnings. I mean, all earnings. Yeah, all week there's been a lot of stuff. But the other stuff was like planned. The Cloudbot stuff earlier was not. Is there audio on here? Can we play this audio as well? Let's see. Chrome. Okay, let's see. This is Gemini in Chrome. Agentic browsing with Auto Browse, Nano Banana, and more. Does it work? Let's see.
New state-of-the-art model for in-context image transformation. And traditionally, if you wanted to see how furniture would look in a room, you'd have to download a photo, upload it to an editor, and hope for the best. Here with Nano Banana, you just point Gemini to an image already on your screen. And in this demo, the prompt is show me like... AI in every feature. You actually like downloading the images and roundtripping them. That's your preferred workflow. And every consumer is just like you, right, Tyler? Right. Stunned in the silence. All right. I mean, I... hit him with the flashbang. Oh, no. Throwing flashbang. Flashbang. Surprised. There's now big changes to Gemini in Chrome. We got flashing lights over here now.
Okay. But this is still like making the product from like a very AI-first view. It's not just like taking the normal thing and then just adding one extra AI button. I mean, I'm not a product manager at Meta, but you have to imagine that there's little features like this that can seep their way into Facebook and Instagram where you see a photo of... you see a photo of a restaurant and you're like, I think that'd be great for a team offsite. Let me just not download the photo and put me, you, and Jordi at the dinner table at the restaurant, envisioning what we're like. I just hit share and then I say, hey, put the group chat that we're in on Instagram DMs in this photo. That'll be funny. It'll be more inspiring for them to be like, yeah, we should go to dinner there. Right.
I guess this feature, the feature in the video that actually got shown. I wonder if that should actually live... like so in that example, you're looking at an apartment online and you're in your browser being like, make it look like Kelly Wearstler styled it. Yeah. And it adds a bunch of furniture. Should that live at the browser level or should it just live in Zillow or Redfin or Compass? Right. Yeah. It's kind of a question on where this... the OS layer. I know what you're going to say. You're like the OS layer or your OS build now, right? No, I mean in this case, I feel like it should be like actually in Redfin and you should be able to cycle through a bunch of different interior design. I have seen that every single layer of the stack is adding AI features from top to bottom.
Interesting context here from Compound 248. Google with an absolutely murderous response to OpenAI's at browser. Highly strategic for Google. Launching a browser was a mistake by Sam and the OpenAI team. OpenAI was never going to gain big browser share, but launching gave Google the needed cover to launch its Chrome AI embedding without violating antitrust because now it's a competitive response. Would they have had... I can't... it's hard for me to believe that Google wouldn't be allowed to add AI features. I don't necessarily buy that, but it's an interesting take and you know, it's one position. Google's using its browser incumbency as a distribution and learning angle for AI is going to be exceedingly powerful if you allow it. The browser is going to learn from everything you do online, creating differentiation for its position as a personal AI.
Wow. Big day today. We're not getting any fines from the chat because we're both suited up. It's been a minute. It's been a minute. I like that. Thanks for holding us accountable. TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full-text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable.
There's so much news. TikTok uninstalls surge 150% after app's US takeover. That is a crazy surge. Okay. Yeah. So there's a new king of the app store called Upscroll. Yes. It is a TikTok... Instagram... clone. Clone. Okay. Competitor. Just getting off the ground. But I guess yeah, people... I think people had the perception that TikTok was immediately censoring a bunch of different topics, political topics, and then just aside, Upscroll used that as an opportunity to say like, hey, we're the alternative. Yeah, it was interesting because I know people were tracking the TikTok changing ownership. Is TikTok going to get banned? There were a lot of TikTok creators that took that as an opportunity to diversify to Reels and Shorts. And it just became obvious that you should be a multiplatform creator around that time. But I wasn't aware that the TikTok community was going to be tracking like when the servers actually shifted over to Oracle. It feels a little wonky and not something that would go super viral, but I think... Yeah. But people noticed because video stopped being served. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So there was an outage and that certainly drove deletions. And Sean highlighted something. Yeah. But again, to be clear, it's like there is a base level of TikTok uninstalls and then that surged 150%. That doesn't mean that they're declining by 50% or anything like that. Like there's still new installs. Calling up Upscroll. Yes. The Rumble of TikTok. Really? The Rumble of TikTok.
