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What just happened at Google DeepMind? Crazy, crazy morning. A shakeup, a reorg, stepping down, stepping up, stepping left, stepping right. There's a lot of different terms. We'll break it down. We'll explain the organization before now, what it looks like going forward, what this means, where this goes. So this morning, Demis Hassabis, the legendary AI researcher, the founder of DeepMind, a true scientist, the subject of Sebastian Mallaby's book, The Infinite Machine. He announced that he's stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind. He's also stepping up into the role of Google DeepMind chairman, and he will also be Alphabet's chief scientist.
So is it a promotion? Is it a demotion? Is he quitting? Is he getting fired? Who knows? But the most important thing is that he's still there at Alphabet. He has a different role, and that's what's important. What is the nature of this new role? Google's CEO Sundar Pichai also announced that Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean will be leaving the company after a 27-year run to start, along with Google senior fellow Sanjay Ghemawat, a public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering. And if you're not familiar with Jeff Dean, he is the Chuck Norris of computer engineering and software engineering. There's a whole list of jokes around Jeff Dean jokes.
Why don't you read some of them, John?
What are my favorite Jeff Dean jokes? Jokes. There's a whole bunch. Any opportunity to repost the Jeff Dean Informatica link. Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers. Jeff Dean's keyboard, it only has two keys, a one and a zero, because he programs in binary. That it's that type of thing. Unsatisfied with constant time, Jeff Dean created the world's first O(1) algorithm so he can bend time. There's all these programmer jokes. I don't know. They're a lot of fun. He knows the last digit of pi, that type of thing. But he's been a legend. These were on Quora maybe 15 years ago, maybe more. People were so excited about him, and for good reason. He invented tons of things.
Doesn't call APIs. APIs call him.
Exactly, that type of thing. Very fun. So the lore around Jeff Dean has been substantial throughout his entire career. He has been, you know, very key to so many different Google projects, integral in MapReduce and actually being able to scale Google systems.
Does this make any sense? Chuck Norris counted to infinity twice. Jeff Dean did it in parallel.
Ah, okay. Yeah, that's kind of funny. It's a programmer joke, but I don't know. But yeah, it's just funny that he was able to like have this level of aura at Google as like a non-founder, just a great scientist, and it was so long ago before there were, before there was so much attention on like talent below the founding team and below the investing team or whatever, you know.
Yeah. Jersey will be going. Google jersey will be going in the rafters.
He's not done, and he's starting a new company, which is very exciting because there's a lot of opportunity in machine learning, science, and engineering, obviously. So Google DeepMind CTO and Google's chief AI architect, Koray, I can't pronounce that, I'm sorry, is being promoted to SVP and will lead DeepMind. So Koray is now running DeepMind. Interestingly, there's no new CEO of DeepMind, which always seemed to be an odd decision because DeepMind was not its own reporting unit. Like when the, when quarterly earnings happen, you get YouTube numbers, you get Google Cloud numbers. And so having a CEO of those divisions made a lot of sense for those organizations. But DeepMind was always a unit that sort of cut across everything because the work that DeepMind does on Gemini and the models made a lot of sense to vend into YouTube, and now there's a little Gemini button when you're on YouTube and you can just go to a one-hour long podcast and say when did they talk about this and it'll just answer you. And so that was like a feature that was vended into that obviously goes into core Google search. Gemini models help with ads. They help with the actual Gemini products. Like they get vended everywhere. There's a Gemini button in Chrome. There's also a Gemini button in Google Docs. There's also a Gemini button in Gmail. And so it was never like its own, even though it was its own unit, like the value that it created at Google was very cross-organizational as opposed to, you know, the YouTube team has a CEO and they have revenues and they have ads and they have a product and yes, it's integrated into the other things, but it very much is a standalone organization, reports its own financials and has a CEO. So, no CEO for DeepMind, at least in the short term. We'll see where it goes. On X, Demis says the move will, quote, allow him to focus on long-term strategy and accelerating scientific breakthroughs. He's done a lot of that already, including leaning into his work at Isomorphic to help cure disease. He fleshed this out more on Google's blog. He said, 'I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability. In my new role, I will continue to work closely with Sundar on strategic and global AGI matters and to advise Koray, Josh, and the GDM leads from our awesome new London Platform 37 offices. As part of this transition, I will also be leaning into my role at Isomorphic, where we are making extremely rapid and promising progress to accelerate our mission there even faster. As you have heard me say many times, I've always believed the number one application of AI should be to improve human health.' That is a great message. Very different from the SpaceX S1. The number one application of AI is the power of the entire galaxy. I mean there's that, but also just in the actual like application, it's like, it's like enterprise workflows, which is...
