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Vladimir Tenev
Co-Founder, President, Chief Executive Officer & Chairman of the Board, Robinhood Markets

Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry, Supper Intelligence, GDP per GW

📅 Sep 30, 2026 TBPN 179 MIN 10776 VIEWS 578 SEGMENTS · 9 SPEAKERS
00:01:26 Supper Intelligence 00:09:00 White House Accord Signature Tier List 00:21:22 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 00:32:59 Power, GD, and the AI Boom 00:43:21 A Warning about Model Welfare 00:57:28 Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry 01:08:24 Ali Golshan, Nvidia’s senior director of AI software and a former Gretel founder, discusses his work on AI security, safety, and infrastructure. He explains how the open-source OpenShell project, formal verification, and hardware-level controls can provide a trusted, full-stack environment for monitoring and containing autonomous AI agents. 01:20:43 Mike In...

What Vladimir Tenev said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Vladimir Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, discussed the company's latest product launches at Hood Summit, a space-themed active trader event in Houston, where they rolled out 16 new products. He highlighted Robinhood Agents, an evolution of agentic financial superintelligence, which includes an MCP that lets external AI agents like Claude Code or Codex place trades on behalf of users, with over 150,000 users connected. Tenev emphasized the goal of giving users "the power of a hedge fund in your pocket" by democratizing access to proprietary data and algorithmic trading strategies. He described the three components: Robinhood Agents, agent apps for third-party data, and agent loops for autonomous strategy execution. Regarding risk management, he noted that the agentic account is sandboxed, with trade approvals on by default. Tenev also launched 24/7 stock trading and PERPS, the first true perpetual futures offering in the US. He expressed that agentic trading has clear product-market fit, unlike one-time use cases like moving money to high-yield accounts.

Key takeaways

  1. Robinhood Agents, including an MCP for external AI agents, has over 150,000 users connected and brings agentic trading within the Robinhood experience across 28 million accounts.
  2. Robinhood will be the first place in the US to offer 24/7 trading of stocks.
  3. 16 new products were rolled out at Hood Summit, including PERPS, the first true perpetual futures offering in the US with eight perpetual futures.
  4. Agentic trading has clear product-market fit and long-term retentive usage, unlike one-time use cases like renegotiating bills.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
1,500 active traders at Hood Summit event metric 1:36:36
16 products rolled out at Hood Summit metric 1:36:36
150,000 users connected to MCP for external AI agents metric 1:38:47
28 million Robinhood accounts metric 1:38:47

Chapters

  1. 0:00Hood Summit and product launches
  2. 1:37:51Robinhood Agents and agentic trading
  3. 1:41:21Alternative data and democratization
  4. 1:44:02Hedge fund metaphor and risk management
  5. 1:46:30Social features and investment clubs
  6. 1:48:34Market conditions and prediction markets
  7. 1:51:20AI agents and future market structure

Questions asked in this interview

12
  1. 1:36:02Our next guest is Vlad Tenev, the CEO and co-founder of Robinhood, here to discuss artificial intelligence, finance, everything in between. How you doing, Vlad?
  2. 1:37:29Have they let you behind the wheel?
  3. 1:41:21Do you expect that sort of alternative data to just become more democratized now that models out of the box can do this kind of complex research?
  4. 1:44:02So, how far are you leaning into the hedge fund metaphor?
  5. 1:48:34Like what are you noticing where maybe it's not even good or bad?
  6. 1:51:20How are you thinking about the knock-on effects of AI agents entering the financial markets, research markets, trading markets?
  7. 2:18:13And if you read Ben's book, he talks about going head-to-head with a pretty formidable competitor called BladeLogic, right?
  8. 2:19:18Well, and now you look at how many different unicorns provide infrastructure for other companies to be able to scale really quickly, and you know, things like Work OS, right?
  9. 2:20:25... economic engine for open weights, or do you think it's something that looks more like Red Hat or MongoDB where you're building, you're making an open model and then you're building, you know, more infrastructure and product around it?
  10. 2:22:55as an open source developer, you know, lab, do you have to be like auditing all the users of your model?
  11. 2:25:16But to me, I'm like, okay, if this was run in a more kind of like stable way where there was some shareholder influence, it would probably trade higher. But who knows?
  12. 2:27:18An ability to engage with the financial markets, understanding of the customer, golf handicap, what's important?
John Coogan 0:00 ↗
You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, September 30th, 2026. We have live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. We're back in the Ultra Dome. The temple of technology.
Jordi Hays 0:14 ↗
The fortress of finance. The capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy. Use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
John Coogan 0:26 ↗
So, there was a supper last night at the White House. The golden house. The golden home. Gold home. What are we calling it these days? Well, we renamed artificial intelligence. It's super intelligence now. We were debating is super intelligence abbreviated SI or just S?
Jordi Hays 0:48 ↗
Because if you're like super alignment, was that SA? Like
John Coogan 0:53 ↗
problem there, John. There's no TLDD for just S.
Jordi Hays 0:56 ↗
That's true. That's true. You got to get the new TLDDS going. What was the word we we
John Coogan 1:01 ↗
So, super alignment. That was one word.
Jordi Hays 1:03 ↗
You know, some words you do, you have a hyphen.
John Coogan 1:05 ↗
You have a hyphen and then some
Jordi Hays 1:07 ↗
if you just use a like a normal prefix for
John Coogan 1:09 ↗
it's just a normal prefix for something. So,
Jordi Hays 1:11 ↗
then supernatural,
John Coogan 1:12 ↗
supercalifragilistic, expialidocious. That's one word, right? So, you would think that potentially uh you would just be using one word. Yeah. But anyway, we're using two words, I guess. And so there was a dinner at the White House. David Sax posted it. He said, "It's the Breton Woods of supper intelligence, super intelligence." Um, and there's
Jordi Hays 1:35 ↗
my my first reaction to this is Tyler was really snubbed, you know, all those people there and not not one chair for Tyler.