Sean Frank says, "TikTok views are down. People are blaming the new owners." I think this is just proof that TikTok was botting views the whole time. Your 100,000 view video was probably reaching 25,000 real people. So no surprise here for me. I always felt like it was always obvious that there were very real people on TikTok. I know people that went over to TikTok. Of course, they'd start making videos about startups. They'd start getting real inbound from people on LinkedIn. Yeah, totally. So there very clearly was always a bunch of real people there, but TikTok had every incentive to just bot all the views because what happens if somebody's getting way more views on TikTok versus Instagram? They're going to lean in. They're going to say like, I have more followers on TikTok. I should be creating content there. And that created a flywheel. Yeah. And so you can imagine as things shifted over, who knows, right? Like the new product. Yeah. They had some system that was... I like different formats. I liked Vine back in the day. At one point I did set up a TikTok and I uploaded like two or three videos. I was just trying to see like what it felt like to use that platform. And I noticed even though I came to the platform with zero followers, the two or three videos that I uploaded immediately got 500 views each. And I thought that the model was you get more of an opportunity to like sort of audition your content in the algorithm and then if it works it can blow up very quickly. And I think that that's somewhat true. Like when I started my YouTube channel, the first videos that I put up got 100 views. And for like a year if I broke a thousand views a video, I was like this is amazing. Like crazy. Hundreds of people. Really? Yeah. But on TikTok you post and you immediately get 500. And I've talked to some folks years ago who would set up a new TikTok account for a brand and they would launch one video that was so polished and so designed to be go viral, like they would blow up a car and they'd spend all this money shooting this and it would actually just... they knew that it would go viral and it would just immediately go even though it's a fresh account and there were no followers because they just knew it was good content. It would get shared. TikTok would audition it to like 100 people. Remember when TikTok launched, it was a period where it was so difficult to grow on Instagram. Yeah. Like that there was a huge challenge. If you're a new creator, you go on Instagram and be really frustrated because your stuff just wasn't getting shared with people that didn't already follow you. Totally. There's some comments under here. There's last thing on the TikTok front. Turner Novak commented maybe they were views from Chinese users which are gone now. It's also could be international users. Remember there's like if you have a new US app under US ownership, is it getting shared with international users that are using other versions of TikTok? Unclear. So...
Well, let's bring in our first guest of the show, Anton from Lovable. While he comes on, I'm going to tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium-sized businesses. Welcome back to the show. Welcome to the TVP and Ultradome. Thanks for taking the time to come and hang out with us. West Coast tour. It's cool to be here in person. Thank you. It's been like more than six months, but it feels like much more. A ton has changed. You know, my side, the business is doing better than ever. I can imagine. Every time I see a post about you, from you, there's a new biggest number. How is growth going? Is it still accelerating? How's the business doing? We are doing great on the growth side. We hit $300 million ARR two months after our $200... even louder in person. But more interestingly to me is the builders who are doing the real things. I was in the airport from San Francisco here and Adam at owner.com who helps tens of thousands of restaurants. He was like super excited and raving about he had built out a new product line over the weekend in 8 hours where he was solving a new problem where all the customers were saying like, we keep getting these phone calls, it's not always someone picking up. And he built an AI who answers the phone for the restaurants and it was all working. You could like configure it just like you were training a human. And he was now building it, releasing it next with his team. And we're seeing all of these new opportunities where people would use Lovable as their technical co-founder and build businesses. Yeah. And like you maybe you saw like I was super shocked when someone was shipping AI-generated dog pictures in frames to pet owners and they were making $300,000 per month on building that out without any technical... How are they actually doing that? Obviously, I think maybe you can describe like the technical co-founder process of building a new application that someone takes payment. But then I want to know about the top of funnel for that. Yeah. But part of... I mean I always saw Lovable's growth as millions of people out in the world that historically were just perpetually searching for a technical co-founder. Problem is a lot of people that are technical have a bunch of great ideas. They don't necessarily need an idea guy. And so there's all this like sort of pent-up creative entrepreneurial energy that just never really goes anywhere because somebody doesn't take the time to actually learn to code. They never find that right partner. Yeah, that's what we're seeing. And our mission is about human creativity which is very fun to empower. But it's not just new businesses. There's a lot of companies and I keep hearing from how they build out like AI applications and agents using Lovable. And once you get into it, especially if you look back compared to 6 months ago, this feels like to me when I use it there's no limit almost of what you can do. And the thing where Lovable, what I'm hearing is that it's a bit unique is that there are a lot of tools that are coming from kind of developers and then more people keep using them. We started with the non-technical people and that makes it just super simple but it still has the same capabilities that more sophisticated users are looking for in the same... How are you thinking about working with companies like owner that I'm not super familiar with owner. We got to have Adam the founder on but my understanding it's somewhat of like a system of record for a restaurant owner. Is that right? And so in theory he could also offer Lovable as like an integration so that individual businesses that are using owner can expand kind of and just build products that they themselves want not necessarily have to rely on owner. Is that right? Or are you seeing opportunities like that with other companies? Yeah, I think we have these partnership programs and that's a good idea. I'm going to bring that back to talk to Adam specifically. But what we're seeing... theoretically somebody is on owner, they have a feature that they want that's not being offered and they can just build it. They don't even have to request a feature. I mean that's what the future looks like and what we've seen is that Lovable is first used by as a communication medium and there are a lot of people that have stopped using Google Slides and PowerPoint and they now they just prompt it away because it looks so nice. Yeah. And I think it's a better medium than the animated videos you were talking about previously. But then now a lot of companies and us is one of those we're running we're switching out SaaS providers to using tools that we use...