And so some type of shakeup has been expected for a long time. Google, the DeepMind organization has, you know, made some real contributions to the space but has been lagging. It's been a point of embarrassment for, I would say, for Google for, I would say, a year plus. They've always felt behind, even though they created so much of the fundamental research that has, you know, gone into this entire chapter of the, you know...
Certainly not behind on video. The video stuff's really good.
But then you get kind of tied up because the Chinese models are like, actually we will do Mickey Mouse.
Yeah, but here's the thing. At no point has Google been breaking out their true AI revenue in a way that gets shareholders excited.
Yeah. And there's just been so many, so many question marks. There was a moment, I mean, over a year ago, felt like Google had some real momentum, and but that momentum was very much lost. And so there's this question of, you know, when Noam left, which was about a month ago, that felt shock, that was like more shocking in some ways than even this. This feels like expected. And then to leave what feels like a hole in the organization is pretty, pretty wild. Stock's down. It was down 5% around the open. It's recovered a little bit, just down three and a half percent. But I mean the big thing is like they just started, like Google as a company, I don't think was able to be at least sufficiently AI'd, right? They started selling compute. A lot of researchers, I'm sure, were frustrated with that, and that could have led to some of the historical...
Tyler over there thinks Nvidia shouldn't sell the chips if they're really AGI-pilled. The much more extreme version of Google should keep the TPUs for themselves is Nvidia should keep the GPUs for themselves. And yeah, I mean that was something that was, that was, you know, discussed as, okay, if you believe you're in the foothills of the singularity, you will want to scale your compute. If you're seeing traction in the products that you're making, you want to be GPU rich. You don't want to be selling TPUs to other companies. And so that's got to be, there's got to be some tension. But Google's a big organization. There's multiple organizations within Google, and they all have different KPIs. So one team might say, 'Yeah, my mandate is to sell as many of these as possible externally.' Other people might say, 'My job is to keep as many of these internally.' And there's a lot of debates there. So we'll see.
Yeah. And obviously Google has made a, you know, massive bet on Anthropic and is, you know, becoming their largest financial backer, especially through some new reporting on some of the lease guarantees that they're doing. But anyway, still so surprising. Google obviously one of the greatest companies of all time, has every possible advantage in this race and yet has just consistently struggled. Susan Jong, who is currently on leave from DeepMind, posted a little, somewhat of a fable. Said, 'Backdrop kings all asleep slash on vacation while minions slave away. August 2024, first big fail. Fast forward January 2025, only competent VP bails after one terrorist lead demanding an even bigger slice of pie breaks the camel's back. Summer 2025, a year ago, second big fail and king of terrorists climbs the ranks above the slumbering execs.' This is a crazy summer tweet. 'Summer 2026, slumbering execs and terrorists who only show up for successful announcements move on, leaving just the king of terrorists behind. Lessons: If you're high enough up there, you can pretty much be a terrorist and hold orgs hostage while continuing to ask for more and more and more until there's absolutely no more aura or gold left to plunder and then just move on to greener pastures to do it all over again.' And we'll leave it up to you crazy, crazy post to try to figure out who's who in this story. It doesn't strike me that Susan will be headed back to the company after this post. Crazy, crazy. She says, 'I've been on leave since January. Got pretty burned out by certain people who just say yes to everything to avoid ever making a hard call.' Yeah. And leave it all to the hungry minions to backstab each other until success finds a cursed hole to crawl out.
I mean, to be fair, I was looking at Tyler's alt account, and he talks about us like this all the time. He's always, he refers to you as the slumbering exec and me as the terrorist.