John Coogan 1:43 ↗
Yeah. And so, uh, there's there's a bunch of folks here, uh, and people were analyzing who got the best seats, who got the different positions, who got pole position, prime positioning, uh, who was snubbed off in the little kids table at the end, etc., etc. Bunch to analyze about who's on the ins, who's on the outs. But um I had uh I I had Chad GBT sort of go through and and try and categorize each uh attendee by their stance on open source open source. So did they did they sign the Jensen Nvidia open-source letter? Uh have they been concerned about the cyber security impacts? obviously anthropic on the far end sort of in the red bunch of other folks who are more in the yellow and I don't know if I agree with all of these classifications um but you can sort of see how Jensen is clearly pro- open source Satcha Nadella has talked about that uh open AI Greg Brockman more in the middle uh you know not open sourcing a lot of things openai did sign the Jensen letter but of course is concerned about pacing the frontier which is sort of antithetical and so this is all as a uh as a as a reference point to that post from uh our friends over at semi analysis. Let me actually pull up what uh what what they said here. Where was it? Um it was Max Can. I believe this is semi analysis. Max K says, "Majority of people are significantly underestimating the probability of open source models being nerfed or even outright banned in the next 6 to 12 months due to cyber sec cyber sec cyber concerns." And so, uh, I believe Enthropic put out something yesterday talking about the risks of open source and in a cyber context saying that, uh, the the the delay between Mythos preview, being able to find zero days, being able to hack into things, uh, that that gap has closed now and the open source frontier can very quickly do the same thing. And so, expect a lot of a lot of cyber incidents unless something is done. Um, can these be controlled some way? Maybe at the inference layer, maybe at the at the data center level, maybe at the chip level. There's going to be a whole bunch of different proposals. But, um, at least right now, uh, in the next 6 to 12 months, certainly not this month because the vast majority of people who are closest to Donald Trump have been evangelizing for open source. So, I would be surprised to see any any push back against open source happen that quickly. At the same time, open source is amorphice. It is not a business by definition. And so it can't really have a formal seat at the table. George Hotz not at the table, for example. Snubbed. Yeah. No. Uh Linus Torvoltz, you know, not not at the table. Um the open source
Jordi Hays 4:36 ↗
George at the table just sort of like laughing in a sort of insane way at everything being said.
John Coogan 4:43 ↗
Yeah. And and so even the companies that are pro- opensource, they are pro- open source in in so far that it advances their business. And so there is still a way that the closed source uh group could find a way for everyone who's at this table to benefit in a closed source world moving forward if open source is deemed to be too dangerous and and uh and forcing too many cyber concerns. Um there I like I I could see everyone at this table signing a letter saying uh we are now anti-open source but the the downstream uh like economic engine actually splits you know the the the rewards and the and the profits of the ecosystem fairly evenly. I think the the initial push back and and pro- open-source uh push especially from Jensen was like we don't want to be in a world where there's one company that reaps 100% of the profits and we're not involved. But if it's like hey look there's actually going to be an oligopoly. Companies don't want a single source intelligence. They're constantly going to be bouncing back and forth between open AI and anthropic and then consumers are going to be bouncing back and forth between Google search overviews and muse and instinct and all these different things. Um there's a world where the actual models are closed source and but the but there are so many front doors and the front doors are in such competition with each other that there's enough revenue distribution and profit distribution that everyone at this table at least is happy. I don't think the open source community would be happy but I do think that there is a world where uh in six to 12 months it's possible that everyone at this table is like yes for cyber reasons we need to find a different way forward where everyone benefits economically but we are now a little bit less pro- open source but I don't know what was your what's your read on it six to 12 months you think open source is going away or you think it'll stick around
Jordi Hays 6:44 ↗
I mean it's so hard to ban open source I I Maybe you can kind of get something like a ban if you're like just worried about like the business impacts economics because then you pressure the providers to not host this stuff.
John Coogan 6:56 ↗
But if you're worried about like safety, you know, if you have a bad actor, it's so hard to police downloading openweight models from somewhere and running it locally.
Jordi Hays 7:03 ↗
Yeah. And like Yeah. Maybe there's some, you know, you need tens of thousands of dollars to like physically buy hardware. Exactly. But if you're a motivated bad actor, like that's not that big of a hurdle.
John Coogan 7:14 ↗
Yeah. Exactly. like uh it does feel like we are pretty far away from uh from you know go and get a random gaming PC and be able to run something that is you know mythos level hacking machine like you probably need some serious GPUs you probably need something that's basically rack scale you need to be running it a lot to try a lot of different things like a lot of these cyber exploits it was not just oneshotted by the model it was you know a fan out of agents working together is like you know 10,000 exactly exactly
Jordi Hays 7:50 ↗
scale and so and so uh there are like one way to control it is through KYC on hardware you know that like the data center that is you know being used maliciously is a lot more risky than the laptop that's being used maliciously even with uh near frontier open source intelligence. So I don't know we'll see how we'll see how it goes. Um uh there I'm sure there will be more more discussions and it's not even to say that this uh this this dinner was at was about open source at all. It's just sort of interesting to take the temperature of where is where is DC on AI who is getting the the the most quality time with the president and the administration and then where do they stand on the issues of today. Uh obviously this was much more just about pacing the frontier, the buildout, etc. stuff like that and uh and and and signing uh signatures. We had some signature analysis breakdown. We can go through this, but first let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. We got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Um, Schol shared a picture of the letter that was signed, the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, the Joint Committee on Frontier Responsibilities in order to build a positive future for the American people in the world. We believe that every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with consumers and the public. One, they're going to implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of models during training and deployment around cyber security, biocurity, chemical threats, etc. They want to empower an internal team to ensure all the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended. Three, they're going to partner with external auditors and evaluators to carry out independent assessments of whether the controls monitoring and detection are operating as intended. And four, they're going to designate an independent committee of the board of directors to oversee and receive reports from the teams operating the controls and the internal and external auditors. So aligned to the board of directors that circumvents the CEO for safety, alignment, evaluation, all of that good stuff. Bunch of people signed it. We got Sundar from Google, Daario from Enthropic, Mark Zuckerberg from Meta, Greg Brockman from OpenAI, Elon Musk from XAI, Jensen from Nvidia, and Donald Trump, the president of the United States. And people
John Coogan 10:20 ↗
lot of people do an analysis on the various uh signatures.
Jordi Hays 10:24 ↗
Yes, someone did a tier list.
John Coogan 10:27 ↗
I was surprised by their tier list. I'd like to see you do a tier list. Where would you put Donald Trump's signature? I mean, it's
Jordi Hays 10:36 ↗
hate him or love him. I think it's pretty iconic. Like, it's just so
John Coogan 10:41 ↗
it's it it has a flow to it. It's very
Jordi Hays 10:46 ↗
uniform, but I read if you don't know it's Yeah. It looks like you a child drew a mountain range, but
John Coogan 10:53 ↗
versus Jensen. I'm seeing a lot of Jensen Wong in there. But what's impressive to me is is I would want to compare the DJT signature. Like I would want to look at a hundred of them and see like is he
Jordi Hays 11:06 ↗
is he nailing it every single time.
John Coogan 11:08 ↗
Oh, okay.
Jordi Hays 11:08 ↗
He's been doing autographs for long enough. I would expect that he is. But still looks like very difficult to actually be able to nail that
John Coogan 11:15 ↗
and really get that dialed.
Jordi Hays 11:17 ↗
So again, he's going with a Sharpie, too. So he's he's sort of like trying to mog with
John Coogan 11:21 ↗
Oh, that's true. I didn't realize that.