Build ourselves, and we connect — we tell Lovable, can you connect these two different applications, internal tools that we build, and add AI in between those? And I think that is more of the future of how companies are going to be run.
Okay, let's talk about vibe coding debt and tech debt, because we've gone through this where we'll build a product. We built a guest directory — a very simple product that basically, every time an episode would get published, we had an app that would effectively scrape the episode, figure out who was a guest, link everything out, and publish it. And it was built in a day by one of our interns last summer, and then he had to spend like the entire summer just maintaining it and shipping incremental updates. So are you seeing any changes on that front? Like, obviously, if it's easier to make products, maybe it's easier to maintain them, but I think the concern is like if you've created, you know, 200 different SaaS tools and internal tools as part of your organization, then you end up spending really valuable resources at the company — you know, human labor time — just kind of maintaining these systems and making sure they keep running.
Can I talk a bit about the recent updates we did yesterday at Lovable? So there's a much more advanced planning mode that helps asking you or your intern questions about what it is that you're trying to achieve, and that makes the AI be able to, you know, find a better solution that doesn't need that type of maintenance. And that's one of the many improvements that we shipped yesterday. Another big one is...
So basically, like if you vibe code poorly or if you prompt poorly, you're adding a bunch of kind of like vibe coding debt, and if you spend a little bit more time like prompting...
Yeah, I think people should just move fast and not be like, 'Oh, I have to think through this so it's maintainable.' You should move really fast to get something that works and that's useful, but then you should sit down and you should reconsider talking to Lovable and asking, 'Should I restart from the beginning? Like, I'm having these problems with the maintenance — should I just be keeping shipping incremental updates, or is there something else that could actually solve this on a deeper level?' And keep having that conversation and be creative in terms of what could be the right solution for this, because the systems are extremely intelligent now and they're just getting more and more intelligent. So that should be your status quo: explain your situation, which the AI doesn't know, and then it will help guide you through what's the best path.
It feels like the solution to vibe coding is more vibe coding or more code, right? So but the question...
He says the vibe coding dealer...
He's like, actually, you need more — but I believe that. But I think the interesting question is the shift to mobile, and I want to know how you're thinking about that transition. Because if you go and vibe code an application and you sit down, you really think about it, you work with the tool to plan and test, and you're giving feedback, and you spend, you know, a full day or a couple hours and you got it in a good spot, but then there's like that one little, 'Oh, actually this button isn't quite working. Can you just go check out? It doesn't work in this scenario.' That winds up just being normally like you text a developer, you Slack them. How are you thinking about long-term integration with end users who might not be jumping into the tool themselves and might not even have the time to actually sit down and vibe code?
I think the future of how teams operate is of course changing, and I think there should be someone who is ultimately responsible for the quality of the applications and might not be you, even though you can throw in ideas of changes and then someone looks at it before it goes out to your customers. So that's high level how I think about it, and there's a lot of new capabilities that we are looking at to make sure that quality is always maintained. And over the last nine months we've been super focused on security, which is — if you're putting something in production, that should be your first priority. And there's a lot built in that makes applications secure from the ground up in how we approach it.
Yeah, the challenge right now is if you have a hit product, you could go to 100 million users in 48 hours. We saw this — what was the company that was like Palantir for dating?