It's a, I mean, I believe in free speech. I defend your right to say these things, Tyler. I am offended, but you know, you get...
No, it's a wild, wild thing. One of the crazier sub tweets from a big tech.
Yeah, but I don't know. I was never sure that she worked there. It felt like it was maybe like an alt account and it was just like an anon. But it does seem like, I mean, she's saying right here, I've been on leave from this organization. So I don't know. And somebody calls her the Homer of our times. Well, it's certainly well written, certainly entertaining. Another interesting wrinkle here is if you look at what Demis was talking about, writing about just a few weeks ago, it wasn't as much focused on the Isomorphic scientific advancements. I know he's super deep in that and that's what he's said he's been focusing on, and I love that message. He says it's time for AI to prove its unequivocal value in the world. And what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer. 100% agree, 100% agree. If you get a new cure for cancer, you save someone's life and they can go and say, yes, I took the new cancer cure and I was cured, AI is doing its job. A lot of people will be very happy about that, perfect. But that's not what Demis was writing about a couple weeks ago. The last substantial piece that Demis put out was called 'The Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age,' in which he argues for a frontier AI standards body that evaluates frontier models before they're released for risks associated with superintelligence. It's at the very least not crazy to assume that Demis' new role at Alphabet is maybe related to what he's advocating for in this essay. There's been a lot of back and forth in Washington about the interpretation of that essay, and a lot of AI researchers have stepped up and said like, 'Yeah, we basically agree with this. This framework seems pretty good. It includes open source models in there.'
Yeah. Demis could be an amazing candidate as somebody to lead a new regulatory body.
Lead America as the president, you think he's running?
Not quite, but I think we got to get a researcher in there at this point.
Yeah, I mean the big question now is...
Are you voting? Are you voting?
You know what I'm talking about. No, so big question now. So Jeff Dean is out, Noam Shazeer is out, Demis is out. Who is going to fill that void from a leadership standpoint? How are they going to be, how are they going to be able to recruit the best researchers in the world?
That's a big question mark, right? And so it does feel like, sounds like Google's investing in Discovery Loop, Jeff Dean's new company. Very excited to see what they do. But I wouldn't be surprised to see Google just shift into more of an NVIDIA-style role as like a capital partner to a number of other labs as they, you know, continue to fall. It's maybe more of like an Amazon and Microsoft role where you have a great business, you're also great at building infrastructure, you also have a semiconductor team and a chip team, and you can play up and down the stack, but maybe you're not as focused on this like full-stack straight shot thing and you're partnering with other labs on different pieces of the puzzle. It'll be interesting to see where everything goes. Discovery Loop, the mission over at Jeff Dean's new company: 'Our mission is straightforward. We are building AI solutions that can automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering. By advancing the pace at which we conduct engineering and scientific discovery, we can bring the benefits of science and technology to the world much faster. Ultimately, our goal is to build AI systems that act as a deeply positive, empowering force for humanity, delivering technology solutions that improve people's lives on a global scale.' Good mission, fully support it. Excited to see what they launch. Also, fun handle, Discovery Loop. You can follow them on Disco Loop AI. Disco.
I like it. I like dis... I, you know, you don't think about disco and discovery having the same root. When I think disco, I think, you know, 70s disco dancing.
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. For sure.
Panic at the disco. Disco is short and formed of discotheque, a French term that originally meant a library of phonograph records.
So that's just etymologically not that related to...
I mean, yeah, maybe if you go far back enough, but interesting. Okay, well let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Tano Bruss says, 'Demis is ousted as DeepMind CEO and Jeff Dean and Sanjay are leaving Google to start a new lab. They're all being very careful to frame these as positive shifts, but there's no way in heck Demis would have accepted this willingly, and there's no way Sundar happily accepted Jeff doing this as a totally independent new public benefit corporation rather than a bet under Alphabet. Tough to see an interpretation other than Jeff losing confidence and working on AGI under Google. Very bad.'
We need a Sebastian Mallaby sequel. We need a sequel.