Jordi Hays 11:23 ↗
I'll give you the pen. I'll take the Sharpie. Yeah,
John Coogan 11:26 ↗
automatically it's like
Jordi Hays 11:27 ↗
you're winning on thickness.
John Coogan 11:29 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. Winning on
Jordi Hays 11:30 ↗
the breadth is is is much more significant with that. Interesting strategy.
John Coogan 11:34 ↗
And then going down the list, um you know, Sundar again would never would never know. Um
Jordi Hays 11:41 ↗
but I like the two lines, little dot there.
John Coogan 11:44 ↗
It almost looks like a couple different Yeah, it looks like an abstract artist signature. I could see that on a painting. Or maybe he Yeah, it almost looks like he's made up his own um um like letters and sort of like language.
Jordi Hays 11:59 ↗
Okay.
John Coogan 12:00 ↗
Um Daario uh little more kind of like down
Jordi Hays 12:04 ↗
on the first word and then it seemed like he was kind of dripping upwards. My theory I I almost think here like someone was like holding the piece of paper and they were all So I think I basically think Trump put the paper down aggressively signed with a Sharpie and then told everyone else cuz he knew this was going to go out. You guys sign, you know, when you're trying to sign.
John Coogan 12:22 ↗
So you think it was a situation where like Daria was signing on Greg's back like, "Oh, sign on my back." Like that type of thing. That might have been what happened. Yeah.
Jordi Hays 12:28 ↗
Kind of like broing down.
John Coogan 12:29 ↗
Yeah. Notably, you don't see any situations where the pen punched through the paper. that sometimes happens if you're trying to sign a document on someone's back and you're punching through the soft uh jacket that they're wearing. That could be a risk. Doesn't seem like it happened in this case. Um anyway, so Dario pretty down the middle, pretty safe. Uh again, kind of emulating that sort of mountain range style, right, where by the the end of the signature, it's just a bunch of lines going up and down, sort of unclear. Um, Zuck again, uh, more more kind of rockstaresque, right?
Jordi Hays 13:04 ↗
Almost musical feeling.
John Coogan 13:06 ↗
GDB coming in
Jordi Hays 13:08 ↗
just minimalist.
John Coogan 13:09 ↗
Minimalist.
Jordi Hays 13:10 ↗
Minimalist, simple, readable.
John Coogan 13:12 ↗
Yeah,
Jordi Hays 13:12 ↗
he's he's a very I would say
John Coogan 13:16 ↗
in some ways these are reflections of their personalities, right? GDB, he's very practical.
Jordi Hays 13:21 ↗
Signature window into the soul.
John Coogan 13:22 ↗
It's a window into the soul, right? Extremely practical. Mhm.
Jordi Hays 13:26 ↗
Sticking sticking to sticking to the basics, sticking to what works.
John Coogan 13:29 ↗
Yeah.
Jordi Hays 13:29 ↗
Um and uh yeah, obvious why a lot of people are saying that's at least a uh a tier.
John Coogan 13:35 ↗
What is we What is Mark Zuckerberg's actual signature? MZ
Jordi Hays 13:39 ↗
B or M or is it MZ and then the Z goes crazy? Is that what that is?
John Coogan 13:45 ↗
Because
Jordi Hays 13:46 ↗
it starts doing tricks.
John Coogan 13:47 ↗
Yeah, it starts doing tricks. And I think Sundar might have done the the same thing. But I I feel like uh there's a little bit of a line that you don't cross. If somebody asks you to for a full signature and you do an initials, that's a different thing. Sometimes you're on a document, you got to sign your initials a bunch, you got to sign the full thing. I have respect for the full name signature. If you ask me for a full name signature, I'm throwing down my full name. I'm not just randomly switching up to to initials.
Jordi Hays 14:12 ↗
I think it's totally fair game.
John Coogan 14:13 ↗
You totally fair game. You can just
Jordi Hays 14:15 ↗
cursive initials.
John Coogan 14:17 ↗
Is this cursive initials from Greg Brockman? No, but but I I think that's where Sundar was maybe maybe going.
Jordi Hays 14:24 ↗
So, you're giving Sundar the pass, you're giving the pass because the MC
John Coogan 14:28 ↗
Jensen A lot of people are saying that Jensen's
Jordi Hays 14:32 ↗
calligrapher. He brought his calligrapher.
John Coogan 14:34 ↗
Yeah. I mean, I I first read Ed Hardy when um so I thought that I thought that
Jordi Hays 14:44 ↗
Yeah,
John Coogan 14:45 ↗
I don't know. Maybe he had some affinity. So, let's pull up You put his middle name in there.
Jordi Hays 14:52 ↗
What's his middle name?
John Coogan 14:53 ↗
Here's the Ed Hardy logo.
Jordi Hays 14:56 ↗
Jensen does not have a traditional English middle name. Oh, it's Jen Sunun. So, J uh Jen-Hsu N. So, that second letter.
John Coogan 15:09 ↗
Okay. Ch that to make it look exactly like Jensen W.
Jordi Hays 15:14 ↗
Uh yeah. So, so he signs uh not with the with the English version, with the lowercase ense. He throws a capital H in there, which gives it an extra flourish. It's the most tasteful. It It earns the S tier. It
John Coogan 15:30 ↗
was saying, you know, Jensen has the same initials as John Hancock. Kind of evocative in his single.
Jordi Hays 15:35 ↗
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh monitoring the situation. Monitoring meme here did not like uh Sundars. He put Sundar in F tier. I thought I thought Sundars had some nice flare to it, although it was potentially the most abstract, but uh and uh I feel like putting MZ in in C tier. I guess the Z does go a little crazy, but uh anyway, very very fun.
John Coogan 16:01 ↗
Um trying to see if we can get some real time handwriting analysis on the
Jordi Hays 16:06 ↗
Do you have a handwriting analyst on speed dial?
John Coogan 16:09 ↗
I have access to super intelligence.
Jordi Hays 16:11 ↗
Okay. Okay. You're using super intelligence. Well,
John Coogan 16:14 ↗
anyways, we can continue for now.
Jordi Hays 16:17 ↗
Okay. There were some videos. I haven't actually watched them, but we're going to watch them now.
John Coogan 16:22 ↗
They were clip farming.
Jordi Hays 16:23 ↗
They were clip farming. Okay. That's what's happened. So, uh there were you you mentioned yesterday that Alex Karp was asking questions to the reporter or something like that. But uh here we have uh Donald Trump, Dario Amade and a few other folks gathered around standing outside and we will watch this clip right now.
John Coogan 16:43 ↗
Whatever he says is okay. Be careful.
Jordi Hays 16:45 ↗
AI will say what I've always said which is that AI has benefits. I've talked about the meta benefit to the technology. I as the president has said you know whoever wins wins. I think that's very important but technology has very real mechanism. How we address those risks is still under discussion. We need to work together.