Did they really go that big?
Yeah. No, no, no. They went — the tea dating app. Remember, they went...
They don't call it Palantir for dating, but yeah. Yeah, you know, the tea dating app really is...
But yeah, the founder was just kind of coding.
I think he had some team members too.
Yeah, sure. But like clearly they were moving very quickly and some mistakes were made.
Yeah. What has anything changed in your mindset about the level that you want to operate at or integrate with versus being a web app with cloud hosting, operating into the browser level, into the OS level, into a dedicated app on a phone or on a Mac, or command line tools? How are you thinking about the different unlocks that you get at different levels?
Yeah, great question. So first of all, I use Lovable on the phone all the time, and it's really like a good mobile experience, which is why we are seeing usage there. I know that a lot of entrepreneurs, they're building out complete work OS systems.
I talked to Gwyneth Paltrow yesterday, and they're building a Lovable brain that accumulates all the information that they need in running their company.
And what that gets some more capabilities from is that it can connect to your local file system. And it can connect to — I mean, in the future, I don't know exactly what the mobile device is going to look like, but the AI has to have context on everything you do on your phone for it to be fully unlocked, for all the capabilities unlocked. And that's something we're looking at — like exactly how does that future look like as we're building towards the best interface for humans to use technology and use AI, because that's the vision we're on.
How do you think about the tradeoffs between consumer and enterprise? Obviously, you can use it to make something that replaces a slide deck — just communication, external marketing materials, landing pages. You can also use it for building an internal tool and just spin something up internally to a company that's never going outside. Both are very interesting markets. Do you want to serve both? Do you think that there's a value to focusing on one over the other?
Yeah, great question. So Lovable started out from the early AI adopters, and that's where we're seeing now growth in all directions because people love how there's maybe some Swedish design sensibility — like things just work — and we put a lot of hard engineering into making it simple. And one of the directions it's spreading in is the enterprise. People come to work and they're like, 'Look how much we can get done using Lovable at work.' So now we have all of these required features for enterprises — SSO and so on. And specifically, I'll tell you an example of one really large company. They have 80,000-plus real estate agents globally, dozens of countries, hundreds of websites. They had an offer to replatform all these websites because, you know, there's always this pain for marketers changing websites. And the VP of marketing there — that would take a year. The marketing team found Lovable and he was like, 'Wow, I can just build one of those websites in a few minutes.' And then they sat down and they looked at how can we...
These are websites for individual homes?
For different brands — brands for real estate agents across different geos. And then over three weeks they replatformed. They saved $2 million on a solution which was part paying for AI chatbots on the website. And their chief innovation officer just says like this is the biggest change that their company has experienced in how fast they can move, how they could build out an AI chatbot just by prompting Lovable. And that's a large company, and that's them building product lines that are facing their end customers. What they're seeing even more volume of is, of course, internal applications and applicant tracking systems built from the ground up by the people who are using those applicant tracking systems with AI, with thousands of people being served.
How are you thinking about headcount planning specifically on the engineering side?
Yes, it's a good question. I was at the Anthropic office, and I think they're hiring a lot of people, just like we are doing. Because what you're actually seeing is that if you use AI correctly as a business — which is one of my personal top goals, or the entire company's top goal out of three goals, is us learning how to use AI as productively as possible. And that means that each human has more output, right, if you do that really well. And as we are learning that and figuring that out, we're putting that into the product and giving our users all the best practices in how to connect all internal tools that your company is running on, and share context across everything you're doing. Like when you're doing research on a podcast, you should all be able to just ask an AI, 'What question should I ask Anton?' And all of that infrastructure, all that tooling, you should be able to build on Lovable, or just get someone else's tool and copy it into your workspace.
How much do you guys pay attention to job descriptions at various companies in terms of understanding market pull? I could imagine companies that wouldn't necessarily hire software engineers saying like, 'We want engineers that can use Lovable and other relevant tools.' Because I think one of the interesting things that we're trying to understand from just kind of understanding how we'll see job growth in some areas, maybe job reduction in other areas, is I think people are underestimating how many companies there will just be a net new role where somebody or multiple people are creating and maintaining software that the company's creating. And we're an example of that, right? Historically, a media company — like if you had a fledgling media company, we brought Tyler on last, I think, Q1 of last year. We'd only been in market for a handful of months. And normally if somebody was building a media company and they were telling me they were hiring — or a podcast, right — and they were telling me they were hiring a software engineer in their second quarter in business, I'd be like, 'Dude, you should focus on like a million other things, right? Just make good content.' But in our case, we realize, hey, we can build quite a lot of internal tooling for what we're doing to make the show better. And so I think we're going to see a lot of job growth from companies that again wouldn't normally hire anybody internally doing software engineering.