Overall, I would love for him to write a sequel to just, and even zoom out and look at the AGI wars generally, like he did in The Power Law about the early venture capital firms and how they all formed and battled each other. That would be great. Anyway, Rohan Patel over at Core Automation says, 'Pour one out for the big G. It's so over.' We did have a funny, brutal, funny moment with Google AI Overviews a couple days ago where it said that one of our friends, yeah, was married to another of our friends' wife. Yes. And it was quite confident in that. It was. And I have no idea how it even thought of that.
Yeah. I think it was because they did a podcast together or something like that. Like they were linked in a blog post together, something like doing a podcast together.
She wrote about him or something, or wrote a profile, and it just like put the names together. Very odd. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, you have to wonder what it takes to get AI Overviews into like a reasoning mode that can actually do the fact-checking so the hallucinations die down because...
Well, yeah. And they have to figure out a way to make that process so inexpensive because they're serving it billions, billions and billions of times. You know, that feels like more of an engineering problem that feels like very solvable. It feels like they're on the right track there.
So anyway, the excerpt from the Wall Street Journal article published this morning on Jeff Dean's departure: 'We wanted to build something differently than how things are built at Google right now. Google's infrastructure has very different requirements than the type of infrastructure we want to build for research.' Sounds like they want a more flexible kind of infrastructure, kind of like the infrastructure Nvidia provides, Nick Dorsey says over at Midnight Capital. Interesting. I wonder what they will do. Of course, I mean, they have to have access to whatever chips they want. They can't be completely locked in. Anyway, Nathan Lambert says, 'Major restructuring at Gemini will be studied forever as the incumbent with all the advantages not being able to get going.'
They got going. This is not correct. They completely got going.
They got going, but they certainly didn't build real momentum.
And then he says, 'PS, OpenAI accomplished their original goal.'
But yeah, the backstory is that a lot of the initial energy around OpenAI was a concern that Google would control AGI and a fear from the various early participants around that scenario.
Oh, well, yeah. New York Times has some nice photos. Mike Isaac, New York Times has really been on a run with the photo archive. They did a whole photo shoot with Leopold Aschenbrenner, sat on it, and then the hedge fund blew up, and then they were able to trickle these out. It's true excellence over there in that.
Well, let's switch over to some more exciting and positive news.
Figma agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.
And almost even more positive news, the moment you've all been waiting for. CarPlay is coming to pontoon boats.
Let's go. Finally, finally, finally, finally.
Have you ever been on a pontoon boat?
Explain what context were you on a pontoon boat. What does a pontoon boat even look like? This is a terrible thing.
It's for cruising. It's for cruising. Team, pull up a pontoon boat.
It's not like a monohull, but it's not a catamaran.
It's something between like a...
Cigarette boat and a houseboat.
Okay. That's a really wide gap.
Well, it's right in the middle.
Okay. No, you just kind of putts around.
Mastercraft Boat Holdings today said it's adding CarPlay to its upcoming Crest and Biscayne pontoons. The company is working with Savvy Navy to bring CarPlay and on-water navigation to boaters.
And Mastercraft Boat Holdings Inc., of course, a public company experiencing a god candle, up 72%, up 18 cents.
Wait, this is cool. This is very cool.
Yeah. This is a double-decker.
Double-decker. See, out in California, we don't know anything about these pontoon boats because these don't work at the beach, right?
Correct. But I was sort of correct. Somewhere in between a houseboat and...
Aren't you from the land of a thousand lakes? Right. Michigan. Isn't that the land of a thousand lakes?
Oh. Oh, you're from... Okay. Are you a pontoon boat guy?
Pontoon boats are huge in Minnesota.
They're for lakes, basically. How many hours have you spent on pontoon boats in your life?
10,000 hours. I'm an expert. The man put in life's work on the pontoon boat, apparently.
Just... you're in the wrong job, buddy.
I think you got to become a pontoon boat... It is crazy to think in another life, Ben could have been the top pontoon boat salesman in the entire world. Hey, this one comes with Apple CarPlay. They need to call it BoatPlay at this point. They got to come with something else. CarPlay. But they're doing navigation, on-water navigation like this.