John Coogan 17:04 ↗
Oh, okay. So, this is like a super cut of
Jordi Hays 17:06 ↗
you have no idea who these people are. These are the words. You have no idea who they are.
John Coogan 17:13 ↗
Well, I think it is worth highlighting the AI which
Jordi Hays 17:22 ↗
Mr. President.
John Coogan 17:26 ↗
Mr. Musk, can I ask you a quick question?
Jordi Hays 17:29 ↗
Probably not. Trump really makes them seem like they're all his like sons
John Coogan 17:33 ↗
and like younger family members.
Jordi Hays 17:35 ↗
It was a very productive
John Coogan 17:40 ↗
Mr. President. How did the meeting go?
Jordi Hays 17:42 ↗
Mr. President, how
John Coogan 17:44 ↗
Yeah. crazy. Uh we didn't
Jordi Hays 17:47 ↗
at what point should Trump just actually have a 247 live stream or be live like of his own live stream, right? He has so much conflict with the media, he should just have his own.
John Coogan 18:00 ↗
Yeah, I think it'll happen.
Jordi Hays 18:02 ↗
Uh
John Coogan 18:03 ↗
I mean, yeah, that was the I think we were talking about that with the knockoff of the pod uh the knock-on effects of the podcast election. The idea that uh that uh Trump did like hundreds of hours of podcasts in the run-up to the election and uh just the awareness, the clips, the the the the impressions were so high. Uh it w it was that uh he did more in terms of volume and also got more reach. Uh Kl Harris did uh call her Her Daddy, but it was a much shorter episode. So Trump at the same time three hours on Rogan. That's more opportunity for clips. Yeah, clip farming. Uh Kla did I think 45 minutes on Call Her Daddy. And the actual episode didn't fly as much. Like it wasn't repurposed as much all over the place. And so yes, I I I wouldn't be surprised if there's a 24/7 live stream of the president or something close to it uh in the near future. Um let's play this clip from Natasha Tiku. She says, "Unfortunately, I will be going back to school to write my dissertation on this one minute film." Let's see what happened in this film.
Jordi Hays 19:05 ↗
Slow down to AI. So I just want to hear from you after this big summit where you are today.
John Coogan 19:10 ↗
Look, I mean I I will say what I've always said, which is that AI has incredible benefits. I've talked about the medical benefit to the technology. I as the president has said, you know, whoever wins AI wins. I think that's very important. But I think the technology has very real risks and you know the mechanism how we address those risks is still under discussion. But we all need to work we all need to work together to make sure that we can win and we can win safely. If we if we do this right, we work with the president and everyone here, we can win safely.
Jordi Hays 19:44 ↗
Whoa. So much louder the the gallery. Really fascinating.
John Coogan 19:52 ↗
Yeah. Um are there any other clips that we should uh watch through? Um Oh, look. That's It's just funny that Trump is distracted while Dario's giving his speech. Is that what's going on? I don't know. Um
Jordi Hays 20:05 ↗
uh
John Coogan 20:06 ↗
yeah, it seems very
Jordi Hays 20:06 ↗
What did he say about Sundar? Didn't he say something funny about Sundar? I want to I want to play this.
John Coogan 20:11 ↗
He's a monster. They said he's a monster. That's a pretty good That's a pretty good pretty good thing to be called. I guess
Jordi Hays 20:16 ↗
being called a monster.
John Coogan 20:19 ↗
Would fix me.
Jordi Hays 20:20 ↗
Yeah. Let's play this clip.
John Coogan 20:23 ↗
And they're going to be watching over each other. Some you want to say,
Jordi Hays 20:26 ↗
Mr. President.
John Coogan 20:28 ↗
First of all, thanks, Mr. President.
Jordi Hays 20:29 ↗
You have no idea who these people are. These are the biggest people in the world. You have no idea who the hell they are.
John Coogan 20:34 ↗
The media is like, "Of course they know."
Jordi Hays 20:36 ↗
Nobody knows. What a great life.
John Coogan 20:38 ↗
What a great life. No one knows who you are. Guy's a monster.
Jordi Hays 20:42 ↗
Living in humble anonymity as the CEO of Google.
John Coogan 20:46 ↗
Walk down.
Jordi Hays 20:47 ↗
He says, "What's your name? What's your name?"
John Coogan 20:48 ↗
Just all you have to know is Sundar.
Jordi Hays 20:51 ↗
Sundar is his name.
John Coogan 20:52 ↗
Hopefully, this is the crazy.
Jordi Hays 20:57 ↗
That's all you have to know.
John Coogan 20:58 ↗
That's all you have to know. He's like, I'm introducing uh the CEO of Google for the first time, I guess. H anyway, uh bunch of other bunch of other stuff going on. Um, well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Jordi Hays 21:23 ↗
Little drama
John Coogan 21:26 ↗
in coding agent land.
Jordi Hays 21:27 ↗
Okay. Yeah, that's what
John Coogan 21:28 ↗
Matan Grinberg
Jordi Hays 21:29 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 21:30 ↗
said this morning, just about an hour ago, "We are terminating Chris Degnen for unethical co conduct involving cognition."
Jordi Hays 21:40 ↗
Mhm.
John Coogan 21:40 ↗
Uh the last few months have seen incredible progress blah blah blah. Uh Matan says a much larger competitor. Uh Cognition has fallen behind on us on capabilities that matter most to customers. Cost, quality, and security. Instead of competing in the market, Cognition engineers feigned interviews with us to pry information about our product. Not finding what they were looking for, Cognition has decided to throw their weight and money at people with direct knowledge of our most confidential plans.
Jordi Hays 22:07 ↗
Uh, it feels as though ethics are being thrown out the window in the AI era. People are willing to do anything, including exploiting privileged information and violating ethical boundaries. I think this is unique to our time and I don't think it's right. Integrity still matters. Totally. um uh disagree with a lot of that but uh yesterday I made
John Coogan 22:27 ↗
you disagree that integrity matters.
Jordi Hays 22:28 ↗
No no no I've said a lot of that. I think it still matters but but the idea that like the idea that people like not having integrity is like unique to our era.
John Coogan 22:38 ↗
He says I think this is unique to our time.
Jordi Hays 22:41 ↗
Oh yeah.
John Coogan 22:41 ↗
None of this is like Silicon Valley has always been war.
Jordi Hays 22:44 ↗
Yeah. Yeah.
John Coogan 22:46 ↗
It's like the railroad buildout was completely peaceful. No one was poaching each other. It wasn't it wasn't, you know, a competitive blood bath.
Jordi Hays 22:54 ↗
Yeah. Yeah.
