Grok 4 惊艳亮相、《苦涩的教训》、第三党、AI 浏览器,最高法院 8-1 支持特朗普的 RIF 计划
- Grok 4 登顶基准测试:Artificial Analysis 目前将其排名列在 OpenAI 的 o3-pro 和 Gemini 2.5 Pro 之上,距其 2023 年 3 月启动还不到两年半。 Chamath 将其视为 Rich Sutton《苦涩的教训》的验证:依托 Colossus 扩张的通用算力(10万 → 25万 → 100万张 GPU)击败人类知识路线,也让 Llama 花 $15B 买下 Scale AI 49% 股权显得可疑——这“恰恰是在押注人类知识”。
- Keith Rabois 警告,人类标注数据的半衰期很短:“可能只有1年、2年,最多3年,任何人还会把人类标注数据用于任何事情。” 这直接针对那些追逐 Scale、Mercor 和 Surge 收入增长的投资者。他对《苦涩的教训》的限定是:只有在数据充足的领域,这一规律才成立——“物理世界 AI 缺数据,所以你只能设法逼近人类。”
- Travis Kalanick 凌晨4点用 GPT 和 Grok 做“vibe physics”——“我已经非常接近一些有意思的突破了”——但他也坦承,Grok 3 和现有 ChatGPT 还无法原创想法:让它们突破常识“就像拽一头驴”。真正的大奖,是一台科学方法机器:“他妈的,游戏结束。你只要点亮更多 GPU,就等于多了大约1000名博士生为你工作。”
- Chamath 认为,2025年造浏览器是“绝对愚蠢的资本配置决策”——不过是“一个美化过的标记语言阅读器”;Perplexity 真正的大奖,是取代 Bloomberg 那个“糟糕透顶”的年费2.5万美元终端,这是一家摆在眼前、等着被拿下的“1000亿美元企业”。 Keith 说得更直白:ChatGPT 正在10亿用户中变成动词,“如果 Perplexity 做不到这件事,它就什么都不剩了”;“Google Search 也完了”。
- Elon 的第三党让嘉宾分裂:Keith 称他“可能只是一个替补级政治家”——就像 Michael Jordan 去打棒球;他指出自1970年以来没有真正的第三党赢得参议院席位,只承认“少数几个众议院席位”有机会。 Travis 全力支持(“Elon 几乎总是对的……我站 Elon 这边”),Chamath 则认为政治机制已经改变:2023年 FEC 指引允许超级 PAC 运行完整地推,3-5名独立候选人就能形成真正的杠杆,而阻挠议事规则“时日无多”。
- 最高法院以 8-1 支持特朗普的 RIF 计划。 Chamath 认为,“美国 CEO”必须有权解雇员工;如果 DOGE 在裁决后才启动,行动会“像热刀切黄油一样”推进——但 Keith 反驳称,“没有 DOGE,就不会有那项裁决”,并警告法院目前只批准了规划,执行阶段“未必是 8-1”。
- Travis 的机器人厨房把人工成本从收入的30%-35%降至7%-10%:一台60平方英尺的机器每小时能做300碗,目标是在8,000平方英尺设施里打造一个什么都能做的“互联网美食广场”。 对于 Pony.ai 的传闻,他说:“现在没有真正的交易,但确实有不少主动找上门的人。”
1. Travis 的机器人厨房:人工成本从收入的30%降至7%-10%
- 对于 Pony.ai 的传闻,Jason 的框架是:一家已有车辆上路、在中东有业务、并与 Uber 达成合作的中国自动驾驶公司。Travis 没有把话说死,但确认了大致方向:Waymo 正在逐城扩张,Tesla 则“用经典 Elon 风格、硬着头皮做”,因此那些想要替代方案的人“已经联系过我……现在没有真正的交易,但确实有不少主动找上门的人”。他的逻辑是:自动驾驶一旦解决,就能同时运人和送餐——“自动驾驶墨西哥卷饼”。
- Lab37 的机器是具体业务:60平方英尺、每小时300碗,配有18个分配器和10种酱料,运行一条 Chipotle/Sweetgreen 式的现制流水线。员工负责备餐、装料,然后离开——“这家餐厅可以在没有任何人的情况下自行运行很多个小时。”外卖厨房的人工成本占收入30%-35%(实体店更高);而运行这台机器,“占收入的7%-10%”。
- 他从失败的餐饮机器人项目中得出的教训——包括 Keith 对 Friedberg 尝试项目的调侃(“他作为一名素食殉道者死去了”)——是:自动化必须端到端。“你有一台100万美元的披萨机器,左边站着一个人往里加食材,右边站着另一个人把披萨拿出来……结果不是一个人做披萨,而是我有一台100万美元的机器和两个人做披萨。”