Um, okay, moving over to...
Okay, we got... What is the story of the day in technology?
Yes, this is the story of the day.
Okay, hit us, John. You know what I'm talking about. Startup billionaire sued over super yacht broker fee. Everyone's talking about this. This is potentially bigger than what's going on at Google today. In London, the billionaire founder of one of the world's most valuable startups recently bought a super yacht valued at an estimated $400 million.
Continue. Replete with a glass-bottomed swimming pool and a helipad. Do they make... Wait, do they make super pontoon boats? Can you get a $400 million pontoon boat? What does that do for you if you...
Almost certainly. The world will create infinite ways to make you part with your hard-earned money.
Yeah. And I'm sure we could arrange an almost half a billion dollar pontoon boat. Team AI images. I want to see what $400 million gets me if I'm going all in on a pontoon boat. Want to really dominate Lake Michigan? Is Lake Michigan too big for a pontoon boat?
Because you said lakes. So any lake it works?
Yeah. I think the pontoon boat is not for like big waves. You can't... It can't be like...
But there's not big waves on Lake Michigan. You can't surf or anything.
I guess there's no... I don't think so.
Surf. Yeah. Anyway, so it was a $400 million super yacht. It had a glass-bottomed swimming pool and a helipad. There was just one problem. According to this reporting in the Wall Street Journal, he didn't pay the broker's fee. That is according to a top luxury yacht broker who is now suing Nikolay Storonsky, a co-founder and chief executive of digital banking giant Revolut, alleging the entrepreneur went behind their back to avoid paying commission on a purchase they had worked on. Cecil Wright and Partners, a luxury yacht broker, filed the legal action in London's High Court over Storonsky's acquisition of Nixie, a 335-foot vessel with four terraces. The broker alleged in a court filing that it was negotiating the purchase for Storonsky when his team secretly contacted the yacht seller directly and agreed to buy the boat, avoiding roughly $20 million in standard commission, the amount the dealer now claims it is owed. In January, Storonsky's team allegedly told Cecil Wright to hold off. Let's see. I'm not going to flip through this. That's to hold off, hold off on contacting the vessel seller, Canadian billionaire and former hockey player Patrick Desmarais, and said they would talk again the following week, according to the filing. The filing claims that by next week, Storonsky's team had already arranged to buy the boat directly from Desmarais, bypassing the broker entirely. It was Cecil Wright that brought the yacht to Storonsky's attention and introduced the Revolut co-founder and the owner.
Matt Young says, 'Unbelievable taking food off the table of that luxury yacht broker's family.'
A spokesman for the Storonsky family office said, 'We are aware of the claim. It is without merit and it will be defended.' He says he's not guilty. Nixie features a private wellness spa, indoor and outdoor cinemas, two movie theaters. Now we were talking. As well as a Japanese teppanyaki grill, according to Boat International. Pull up this picture that Tyler just shared. I think this is what Nixie looks like.
Yeah, let's see it. When chartered, it's equipped with a variety of water toys, including a luxury Seabob water sled and inflatable blob launchers. Is this the pontoon boat? The luxury pontoon boat?
Oh, sorry. That's the $400 million pontoon boat that Tyler just generated.
That's pretty good. I like it. I like it. That just looks like a normal yacht. That doesn't actually look that crazy to me. I don't know.
Storonsky is one of Europe's highest-profile startup founders. Founded in 2015, Revolut is now the region's most valuable startup with a recent share sale valuing the digital bank at $115 billion. Wow, Revolut, what a tear. Originally built around low-fee foreign currency transactions, Revolut is widely used by international travelers and migrants sending remittances home. The company gained a full UK banking license in March after a lengthy battle. Wow. It took them over a decade to get a banking license. That is crazy. But they did it after a lengthy battle. Now they're looking to expand into the United States, having recently applied for a national banking charter. It's crazy. It's crazy that they can't go faster. Like Aravive got a charter so fast, and then there's been other companies that have explored like buying a regional bank and then using that charter. Why?
It's almost certainly part of why Revolut is now such a massive company because they don't have infinite competition in the way that many, many banks and neobanks have here in the US.