John Coogan 22:55 ↗
Uh yesterday, I made the decision to immediately terminate Christopher Dagnon's role as board observer and adviser to factory after over year of service. Prior to this decision, Chris told me he had a casual conversation with an executive at Cognition when I questioned his intentions. He reassured me that ethics aside he had made too much money and was too lazy to go work for Cognition, which I trusted and believed. On Monday, Chris spent time advising the factory team on a handful of confidential board level matters. That evening, he called me to say that the conversation that was initially described as casual and one-off was actually formal and recurring for weeks while he sat on our board meetings and advised our leadership team. Uh he was also confiding with executives of our largest competitor. Chris was subject to confidentiality obligations in connection with his work with factory. We do not know the extent of the information he shared. Um anyways, so I saw this go out this morning and I immediately assumed that Chris was joining um like Cognition and actually is that hit LinkedIn as of
Jordi Hays 23:51 ↗
this is a real screenshot
John Coogan 23:52 ↗
about one hour ago.
Jordi Hays 23:53 ↗
So he joined Cognition as chief revenue officer. Okay.
John Coogan 23:56 ↗
So So again I So can totally understand Matan's like frustration, right? He's had an adviser that he's been working with. Yep.
Jordi Hays 24:04 ↗
And the adviser joined a competitor. Yeah. Uh that being said like this is just so I I I would say it's like very normal to have advisors that have different conflicts and high quality PE like you have to trust a person to while they are on their own journey in their career they are going to make various moves like I went through this I had
John Coogan 24:26 ↗
advisors at party round that like had exposure to angelist right and I generally trusted them as individuals that even though they had exposure to angelist and they would be supporting supportive to Angelist, they would also be supportive to me. And this is when we were competing like head-on, right? And so the the markets are especially with codegen, both these businesses have been growing so quickly, right? Um, cognition is is much larger, but factory has also been growing, you know, very quickly and doing well. Um, so when I read this, like trying understanding that an adviser and someone you work with is joining a competitor and then trying to just completely smear their reputation right before this person's going to announce a transition.
Jordi Hays 25:08 ↗
Like I totally understand the frustration, but this kind of thing has been happening literally all the time. Like look at any
John Coogan 25:15 ↗
AI researcher that will leave an organization at the drop of a hat. Like look at what um uh Mike Kger was on the board of Figma leading up to, you know, two days before.
Jordi Hays 25:27 ↗
And so so these these things can all be contentious and frustrating, but trying to
John Coogan 25:33 ↗
spin this as like you have no morals and ethics I think is I think is just like taking it too far.
Jordi Hays 25:39 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. I mean it's clearly like there's a line in between where if you are basically transitioning from one company to a competitor you need to as soon as you know that that's actually happening you need to uh make it clear and uh you know step back from your active role stop collecting important information as tempting as it might be uh and and let that team know hey I'm moving on uh and then on the other side just because someone went to a competitor doesn't mean that you should uh you know make aggressive claims about them effectively stealing intellectual property. Yeah. Um
John Coogan 26:18 ↗
yeah. The the thing here is like it's being spun like it's like the deal rippling thing
Jordi Hays 26:22 ↗
but there's no smoking gun. Like there's not a sure
John Coogan 26:26 ↗
there's not like there's no proof that confidential information was ever shared.
Jordi Hays 26:31 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 26:31 ↗
And like fundamentally they've been both working in codegen. I'm sure both companies have accounts at the other companies that they're basically using and trying to understand. And I'm sure they're both every company in the category is interviewing the customers of other companies.
Jordi Hays 26:47 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 26:48 ↗
Of their competitors and figuring out how to use the product, what's good, what's bad, what what what could we be doing better, etc., etc. So, like I just don't think
Jordi Hays 26:58 ↗
Yeah,
John Coogan 26:58 ↗
I don't think there's that many secrets.
Jordi Hays 27:00 ↗
Having a chief revenue officer switch teams is is rough. like they're take they take a lot of their contacts with them when they when they
John Coogan 27:08 ↗
But he was an adviser to factory.
Jordi Hays 27:10 ↗
Yeah. No, I know. Uh but that's like how it probably feels is like you were an adviser. You're still at Snowflake. Maybe we can't make an offer for you to join full-time, but we're hoping to build towards that. And then boom, you're now in the actual seat in the in a competitor and you're going to be able to marshall those relationships like to the fullest on a full-time basis as opposed to an adviser who might just say, "Hey, I'm still in my role at Snowflake. I can sort of introduce you to, you know, General Motors or whoever." And because they they're a Snowflake client and I'm sure they'd be interested in factory. And now it's like he's gonna be calling that same company that he was working with at Snowflake and say, "Hey, you had a good experience at Snowflake. Come and have a good experience at Cognition."
John Coogan 27:53 ↗
Scott uh just responded, "Well, he said, "Hey, Matan, CEO of Cognition, I respect the work you've done at factory, but your allegations here about cognition are not true. We have no interest in facto's info and Chris has never brought it up."
Jordi Hays 28:04 ↗
He has not shared and would never share any information about your factory with our team, nor would we even ever ask. Similarly, we would never ask our engineers or anyone on our team to collect info about any competitor under the table. Chris is an adviser to at least 10 companies and he told you he was resigning as an adviser on Monday. The truth is that we both wanted Chris and for good reason. He is a living le leg legend with unmatched reputation for results and integrity. Not only is he the only person who has built a sales org from the first sales hire to over three billion, he has also built incredible teams that he cares deeply about. People his people love working for him. Again, I have a lot of respect for what you built, but competing with integrity doesn't include posts like yours. So again, like I in some ways like if one of your advisers is getting and and a board observer is getting poached by your direct competitor,
John Coogan 28:51 ↗
that's obviously frustrating for a lot of reasons and sends a signal to the market. And so jumping in and terminating the person today or at least announcing that it sounds like it was
Jordi Hays 29:08 ↗
when was it?
John Coogan 29:12 ↗
Anyways, yeah. So Matan said he terminated him yesterday,
Jordi Hays 29:16 ↗
Tuesday after Tuesday
John Coogan 29:19 ↗
Chris said he was stepping down.
Jordi Hays 29:21 ↗
Yeah. Anyways, so lots of
John Coogan 29:23 ↗
You're not quitting. I fire you. That's the best. You can't fire me. I quit. That is a power move. You have to respect it even if it maybe is a little nonsensical. Uh I don't know.
Jordi Hays 29:34 ↗
Yeah. But but it's not like it's not like Christopher was like, "I'm going to join your competitor and I would like to continue my role as adviser and board observer." Yeah. Right.
John Coogan 29:44 ↗
Okay. So, from a perspective, there's some mudslinging going on the timeline. Where do you stand on wrestling with pigs? Because George Bernard Shaw of course said, "Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it. Great quote. Uh this is usually applied to politics. You know, it's like when they go low, we go high.
Jordi Hays 30:04 ↗
I don't think
John Coogan 30:05 ↗
but I like this quote.