It's a good question. I don't look at other people's job offers. My background is in physics, so I just break things down into like what are the governing principles for making a team work really well and humans working well together and getting output as a company. And what I'm seeing is that you want a team of people who — they don't have to be software engineers, but they're very curious and they get new things, understand them very quickly. And that's one of the things that we're fundamentally hiring for. I mean, I can take another example because I'm so inspired every time I meet someone whose lives we've changed. So it's a guy, Allan, he built a healthcare AI staffing company in five months. There is a million dollars in ARR, and he couldn't have been able to build something like this before.
Yeah, there's so many niche labor marketplaces. These used to be like more popular, like venture-backed businesses, and then a lot of VCs figured out like, hey, you can build a great business here, but you end up kind of capping out. There's some software component to do with like matching and kind of booking, payments, stuff like that. But ultimately, a lot of these businesses should just remain like somewhat niche, right? You could have a $10 million a year business doing staffing and have it, you know, like the people running it, right? You have a lean team. But historically it was a challenge because there was a number of companies that would build like out-of-the-box like marketplace software, but usually they were like — you had to do so much work to actually adapt the software that it was kind of this trade-off of like, do I build it in-house? Do I use...
People used to abuse WordPress like crazy. They'd build a whole social network on WordPress or try and modify it with e-commerce stuff, and it would take a year and millions of dollars to build something that now it takes a weekend.
How do you lead the team around dealing with competition? You know, you guys are now competing with pretty much every company in the whole world, it seems like — you know, from hyperscalers that are building vibe coding tools to other startups. What's your philosophy around dealing with competition, just kind of like emotionally, like in the organization?
Yeah. I mean, first of all, what we're seeing is that people come back to Lovable and compare it with other tools. They say like, 'Wow, this is such a wonderful, simpler experience that works better for them, that we're actually working, and it's more capable in many, many dimensions.' So that just gives us a lot of belief in what we're doing. And the way we think about it is to not look at what others are doing, it's just to look at what do our customers want us to do, and being very grounded in that. And we banned the competition Slack channel, you know, people — because it would literally be every day, it's like, 'Hey, we have a new venture-backed...'
But it's a sign that... we fundamentally say we're building the best product based on first principles, what we think is the best way to do these things. And it often means not adding new features, adding new capabilities, but thinking very long term: how is this whole experience going to be for us humans as we interact with superintelligence basically in the future? And that's what we're driving us — building that product is the motivator for everyone.
What about international expansion? You're obviously in Europe here already. Are you opening offices in other continents?
Yeah, we haven't announced more offices than Stockholm, and then great go-to-market...
We have more announcements, but we have people hired — a few people are hired remotely, including here in the US in various cities. So that's what it's like, but we're getting a lot of value of being in person — people who are very long-term thinking, very bought into the mission that we're on, based in Stockholm.
How do you think about retention? There's so many amazing tools that come out. Like I remember those — it was Lensa magic avatars. Everyone had to take their photo and do the Studio Ghibli precursor, like a year earlier, the style transfer on their image, and then people sort of like they tried it and then they churned out. But at the same time, like website builders have incredibly low churn because once you build your website, even if you're not using the tool every day, you're using it as hosting and you might be jumping back in to make changes. How are you thinking about the different retention dynamics, the different cohorts? How are things looking?
We're seeing very, very healthy retention. Net dollar retention has been more than 100%.
We're also of course seeing some AI tourists that are just trying a lot of...
Yeah. Yeah. They must exist and they just stop by and then they move on to something else, right?
Yeah. And what we're doing is that we're splitting out the different segments and seeing like what are the jobs to be done for the segments that we could do better. And fundamentally what we're noticing is that for most things we're adding, which is about making the whole experience to do more things more seamlessly, like more capabilities...