Earlier this year, Revolut reported record annual profits and a jump in its customer numbers. At the same time, Revolut said it remained focused on its goal of increasing its customer base to 100 million users by mid-2027 from more than 70 million currently. Well, good luck in the luxury yacht battle. Hopefully, everyone gets what they're owed and everyone is compensated fairly. Hate to see people fighting over that. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. AI's great reverse bank run. In today's newsletter, Joe Weisenthal wrote about Leopold's basilisk and what makes this particular mania feel distinct. People are betting on left-tail outcomes without sacrificing the right tail of financial opportunities. Doomers are getting fabulously wealthy. Let's see what he's saying. Here's the deal. Historically, if you want to cut off your left tail, you also have to cut off your right tail. Or to put it more specifically, if you are up big on a stock position, you want to hedge your gains by buying puts, you can do that. But if you want to maintain your puts over time, you spend a lot of money and erase any upside gains that you might otherwise be making. Or to put it even more generally, suppose you're afraid of the outbreak of war. Well, you can move to a rural farm and grow your own food, but then you miss out on the economic opportunities afforded by living in the city. People make these kinds of trade-offs all the time depending on what's worrying them. Pin that thought for just a second. One of the big questions with AI is whether it's just another technology or whether it somehow will be different this time. Is it purchasable intelligence kind of like purchasable electricity, or is it something more like a sci-fi novel where humans get replaced or eliminated in some way? The big American companies selling AI mostly operate as if AI is just another technology to be developed and solved. But we know that there's deep anxiety within the companies themselves that AI could play out in the way sci-fi novels have expected for decades. And this sometimes is reflected in their governance structures. Here's one stylized fact though that might argue for the 'it's different' camp. If you are one of those people who's been reading AI philosophers and message boards for the last decade, familiar with paperclip maximizers since long before ChatGPT came out, you might have deep existential fears about something bad happening right around the corner. You might also have ended up very, very rich. With AI, there has been no trade-off. The doomers who were early on accumulating GPUs, or better yet, shares in GPU companies, have done extremely well. The put option on humanity has become the call option on the technology. You could bet on the left-tail outcome, not sacrifice anything financially. We've maybe had some shades of this before. For a while, Bitcoin was characterized as an end-of-the-world hedge, a form of money for when the nation state collapsed, and people made a lot of money on that bet. But a trader wasn't driven by the fear that Bitcoin was a world destroyer. Or take gold. Betting on gold at certain times protected you against hyperinflation. But the fear that came with the bet did not entail gold being the catalyst for doom. Something else would be the catalyst, but you would be protected. AI is different. The long-feared catalyst for doom itself has presented an unbelievably profitable trade, at least so far. What's interesting about this is that he's sort of saying like the doomers got rich. There are plenty of AI doomers who did not join AI labs, did not participate financially, worked in nonprofits, just wrote books, worked on research, did not ever join anything that had economic upside. But I take his point that in general, if you were early to this, oh wow, like things are going to get weird, you probably were earlier on the train. And a lot of those people that were talking about AI and doom scenarios did wind up working at labs that did very well. So it's a good point, but there are some people that don't fall in this category. Long before we had the transformer architecture of GPT, people have been theorizing about the risks of AI doom. One popular thought experiment is Roko's Basilisk, a 2010 thought experiment. Wow. When was the last time we got a new thought experiment? I didn't know they were dropping new ones in 2010. That seems kind of recent. Maybe there's like, I don't know. Someone should come up with a new thought experiment. What's the most recent thought experiment that's really taken hold and been thought-provoking?
That's not a thought experiment. That's an axiom. That's a lifestyle. A thought experiment is almost like a paradox. Something you can wrestle with. We got to come up with some new...
I've been wrestling with golden retriever mode.
You think it's a thought experiment?
I think you can make it one. I don't think it falls in the bucket of thought experiment.
What do you think, Ty? No. What are you guys laughing at? Are you doing more pontoon boats?
Crazy text. I'm trying to find the most recently created thought...
