December 20 2024
- Jason misses Sacks
- Aaron Levie joins the Pod
- Subbing in for Sacks
- Sacks
- Thinks he’s a strong pick for AI, doesn’t know much about crypto
- AI regulations
- Earlier AI regulations were dumb - prescribing inane requirements - would have been bad to have each state with its own regulations
- Benefitting from competition - would have been bad to have them meet as a council to release improvements
- Crypto regulation possibilities
- Stable coins
- Tether and USDC making good businesses
- SpaceX/Starlink leveraging stable coins
- If everyone agrees on this - it could help global GDP a lot - credit card companies and the like charge ~3% of fees for transfers - this could go to 0
- Stable coins is a good place to start because everyone agrees on this - BTC and other more speculative projects just invite too much animated conversation
- Even crypto folks can’t agree on how to regulate parts of this industry
- DOGE kills its first bill
- CR was very long - ~1500 pages
- With all kinds of random provisions that are not about CR or disaster relief
- Spending is 23% of GDP ~$6T
- It seems reasonable for government to provide disaster relief - but its also distorting markets - they’re providing insurance, etc for disaster prone areas
- Founding Fathers enabled this in some ways - their expectation was that House members would provide the checks and balances because they represent the people - alternatively maybe they should have added some constitutional provisions - term limits, percentages, etc
- They didn’t foresee that a significant portion of the electorate would be so dependent on the government - people are entitled and want it from the government if the free market isn’t providing it
- Patrick Collison - choose 2 from good, cheap, fast is devious misinformation spread by the slow
- People think Elon doesn’t understand the govt - but maybe the govt doesn’t understand Elon
- DOGE has shown that just shining light on the issues using X will cause politicians to retreat to a reasonable ground
- At some points in an IQ test if you’re on board or not if the best entrepreneurs are in the cabinet helping with this effort
- This week in hypocrisy
- Democrats complaining about Elon influence have no shame about Biden’s issues that was hid by the administration and the media too
- This was deeply disturbing - that the American voting public was kept in the dark about Biden’s issues
- Too much regulation is bad - see climate tech companies leaving California
- NJ drones
- Now FAA has instituted a temporary ban in NJ/NY area
- Possibilities
- Government experiment
- Individuals causing trouble
- Pysop
- (Drone delivery business in China is ~$30B/year - they might have 100K flying cars soon - Metuan is a company that does drone delivery service)
- You can stoke some fears by doing this and hurt US progress on drones
- Some shoutouts to X journalists - Autism Capital, Geiger Capital, Kanekoa The Great
- OpenAI for profit conversion
- Elon is against it
- Zuck is also against it?
- Menlo Ventures chart on LLM market share 2023-2024 is painting a stark picture for OpenAI
- Hardware war is important - Elon and Hyperscalers will be well positioned
- Model promiscuity
- “There are no secrets in AI”
- If research is not an advantage - then compute and data are the game
- Box has benefited - example: they give their customers unlimited storage but they operate at 80%+ margin - all the value is in the software on top
- There is a limit to how much you can charge because Zuck is a counter balance with releasing his open models because someone can just host that
- Great discussion on software industrial complex
- Feature set inflation
- Alex Karp and Satya Nadella had similar viral clips - compete on product, not your GTM team
- AI agents coming for SaaS?
- The regulators will always be humans
- Gemini and Google’s successes in AI
- Doing really well - they have a lot of data
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