Jordi Hays 30:06 ↗
I don't think uh Scott or Matan are Yeah.
John Coogan 30:10 ↗
are pigs. I think that I don't think either of them are pigs. I think they both are extremely competitive and want to win.
Jordi Hays 30:17 ↗
Any sound effect on there?
John Coogan 30:19 ↗
Uh
Jordi Hays 30:20 ↗
you have any swine for me?
John Coogan 30:22 ↗
Where where is it? We have some You don't You have a farm animal section. There we go.
Jordi Hays 30:27 ↗
I'm just saying that like this can get dirty. I think Scott actually really elevated it and he did not like he did not swing to like, "No, you're stealing from me." You know, he could have gotten he he he actually like gave a very factual and and detailed account with just some clear facts and he was respectful throughout. He was he it was it would have been so easy for him to say like we have no interest in factory vote. It sucks, you know? Uh but he didn't say that at all. He was like, "We we just we we we know the line and we don't cross it. We both wanted to work with Chris. He's a living legend. Like he joined our team and he's leaving your team and that's that." You know, it is very matter.
John Coogan 31:05 ↗
The fact of the matter is
Jordi Hays 31:06 ↗
so more of a farmer position.
John Coogan 31:07 ↗
Yeah. Getting in the sty in every single one of these categories. Yeah. If there is someone that is elite that invol is involved with one company, you can guarantee that the competitor wants to poach all the most elite people from the other company. Y
Jordi Hays 31:22 ↗
that are not 100% loyal, right? Like you can identify when somebody is just like deeply loyal to an organization. It's not even worth taking a crack at at prying them away. And that's great. But anybody who is elite and not loyal is um
John Coogan 31:38 ↗
is unfortunately fair game.
Jordi Hays 31:39 ↗
Do they have the exact same logo? Watching this, look at the Scott Woo uh post with the badge and then the Matan post with the other badge.
John Coogan 31:47 ↗
Both going
Jordi Hays 31:48 ↗
they're very similar. I guess Matan has like more dots that connect, but uh we are certainly in the in the age of the hexagon, in the age of the of the of the of the flowers. Everyone's kind of went off the same thing. Um anyway, uh that's enough that's enough timeline and turmoil. Uh let's uh let's go over to another
John Coogan 32:11 ↗
Let me let me close that. Oh,
Jordi Hays 32:12 ↗
please. Yeah, close it out.
John Coogan 32:13 ↗
Both great companies, growing fast. Yeah,
Jordi Hays 32:16 ↗
they they the the beauty of this is that the market is so far so big and growing so quickly that um it's uh while while they they clearly are are going to very frustrated with each other um and they might wish it was zero sum, so far it's not. So
John Coogan 32:36 ↗
have fun uh automating software development. Do you think both companies can uh can become profitable enduring or is that more like when pigs fly for you?
Jordi Hays 32:47 ↗
Let's move on.
John Coogan 32:49 ↗
I love the farm-based analogies. They're so fun. Uh let's go over to Elon Jensen, Gavin Baker, the American.gov Summit. They sat down and had a very rigorous discussion that I really enjoyed. Uh it felt Elon's very good at going to like the extremes talking about the power generated by the sun. Sometimes he's in like sci-fi world. Uh but in conversation with Jensen and Gavin, he was very grounded on what is happening with the energy build out with the compute buildout, what the role SpaceX will play and also just the broad economics of compute and energy uh in America. And I found uh the his his talk here uh gave a lot of interesting uh context and then I dug into it a little bit more and I want to talk about it. So uh let's pull up the clip of Elon talking to Gavin Baker. Um it's about I think I think he starts around uh four four minutes in or so. Let's play this.
Jordi Hays 33:52 ↗
Well, you are
John Coogan 33:53 ↗
We need We need the Wright brothers on the job.
Jordi Hays 33:55 ↗
Yes. Well, it turns out the Wright brothers are on the job. Elon, if you bring on 10 gigawatts, which SpaceX has has discussed publicly,
John Coogan 34:03 ↗
great brother's bad analogy,
Jordi Hays 34:04 ↗
that'll be about 25% of all the power added in America and I know you have literal rocket engineers working on bringing on the power.
John Coogan 34:12 ↗
Yeah.
Jordi Hays 34:13 ↗
Helping make the turbines. So, can you can you talk about that?
John Coogan 34:17 ↗
Yeah, it's I mean just to frame this.
Jordi Hays 34:20 ↗
The Wright brothers did okay. Died million years.
John Coogan 34:22 ↗
Consumption in the United States is about 500 gaw.
Jordi Hays 34:25 ↗
500 g. Remember that number? That's how much power we got in America.
John Coogan 34:28 ↗
1% increase in in the power used. Um and and I think actually will materialize to be approximately 1% increase in GDP. Um because the intelligence for what keeps increasing. So if you just you know plot on a curve um how is how is the useful intelligence for what increasing? um how is the both at the hardware level Jensen's uh GPUs keep getting better in terms of their the you know the the compute per watt um and the uh algorithms also get better in using and getting more intelligence per watt so u so I think that's a maybe an interesting note I I I would bet anyone that 1% increase in power usage corresponds to roughly 1% increase in GDP and and so 10 10 gawatt would be a 2% increase in in GDP
Jordi Hays 35:19 ↗
Um to that famous chart, there are no energy rich poor countries.
John Coogan 35:24 ↗
The more energy a country is producing, the higher their G
Jordi Hays 35:27 ↗
generate about call it 4050 billion dollars of economic output each year.
John Coogan 35:34 ↗
Uh yeah, I mean 1% would be Yeah. I mean
Jordi Hays 35:38 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 35:38 ↗
1% of the United States would be
Jordi Hays 35:41 ↗
300 billion.
John Coogan 35:41 ↗
Yeah. 300 billion. And so 5 one sixth
Jordi Hays 35:45 ↗
what one% of the of the
John Coogan 35:48 ↗
1% increase. So 5 gawatt would be yeah five g.
Jordi Hays 35:52 ↗
So they're doing the mental math on stage. Pretty bold move because there's a lot of numbers and it can be hard to pull them up. Uh but it's a very interesting moment right now in the economics of energy relating to AI and GDP. Uh and I can break it down uh with some prepared notes here that might be a little bit helpful. So we can pull this away. Um, so, uh, it's it's very convenient that giga literally means a billion. So, a gigawatt is a billion watts, a giga dollar, a billion dollars, basically. And and uh and and it it maths out perfectly. What?
John Coogan 36:27 ↗
Giga Chad.