Okay, Jackson, you are correct. Yes, that is the most recent thought experiment. Good stuff. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. That's very funny. Okay, wait. Quick, we got to switch gears because the price of lab monkeys in China is soaring as demand for preclinical testing outpaces supply. The price of lab monkeys in China is soaring as demand for preclinical testing outpaces supply. Do you think it's time to ape in?
Do you think it's time to ape strong together?
Yeah. Yeah. Go long the monkey trade. So this is the actual news. We got monkeys up here. There we go. In...
The first picture was crazy. It really sat.
Yep. But it is happening and it is interesting because it tells you a lot about what's going on in drug testing, animal rights obviously, and also just the broader economic market. So in June, a Chinese state laboratory paid roughly $26,000 per monkey for a purchase of 40 animals, nearly double what similar animals cost a year earlier. The price has doubled in the last year of monkeys. Biotech executives say the same trend is showing up across the industry driven by a wave of new biologic medicines and next-generation therapies that require far more primate testing than existing breeding capacity can currently support. The shortage could become a bottleneck for China's rapid drug development ecosystem because many experimental medicines must still undergo studies in nonhuman primates before regulators will allow them to advance. While regulated monkey farms have maintained relatively steady production, demand has accelerated much faster than supply. A similar imbalance emerged during the COVID pandemic when vaccine development sent prices sharply higher. But this time the pressure reflects China's emergence as one of the leading centers for innovative drug discovery. The country now generates a third of the global pipeline of novel medicines and has become a major destination for clinical trials and licensing deals with US and European pharmaceutical companies. So monkeys remain essential for making many preclinical studies because their biology closely resembles that of humans. We know the monkey has remarkable resemblance to our particular makeup.
Many people have said we have the mind.
Yes. Yes. So if they're working on a brain, well, typically they would test on a golden retriever, but yes. So this makes them one of the best available models for evaluating a drug's safety, how it moves through the body, its effects on different organs, and the potential for serious toxic side effects.
before human trials begin. While a shortage may slow some research programs, it's also a sign of an unprecedented surge in investment in innovation aimed at developing new potentially life-saving treatments.
Tom in the X chat, how long would it take infinite monkeys to make a one monkey billion dollar?
Yeah, wait. Uh, yeah, that is an important question.
That's a good thought experiment. How long would it take infinite monkeys to make a one monkey billion dollar company? There is a—that's a new paradox there.
So, so there is a—there is a thought experiment related to this. It's the infinite monkey theorem. This is a real thing. Uh, it states that a monkey pressing keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite time will almost surely type any given text. Deeply relevant to LLMs.
Are there any uh—Okay, get the tinfoil hat.
What do you think's going on? Is it possible that our modern AI systems are monkeys just clacking a bunch of keys and that's—and that's this is just an AI bottleneck.
Yeah. You think that when you go to ChatGPT it's secretly a monkey on the other side.
Yeah. That it's not—it's not a computer.
Yeah. No one really goes in the data centers. Could just be a bunch of monkeys and computers. You don't know.
Bunch of monkeys and bananas.
You don't know. Okay. Well, um, there's also news somewhat related. Are there monkeys in the Amazon rainforest? Almost certainly, right? Almost certainly.
Jack in the YouTube chat says, "How long until monkey see?"
There's over 50 to 100 species of monkey in the Amazon rainforest.