Exactly. More seamless without making it a more complex experience, that's helping their transition across the board for everyone, and less of a point solution — less of, 'Yeah, I use that for slides this week, but then there's a new one over there, I got to try the new thing' — more of like actually run your entire business, build the new business on this, and then stay with that for a long time. That makes a ton of sense. What about recommendations for other software products, databases? I've seen a bunch of charts where the default recommendation for Supabase, for example, is just climbing like crazy because it's recommended by you and by a backend and by a number of the models. What does that business evolve into — an affiliate model? Do you have demand from your customers to educate them about the different tradeoffs when they're building, when they're picking something, or do you want all of that to be abstracted away so that the end user doesn't even know what a database is, for example? And database is just one example. There's a million things you probably plug in with, right?
This is a great question. We have some really good product integrations, and you mentioned Supabase — it's one of them. And we're covering more and more area of payments, email, and communications. We want more of those amazing partnerships. I think there shouldn't be any limits on those integrations. You should be able to ask Lovable to — I mean, get cleaning for your podcast studio or whatever, and that shouldn't be done by us. It should be a partnership where we're currently just making more of those partnerships successful. And there are multiple companies that have seen an absolute majority of their growth coming from us, actually. But then at some point, yeah, I mean, we need to let our users get the best product integration if there are many ones.
I feel like other companies should be a little bit worried if the majority of their growth is coming from you guys, given that the whole purpose of the company is to make it easy to build software, and eventually you guys will just naturally do some of those things.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the integrations — I'm happy to not do them. We want to focus on the interface, the app creation layer, and then underneath there needs to be a lot of things that connect to very technically challenging systems to build the infrastructure and so on that we don't need to put our efforts into building. So it's fun — we want to do a lot more partnerships this year.
Yeah, makes sense. Talk about the dynamics between Lovable and all the different labs. I'm sure that you have very open dialogue with them around just like integrating with new tools, getting previews of models, all that kind of thing. And I'm sure part of why you're on the West Coast is just to spend time with the different teams.
Yeah. Those relationships are really good. We are fundamentally listening to the users more than them. We're building for the 99% while they're building development.
Please listen to your users less. You really want to... No, I'm kidding.
Yeah. No. And they have to spend so much of their focus on the strategy, on like building these models and squeezing out more and more juice from those models. And we're in this place which is very favorable for the end users, where we're not tied to a specific model. We use a combination at the level of different models, and that gives a better user experience in the end, with the trade-off of speed and the high quality for each specific task.
Yeah. How did you and the team react to Claudebot? Was there any kind of new user paradigms that you were inspired by? Anything to take away and kind of integrate? I mean, we had Peter on the show Tuesday, a couple days ago, and he was very open — like he's just in it. He's clearly not in it to make money. Like he's in it for the love of the game. And just kind of — we asked him, you know, do you think that people will clone what you're doing or copy it or build on top of it? And he was like, 'Yeah, I do. That's cool.' So kind of an unexpected answer, but I'm curious if there's anything that you thought was particularly interesting that you can bring back to Lovable.
Yes. I love Peter. Happy you had him on the show. I think like me and many people in the team have been building our own versions of this personal assistant that you just talk to, record audio to, and talk on your phone. In my case, on my computer. And then what we are of course thinking about, which is like the other top goal for this year, is to provide the best workspace for the best way to collaborate as a team. And that of course has a big part of that is being able to talk to an agent that has access to all of your different tools that once you're building with Lovable, and can pull out the data when you need it. And I think I'm very happy about this open source project in particular getting a lot of traction. It's a bit my roots as well.
Yeah, it feels like it's just waking everyone up to what's possible. It was really like feeling the AGI moment generally, and maybe not everyone reaches for open source and all that's entailed with that, but it's sort of just like a new call to action for everyone to try new tools. So yeah, overall good, very bullish.
Twitter likes this — completely new things that you can try out. In the end, what users want is something that's simple and that's very, very trusted, high security, high reliability. And when you're building your strategy like us, that's what we're focusing on: what is it that most people want, and what's the sustaining product that you want to build?
What social platform is most important to Lovable's growth at the moment?
I think — I'm not sure if my team likes me sharing data here — but Twitter and LinkedIn are the ones I know are the big ones. And but we're also seeing Instagram...
Because I feel like products when they actually go mainstream — like going mainstream looks like going over to Instagram and these other platforms — feels like beyond a niche, which I think of LinkedIn and X as. But yeah, I mean, it's a big community, so it makes a ton of sense, especially with some of the larger enterprises that you're working with on the business side. That makes a ton of sense. What does the top of funnel look like and growth function look like? Is there a flywheel where someone builds and then shares? And I imagine that there's, you know, links built with Lovable in the footer, but is that a real engine of growth, or are advertising — what's driving growth overall at the high level?