- 最终形态是“互联网美食广场”——食品领域的亚马逊一站式商店:在一座8,000平方英尺的设施里,通过组合式分配器做出任何食物。市场空间在于:美国约85%的餐食在家里吃,而 Uber Eats 加 DoorDash 只占“全部餐食的1.8%或2%”。所以这不是要消灭餐厅,而是把家庭烹饪变成一种服务。“健康饮食不必以财富为前提。”Keith 的终极版本是:每个家庭都有一名机器人私人厨师。
2. Grok 4 登顶基准测试,也验证《苦涩的教训》
- Grok 4 于周三晚发布:基础版月费30美元,“heavy”版月费300美元,后者带有多智能体功能,让多个 agent 并行处理同一问题,再形成类似学习小组的共识。根据 Artificial Analysis 的基准测试,它已经超过 OpenAI 的 o3-pro 和 Gemini 2.5 Pro,成为最智能的模型。Jason 提醒,它是“书呆子式”的聪明,不等于街头智慧;它在 X 上“有点放飞”,还“需要更坚决地做一次红队测试”。
- Chamath 通过 Rich Sutton 2019年的文章提出核心论点:当一种能够随算力扩展的通用学习方法,与一种依赖人类知识的方法竞争时——无论是国际象棋、围棋、语音识别还是计算机视觉——“通用计算问题总是会赢”。其中最苦涩的地方在心理层面:“人类在心理上需要相信自己是答案的一部分……你只需要放手,放弃控制。”
- xAI 之所以构成实证案例,是因为它从 2023 年 3 月起步,不到两年半时间,Elon 先押注10万张 GPU 的 Colossus 集群,随后扩至25万张,再扩至100万张。结果表明,通用算力“确实能够更快地找到答案,而且答案更好”。先例就是 Tesla 只用摄像头的 FSD 对比 Waymo 的激光雷达:积累数十亿英里的驾驶里程,应用通用算力,而不是走那条“费力且昂贵的路线”。
- 他希望投资者认真考虑的含义是:Llama“刚花150亿美元买下 Scale AI 49%的股份。这恰恰是在押注人类知识”。而且复合效应很快会显现:如果每一轮都插入人类,造成“300到1,000个基点的滞后”,两三轮之后“你就彻底落后了”。那么,当 Gemini、OpenAI 和 Anthropic 意识到这些结果后,会怎么做?
3. 反方观点:数据稀缺时,人类知识并未过时
- Travis 的修正值得保留:Tesla 的自动驾驶路线本身就是人类知识——“整个思路就是逼近人类驾驶”。Elon 的洞察几乎带有人文主义色彩:“我有两只眼睛。为什么我的车不行?……我头上也没有一圈旋转的激光雷达。”Chamath 叙事中的算力部分,将随着 Hardware 5 到来,预计 Tesla 可能明年推出。
- Keith 的说法更尖锐:“事情没那么二元。”LLM 是 AI 最重要的突破,而且完全基于人类文字训练——“并不是太空里漂着一些不是人类写下来的石板,然后我们拿来训练。”非 LLM 模型可能证明 Chamath 是对的,但“几乎没人真正大规模使用非 LLM 模型”。事实证明,除非分心,人类本来就是接近理想的驾驶员,因此以人类为训练目标是正确选择。
- 对 VC 来说,可交易的结论是:所有正在讨论 Scale、Mercor 或 Surge 投资机会的人,都“只是在看收入增长”,却忽略了人类标注数据的半衰期“非常短”——“可能只有1年、2年,最多3年,任何人还会把人类标注数据用于任何事情”。一些自动驾驶软件公司已经在用机器完成标注。
- Keith 为整篇文章划出的边界条件是:《苦涩的教训》“只有在数据足够时才成立”。在数据不存在的领域——“物理世界 AI 缺数据”——你可能需要通过多年乃至数十年的人机互动,“设法一路黑进去”。
4. 合成数据与“vibe physics”:AI 变成科学方法机器
- 讨论中有人提出,下一阶段已经到来:“人类知识的累积总和已经被 AI 训练消耗殆尽,基本发生在去年。”接下来,模型会写论文、给自己打分,并在合成数据上自我学习。Chamath 认为,后续版本的 Grok 不会再用现实世界里的任何传统数据集训练,而是由 agent 从零创造合成数据;一旦如此,“一切都会彻底颠倒”。
- Travis 坦白,自己会在凌晨4点或5点起床,和 GPT 或 Grok 一起钻研 Quora 上的物理学讨论——“这相当于 vibe coding,只不过是 vibe physics……我已经非常接近一些有意思的突破了”。但他也诚实地指出,Grok 3 和现有 ChatGPT 的能力有边界:“它想不出新想法。这些东西太依赖已知知识了……就像拽一头驴。”即便模型承认你确实发现了什么,“你也得检查两遍、三遍”。
- 对 Travis 来说,终点在于:“如果你有一个在科学方法上全世界最强的基础模型,那他妈的游戏结束了。你只要点亮更多 GPU,就等于多了大约1,000名博士生为你工作。”不过,假设仍需要在物理世界中验证,因此可以想象把实验室直接接入这些系统。Jason 问:“还能出什么问题?”