Okay. Well, a new LiDAR survey of the Amazon rainforest has uncovered evidence of a previously unknown civilization that may have supported as many as three million people, challenging decades of assumptions about the region's ancient history. So, we—I mean, we talked to a friend of the show who—who was doing this, scanning the rainforest with LiDAR, um, putting new sensor stacks on helicopters, flying them around on planes. Um, but there's new—there's—there's new evidence here. So, uh, using laser scanning technology capable of penetrating the dense forest canopy, researchers mapped more than 4,500 square kilometers of Brazil's Acre state, uh, after flying over 4,400 km of rainforest. The survey, which was published in Nature, identified 396 previously unknown geoglyphs, massive geometric earthworks made from deep ditches and raised embankments. The discoveries have provided the clearest picture yet of the Aury civilization, which is believed to have emerged around 500 B.C.E. and flourished until roughly 850 C.E. Rather than serving as permanent settlements, the earthworks appear to have functioned as ceremonial and civic centers where people gathered for rituals, political meetings, and other communal events while living in nearby multifamily longhouses and cultivating crops such as corn and squash. Based on the number of earthworks and the labor required to build and maintain them, the researchers estimate that the civilization's population peaked somewhere between 1.25 million and 3 million people. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that the ancient Amazon was home to large interconnected societies with engineered landscapes, not just small isolated villages, as many archaeologists once believed. Even more remarkably, the surveyed area alone contains roughly as many earthworks as earlier estimates suggested existed across the entire Amazon basin. If future LiDAR surveys uncover similar densities elsewhere, scientists may have to dramatically revise estimates of how many people once lived in the rainforest. Archaeologists still do not know why the civilization disappeared, though the abandonment of these ceremonial centers between 850 and 950 C.E. coincides with the decline of several other major societies in the Americas, including the Maya. Very interesting.
I wonder where else people can scan with LiDAR, find interesting things. Gotta go to Antarctica or something. I don't know. Um, well, in other news, Gwern is retiring from writing to start a company. Gwern is the anonymous online writer. Is it Gwern.org or Gwern.net? Gwern.net. Fantastic blog. Uh, he's done, I believe, only one podcast in history with Darknet Diaries where he was anonymous. They used uh like a 3D rendered version of him, a voice changer to keep him anonymous. Um, uh, this is the website of Gwern Branwen. He writes about AI, psychology, statistics. Uh, he also is—I mean, he's written about uh self-experimentation, Bitcoin, all sorts of different stuff. He wrote an amazing piece about nicotine and uh all the deep dive there. It was very fascinating, very formative when I was starting uh my nicotine company. It's very interesting. Um, but he's starting a new company. Uh, so let's dig into what he wrote. Uh, let's see. Can I pull this up? Where is it? I lost it. Gwern. Gwern. Gwern. He has a locked account. So, you got to go request to follow and then—Damn it. Timeline app. Open it back up. Where is it? Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Um, Gwern. Okay. He's retiring from writing to start a company. Uh, the company's first product for writing. His—his goal is to design—is to—uh, his go—his design goal is a 100x increase in productivity. What would it take for an AI to make me 100x more productive as a writer or thinker? Why 100x specifically? He says, "Because two aiming at—uh, two aiming atoms is enough to hope to keep up for a while. And this goal will shatter ineffective band-aid style short-term design proposals. But it doesn't require solving the AI alignment problem or value extrapolation. We do not need to be able to oversee millions of superintelligent AIs working autonomously for subjective millennia, which is good because an AI can probably not do that." What would that look like for—for me? Roughly, I think it would look like an AI enabling me to produce one to three worthwhile writings a day which are 100% written by it without loss of quality.
Very interesting. I've heard enough. 100 million. Give them a million dollars. Yeah. No, I—I agree. Um, it is interesting that uh, you know, we—we've been going back and forth on, you know, is writing verifiable? I think it's a little less verifiable. Um, but you know, with feedback and different algorithms you can get there, but it just feels like the progress in mathematics is accelerating faster than the—than the progress in writing.
Yes. And also, I mean, in this scenario it's like maybe it's easier to train a model to write like a—like one specific person to—to write good generally. Like that—that's like much more amorphous. What does it mean to like write well versus like, oh, this is in the style of a particular person. This is how they would think.
It also feels like there needs to be a—uh, sort of like a—like a whole agent harness or workflow because writing is not just the last step of instantiating the words. It's all the research that goes into it, all the different references, the—all the different links and things, and the way he will put together arguments, the way he structures these things. Um, all of that is—is part of the writing process. Even just narrowing down, you know, is this an essay or is this a, you know, shorter post, longer post, all these different decisions, they can probably be built into a system, but it will take time. So, that's what he's working on. Um, anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have the perfect guest to talk about Shopify because we have Harley Finkelstein, the president of Shopify, here with us in the TVN Ultra. Welcome back to the show, Harley. Congratulations. What a quarter. Insane stock chart. Take us through it. What's going on at Shopify?