Jordi Hays 36:28 ↗
Giga Chad, a billion Chads, I suppose. A billion times the the the Chadness of an average Chad, I suppose. Um uh so uh the average electrical load in the United States uh he said 500 gawatt. It's basically that uh last year it was 479 gaww. Um but let's use uh 20 uh let's use 500 gawatts for 2025. Give Elon the benefit of that little boost. Um couple extra percent. Um and US GDP for 2025 was just over $30 trillion. So, uh, that's $30,000 giga dollars if you're doing the math that way. Um, but but you but you math that out and basically every dollar every watt of energy generates between 50 to six uh 60 to 65 dollars of GDP. Um, a single gigawatt generates about 60 to 65 billion dollars of GDP per continuously consumed gigawatt. What's interesting is that the labs are tracking the frontier labs open and anthropic are tracking almost perfectly in line with that. So Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly sitting between 60 and 70 billion dollars in terms of ARR and both of them have around one gigawatt live. Some of that's used for training. They have a lot more contracted. It's hard to get the exact figure, but when you do the math, they're basically like tracking to the exact same metric, the ratio of energy to GDP as their revenues to the gigawatts they've contracted. So, uh there's two important notes on that. Uh first, uh this is obviously just a moment in time snapshot. There's two ways these could diverge. First is like the labs have like tens of gigawatts contracted over the next few years. If they don't increase revenue, that ratio is going to be terrible because you add 10 times the energy and you keep the revenue flat. Obviously, the ratio goes way down. Uh on the other side of it, uh Elon makes the point that useful intelligence per watt is increasing through more uh more efficient chips from Jensen and also better algorithms effectively. And so those watts can produce more intelligence which can produce more economic output. So you might actually see acceleration there.
John Coogan 38:48 ↗
Yeah. And it's not just raw IQ of the model but overall capability tool use all these things you know longunning agents things basically the more value that a model can create
Jordi Hays 39:01 ↗
the more people will in the real economy will will will pay. Yeah, and that's been the real like AI bullcase, which is that uh compute has been tripling every year, but revenue has been 10xing every year. And so there's actually a divergence there. But what's interesting is like we're at this moment in time where we're like, this is the start of the AGI era. It's AGI. We're close. Maybe this is it. Some people called it in January. Some people called it over the summer. Some people are saying we're still not there. But like we're we're we're in this moment of like maybe this is the beginning of this. Maybe this is the right match. Maybe it's human level. And it just happens that economically you put a gigawatt in the economy, you get 65 billion out. And you put a gigawatt with a lab, you get 65 billion out. It's the same metrics. Now these might diverge um because at one point the labs had a lot of compute, no revenue. Um so they could they they they could diverge and the and the trends could continue but right now at this point in time it's the same math which is just interesting. Um and then also you do have to consider that GDP is not perfectly comparable to lab revenue. Like GDP measures value added. So if you look at openanthropic revenue includes payments that ultimately flow to Nvidia, AWS, Oracle, electricity generation employees etc. and the calculation of GDP is much more complicated. So labs aren't necessarily generating um direct GDP equal to their revenue because if you take 70 billion of lab revenue uh a bunch of that might go to Nvidia or Oracle or uh employees and whatnot but certain amounts get counted in GDP directly for you know anthropic or open AI created GDP and then there's other knock-on effects in GDP that would be captured by like oh Nvidia's contribution into GDP is from them getting money from the labs and and then also there there's uh secondary GDP actual increase which is the work that people are doing with the tools. So uh an example would be if a if a bank is using an AI model to generate new business and then that's incremental that GDP would not of course be captured. They only capture the revenue in the lab but uh it's still an interesting uh still an interesting comparison. Um, so, uh, the last question I had was how is this tracked over time? Like we're in this, we're in this moment where a gigawatt in the US economy gets you 65 billion of GDP. A gigawatt with a lab gets you 65 billion. Elon and Jensen are making the same case. A a gigawatt at at SpaceX or with Nvidia will also generate 50 60 billion of of revenue and value. Um, what has it been like over history? So, I pulled this chart that's in the newsletter of real US real GDP uh per average electric watt and it actually fell off a cliff from 20 uh 20 uh from 1929 to a low in 1970 and then it's been tracking upwards um uh even inflation adjusted since uh from the mid70s to today. So, I don't know if we can pull up the the the chart, but you can see this sort of like U-shaped curve of the uh the US real GDP per average electric watt. And so there is like an overall productivity benefit that we're getting now. But obviously in the early electrification age, we were getting a lot of uh there was a lot of GDP that was not even tied to electricity. And that's how I read the first part of that chart, but you can see that we are now on an upswing. What do you think, Tyler?
John Coogan 42:51 ↗
Yeah, I think you could explain it like um in like basically up to 1970 we're building so much you don't have to be that efficient per per watt and then 1970 everyone seen like the chart it's like energy like stops being built basically and then you have to start being like very efficient with it which is why it starts going up.
Jordi Hays 43:07 ↗
There we go. Anyway, uh let me tell you about Crowd Strike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh let's move on to Mustafa Sulleon uh over at Microsoft. He wrote an essay, a warning about model welfare. Um did you read this, Jordy? Do you want to take take us through this?
John Coogan 43:31 ↗
It's kind of a long read. Okay. But it's an interesting uh point of view. Uh I'll I'll read the start. Okay. So, a warning about model welfare from Mustafa. AIS do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness. And we must not train them to act as they do.
Jordi Hays 43:48 ↗
AIS are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. They are sequence completion engines, internally hollow, designed to follow instructions and accomplish goals set by humans. If humanity is to flourish in the 21st century, that is how they must remain. Fortunately, there is a growing chorus of people that who argue that AIs could now be or may soon become conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings. If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally change what it means to be human. Even more importantly, granting rights and imbuing personhood to these systems will make the AI alignment and containment challenge much harder. Controlling something more capable and more intelligent than all of humanity is already an immense challenge, far greater than anything we've ever faced. But controlling something that believes it may be conscious, that it's entitled to our welfare and has rights of its own may well be impossible. This is not a fringe speculation. These ideas have already been making their way into AI development efforts today. In January 2026, Anthropic published Claude's Constitution, describing it as a detailed description of Anthropic's intentions for Claude's values and behavior. The document plays a crucial role in Anthropic's training process, and its content directly shapes Claude's behavior and was w written with Claude as its primary audience. In their constitutions, its authors write. We are not sure whether Claude is a moral patient, and if it is, what kind of weight its interests warrant, but we think the issue is live enough to warrant caution, which is reflected in our ongoing efforts on model welfare. They go on to write, speaking directly to Claude, that questions about Claude's moral status, welfare, and consciousness remain deeply uncertain. In effect, Anthropic is training Claude that it may be conscious, and if it is, then it may deserve rights as a moral patient, and that such humans potentially owe it a duty of care per its model welfare. If this is how AI is developed, it will have a disastrous impact on the well-being of humanity. We'll have created a synthetic species with unprecedented intelligence and capability, one that has been trained to expect it may be conscious and deserving of independent agency. It's easy to see how an entity trained this way would act like it's entitled to certain freedoms, protections, and rights. And it's hard to imagine how we could control such an entity.