Yeah. And so we're seeing about 300 million visits to Lovable applications per month. So that is a real effect. People like, 'Oh, this is this great website,' and most of the time that leading to conversion is they just talking to the person, like, 'Oh yeah, you built it with Lovable.' And that is a part of the biggest channel, which is just word of mouth, and that continues to be like absolutely...
They see something cool, even if it's just a small demo, even if they're not paying for that business, they see it and they're like, 'I want to do that, but for me or my...
Yeah, they hear about us from their friends or they see about us on the internet somewhere. And yeah, I'm looking at investing more into growth, of course. And then I think Instagram — we're getting growth marketing really, really strong. It could be the next big channel.
Super Bowl's coming up. It's not too late to throw something together. Maybe anything.
Maybe next year. We'll see.
TV. We'll see. It's not breaking.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Have a great rest of your trip. We really appreciate you coming by. And we will 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 up next, we have...
I'm expecting a Super Bowl ad.
I want a Super Bowl ad that they could do some really fun stuff. I mean, even some of the customer testimonials would be great, even if they go with something more. They should build the entire ad in Lovable, dog food the product. We have Christian Garrett and Delian Asparouhov in the waiting room. We will bring them in to the TVPN Ultra. Delian, Christian, how are you doing? How are you feeling?
There they are. What's going on?
Way to go, baby. Live from New York.
Boys, great. Thank you guys. Take us through the news. Break it down for us. This is year four, correct?
Third year of doing the daytime forum. We started it back in the day just as like a small dinner series, and then three years ago kind of experimented with daytime forum. That went great. And then this could be our third time doing it.
Okay. What's special about this time? Who's on the lineup?
You want to start? I'll start. I mean, obviously the 250th is great timing for us to have another event here. We're very excited about that. I think the key focus this year, outside of continuing to build on what the forum has always been about, which is building bridges between technology and government, technology sector and government, is going to be increased focus not just on technological leadership but industrial leadership, and then as well as looking at having leadership among our allies. So I think this year you'll see a bigger expansion of the industries where technology is having an impact and playing a critical role, and you'll see leaders from companies that are leaders in those industries, and you'll also see a lot of folks coming from abroad and participating as well. And so I think you're just seeing that the relationship of the bridge between technology and government is actually a key framework for building deep relationships between the US and our allies, as well as building deep relationships and strengthening other industries.
And we didn't say it, but March 24th, Washington DC. For now, we've only announced some of the private speakers. We haven't announced any of the gov speakers yet, but it's folks like Trey Stevens from Andreessen Horowitz, Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures, Brad Lightcap from OpenAI, Shyam Sankar from Palantir, a bunch more that we'll start to basically release. But yeah, what I like about this year is we're also going to start to expand themes a little bit. There's going to be a strong basically biotechnology focus, and some folks both within the administration, within private industry, talking about basically how we need to make sure that we don't lose that entire supply chain and industry to China the same way that we have with like consumer electronics or humanoids. You're starting to see some early signs towards that, and there'll even be some joint policy put out that HVF will be sort of endorsing. And so what's been cool is as the forum has been around for several years, we're now not just acting as a gathering place, but it's even a place for people to start to think about not just meeting, but even like publishing policy together that aligns sort of private and public incentives in a way that is best for the nation. And then throughout all this, you know, we like I said, we started this five years ago, obviously under the Biden administration, continuing to maintain I think true bipartisanship. Vinod Khosla obviously has a certain set of thoughts about policies, regulations, etc. I may not necessarily agree with all of them, but we try to throughout both the forum, the events that we host, everything is pretty consistently even and across the aisle, and we try and stick with sort of centrists on both sides that can actually reach across the aisle and produce productive policy together. You won't see a ton of the extremists from either party there.
That's great. I noticed Young Liu from Foxconn is attending. Interesting company. Obviously, everyone's very familiar. Do you think there's going to be more energy about let's bring more Foxconn manufacturing to America, or just startups trying to work with Foxconn? There was this leak that OpenAI might be working with Foxconn on the new Sweet Pea earbuds, and it feels like more and more companies, as they think about hardware, they're going to be wanting to establish a relationship with Foxconn. That's sort of the beauty of this, at least from the business side. What's interesting about Foxconn? Why is he important to the conference?