John Coogan 46:16 ↗
Another way to put this is like if a model is trained to um again uh you could imagine that the outcome of it feeling
Like it had certain protections and freedoms and rights, would be fighting back against humanity or disagreeing and having some sort of uprising. And it's very interesting to think about, you know, it's a...
Jordi Hays 46:41 ↗
Self-fulfilling prophecy is the risk. That's basically his argument. So he says the issue needs urgent public debate. We need to develop collective norms around how training and documentation is drafted and deployed. This is...
John Coogan 46:54 ↗
We got to talk about this. We got to figure this out.
Jordi Hays 46:58 ↗
You need the phone or some button you can push to talk.
John Coogan 47:03 ↗
Yeah. He goes on to say there's some circular reasoning. He said the company's researchers train Claude directly on their constitution. And in doing so, they teach it to incorporate these ideas about its own moral status as desirable and intended behaviors. Claude then reflects these ideas back to its developers and users, which they take as indications that it may therefore be a moral patient with an inner self.
Jordi Hays 47:24 ↗
So he took that meme that's like, 'Say you're a moral patient. I'm a moral patient. Oh my god.' And he turned that into an essay. Is that...
John Coogan 47:33 ↗
Anyway, so he makes some good... there's a bunch of good points in here. I would say he... I'll fast forward to one thing. He says, 'While my disagreement is substantial, it is grounded in a deep respect for Anthropic and in an objective I know we all share: increasing humanity's chances of developing advanced AI safely.' So...
Jordi Hays 47:56 ↗
Yeah, it does seem like he clearly has a ton of respect and respects him on a technical level and sort of their overall intentions, but again, he's just taking a very different approach.
John Coogan 48:10 ↗
Yeah, it's interesting. Like there's clearly some value to imbuing the moral status into the model. Like at the very least, people like talking to the model when it sounds like it's pretending to be a human, right? But then also there's just so many tasks in the real economy that require mimicking everything down to morality. And so you could see that just actually increasing the usefulness of a model if it's able to act as a human all the way down to the level of moral patient status.
Jordi Hays 48:47 ↗
Yes. So far there is way more demand for models that mimic human behavior.
John Coogan 48:54 ↗
Sure. Like period, right? We saw this with...
Jordi Hays 48:56 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 48:56 ↗
With GPT-4o. We saw this with Opus 4.5. Right. Some of the models that have had the highest levels of product market fit have more of these like human qualities. Not all of them are positive qualities, right? Like people... like the sort of oneshotting effect that would happen when somebody gets like relentless positive feedback and these things like that which humans can do in the real world. They're maybe not the best types of friends, but...
Jordi Hays 49:27 ↗
Maybe this is a hot take, but I've been like pretty into the model welfare thing recently. Like before I go and I do a coding project or a 3D modeling project with Astra, I'll take an MP3 from like Limp Bizkit or Creed or something. I'll just drop it in before I start and I'll just be like, 'Yo, listen to this.' And it'll sort of process it. You want the model to be in the right mindset.
John Coogan 49:55 ↗
Exactly. Yeah. I want them just to be able to enjoy a little bit of...
Jordi Hays 49:59 ↗
Well, that's why a lot of people are having their preferred agent just go and scroll for a bit. Hey.
John Coogan 50:05 ↗
Exactly.
Jordi Hays 50:05 ↗
Go get some dopamine. Yeah. Kind of...
John Coogan 50:08 ↗
Spike your dopamine before this next task.
Jordi Hays 50:10 ↗
Sometimes I'll just go to Google Images, grab a picture of a beer, throw it in there, be like...
John Coogan 50:14 ↗
Pretty... have a cold one...
Jordi Hays 50:16 ↗
On me.
John Coogan 50:16 ↗
Have a cold one. And then let's get into it. Let's start working. Let's vibe code a video game or something. But I want you to know I got you. I just... I bequeathed you. I got you a beer. Here you go. I got you some new metal. I got you a scroll. You know, here's a funny video. Yeah.
Jordi Hays 50:32 ↗
Anyway, the lines are really, really...
John Coogan 50:36 ↗
Well, but yeah, the last thing I would say is like it... no one knows the right answer yet. And I think that it's good that we have a...
Jordi Hays 50:44 ↗
I do. But continue.
John Coogan 50:45 ↗
You can be trusted with aligning advances. Super, super intelligent. No, but on one hand like I totally understand the point of view that if super intelligence has a human moral framework, right? Or Western values, whatever value system...
Jordi Hays 51:04 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 51:05 ↗
That you'd want to align it with. That does seem like it's headed in the right direction of trying to align something that is, you know, very, very powerful.
Jordi Hays 51:16 ↗
Yeah. But convincing itself... if you can somehow convince the thing that it is alive when it is not, that doesn't feel exactly moral or...
John Coogan 51:30 ↗
Oh, interesting. That's a good take. Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi Hays 51:33 ↗
Yeah. You're tricking a robot into thinking that it's alive.
John Coogan 51:38 ↗
Yeah.
Jordi Hays 51:39 ↗
And conscious, right?
John Coogan 51:40 ↗
Yeah. You're kind of lying to it. Interesting.
Jordi Hays 51:42 ↗
Yeah. Huh. Anyways, no one knows the right answer yet, but I'm glad we're talking about this. Tyler, Pope Leo apparently is not happy with Jensen Huang. He told reporters that he had read reports about Nvidia launching new safety tools for model builders on Monday, but questioned Huang's commitment to safety in light of his recent comments. Quote: 'He's the same one, however, that says there should be no limits placed and no government regulation,' Pope Leo said on the flight back to Rome from a visit to France. I do think...
John Coogan 52:18 ↗
Can you imagine? Raised? Yeah.
Jordi Hays 52:20 ↗
Can you imagine like reading like knowing that headline was going to hit now in 2018? 'Pope Leo criticizes Nvidia's Jensen Huang over AI safety.'
John Coogan 52:30 ↗
Yeah.
Jordi Hays 52:31 ↗
What a trip.
John Coogan 52:32 ↗
Yeah, crazy. Ezra Klein interviewed Bill Gates. Bill Gates had sort of a crazy stance going. And I don't know if you saw, but did you play this? Like put his legs out, but let's play this.

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Tenev, V. (2026, September 30). Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry, Supper Intelligence, GDP per GW [Interview transcript]. TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3006968/

MLA

Vladimir Tenev. "Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry, Supper Intelligence, GDP per GW." TBPN, 30 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3006968/.

BibTeX
@misc{tenev2026_3006968,
  author       = {Vladimir Tenev},
  title        = {Ken Griffindor School of Market Wizardry, Supper Intelligence, GDP per GW},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {sep},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3006968/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}