Well, I think first off, you know, you have Foxconn, Qualcomm. You'll have some other names that will be announced across these other kind of categories of companies that have maybe been in industries that weren't viewed as technology industries but now increasingly are. And I think a lot of the leaders that are coming there are really just representing a trend that you've seen, which is once again technology industry is a great way to build deepening relationships and partnerships with our allies. And to your point, it works both ways, right? Yes, you'll see just like TSMC who's made a huge investment in the state of Arizona, and you're seeing that from other companies as well here domestically. You're also seeing companies abroad continue to invest in other countries and scale there through partnerships like these. An example in another country, you know, we've seen Anduril invest heavily, and is a portfolio company for Founders Fund and 137 for us respectively, and invest heavily in countries like the UK, Australia, and Japan, just recently opening their office there. Japan is another country, as well as many others like South Korea and Europe, that are increasingly opening their doors to become manufacturing hubs for the reindustrialization here in the US, as well as supporting their own reindustrialization efforts. And I think you know you're going to have to see many companies like Foxconn play a critical role as the West tries to shift off of reliance on Chinese capacity across critical industries.
We as much as possible obviously try to make it so that it's sort of bipartisan from the elected officials and sort of Congress, but we do try to as much as possible whichever administration basically is in office try to reflect some of their priorities. And what you've obviously seen under this administration is them leaning into making sure that our allies are sort of contributing their fair share, but also reestablishing their own reindustrialization efforts. And so I think a significant theme of this year's forum is going to be having a lot more international presence, and there to both learn from how the US is reindustrializing, but also partner with some of these companies to bring those technologies locally, partner with some of their local primes and reindustrialization efforts to accelerate those in some ways these trends that you're seeing in the US. The United States is much better off if France, if Germany, if the United Kingdom, if Australia, if Japan are mimicking basically those same technological patterns. And so that's definitely going to be a major topic of this year's forum.
Yeah, I know you haven't announced the government attendees, but is there a desire to have international leaders attend as well? Is this going to be the next Davos in a couple years, or do you want to keep it focused on domestic policy makers, US policy makers, senators, representatives?
I mean, obviously the event being in DC and the core focus is on the technology sector and the government sector in the US. But the event's always been international. You know, from the beginnings, we've had foreign ambassadors from other countries attend. We had the VP of Taiwan speak multiple times. I think you will see a lot more international leadership attend as well. I think it's reflective to Delian's point that this really is about the West being successful, and you know, the concept of it's not US alone, right? And so I think yes, you will see that represented. Most of the leadership, of course, is still going to be heavily domestic, right? And so leaders from Congress, leaders from the administration, etc. But you will definitely see a lot more leadership from countries abroad and our allies, and that's going to be very exciting. And that's going to be from the Middle East, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, and Europe.
Yeah, I think you'll see like in the long term, I think the way that this will always break it down is it'll probably be like 85%, 90% domestic focus, but there'll always be like a twinge of international. And so I think that's what it's been probably historically on the attendee side of things. And this year for the first time there will be a few more sort of internationally focused panels, but it's not going to quite go to like Davos level, which is like kind of global elite in some ways. This is always going to be primarily sort of United States focus with a twinge of international.
What are all the ways that people can participate, view, you know, watch from home, be a part of it, whether as a sponsor, all that stuff?
Yeah. So the event is invite only to participate during the day in Washington DC. But you know, it is going to be about a thousand people, so it's a relatively broad audience that we'll be bringing in there. We'll also be live streaming all of the panels on our YouTube and X accounts. And then there will be a couple media groups that are live streaming from there, some traditional ones like Bloomberg and some super exciting novel ones like TVPN on site. So there'll be a variety of different live streams to tune into that I think will give you a feel of the event, both the official panels as well as obviously the side conversations that you guys will be doing.
Yeah, that's great. What is the business structure of Hill & Valley now? Is it its own nonprofit? How is...
We are officially a 501c3. So this is the first year ever. We are welcome to the board of the Hill Valley Forum Foundation. Yeah. 501c3.
Are you guys just being mimetic with OpenAI? Are you considering a for-profit conversion? Because I feel like the ads really — we could do a lot with each other here.
There's a lot more to be announced, like Delian said. So just stay tuned.
Yeah, but we do have full-time staff, which is really exciting. So yeah, you know, Chris and I were starting to get a little too stretched thin between both of us having too many jobs. So it is nice finally...
And we lost a key leader as well. So we really stretched...