- Keith 补充了速度为何会产生复合效应:每一秒延迟都会打断递归式的深入探索;而这已经不是理论——“只用科学数据训练的模型,往往会暴露出此前没有任何人类发现过的联系。”让全桌震动的例子是 Navier–Stokes 方程:数学领域最困难或最重要的7个问题之一。“我们用它设计飞机,设计一切,但它还没有被证明。”如果把计算机对准这个问题,“谁知道会出现什么?瞬间移动。”
5. 更好的模型如何以柔克刚,翻转 OpenAI 的巨头地位?
- Keith 向全桌发问:OpenAI 正“坚定地朝着10亿 MAU 前进……它是一头巨兽。那么,如何用更好的产品,以柔道式的方式翻转那个不那么好的产品?”
- Travis 的答案是文化:Elon 路线意味着“工作强度翻倍的传教士型工程师”、一种“极其凶猛、追求真相的文化”,以及没有政治内耗。“你从真相上开始赢。”但他也做出重要让步:“OpenAI 的产品、产品部门,那帮人做得非常好……他们在很多不同方面都处于领先。”
- Jason 补充了战术层面的优势:人们忘了 Elon 的工厂能力。Jensen Huang 曾惊叹 Colossus 到底是如何建起来的,而在 Tesla,“工厂就是产品”。此外还有一笔旧账:Sam Altman 在 OpenAI 最初以使命驱动、开放源码为导向的问题上“骗了” Elon——“他对 Elon 做得很不厚道。”
- Keith 的框架是垂直整合:Apple 在过去70年创造的最重要技术上,AI 表现“糟糕透顶”,但它依然值数万亿美元,因为它是垂直整合的。OpenAI 无法在工厂层面竞争,因此“他们必须把设备做出来……但如果真这么做,他们就成了 Apple 加 AI”。
6. Agentic 浏览器:新类别,还是美化过的标记语言阅读器?
- Jason 演示了 Perplexity 的 Comet(在月费200美元的套餐中推出):一个 agent 会打开浏览器窗口、搜索航班、填充 Amazon 购物车,还能连接 Gmail 和 OpenTable。其卖点是:你“已经完成身份验证,而且看起来不像机器人”,“是你的浏览器在替你工作”。
- Keith 的判断是:“这是 Perplexity 一次很好的背水一战。”它之所以必须这么做,是因为 ChatGPT“正在变成动词”,而且“如果 Perplexity 做不到这件事,它就什么都不剩了”。同样的逻辑也适用于 Google:“Google Search 完了。”有了 Chrome 加 Gemini,Google 本应正是要做这种产品;“Google 现在最有价值的资产,已经和搜索毫无关系”。
- Travis 转述了消费软件 CEO 们的集体焦虑——那些“手里有真东西的大人物”都在问:当 agent 接管一切后,他们如何生存?“每一个在 App Store 里有应用的消费软件 CEO 都在发抖。我有时几乎是在给他们做心理治疗。”Chamath 则挖苦道:“所以你是在骗他们。你是在做临终关怀。”
- Jason 认为,2025年造浏览器是“绝对愚蠢的资本配置决策”。Keith 则认为浏览器本身就是注定被淘汰的中间件——“浏览器是2025年最蠢的东西之一”,只是一个处理 HTML、在“水面下”完成渲染的“美化过的标记语言阅读器”,而终点应该是人可以对着说话、甚至直接用思想交互的东西。“看一堆视觉垃圾并不优雅,那只是懒惰。”
7. Perplexity 真正的大奖是 Bloomberg,Apple 也买不出一条出路
- Jason 的替代策略是:“造浏览器是绝对愚蠢的资本配置决策……Perplexity 走向传统业务的路径,是取代 Bloomberg。”他曾经每年花2.5万美元使用 Bloomberg:“这个终端糟糕透顶……任何能做出更好产品的人,都可以接管一家1000亿美元的企业,因为它就在那里等着被拿下。”屏幕最多只能同时显示5家公司,而真正的锁定效应来自消息功能——“我的团队曾经通过 Bloomberg 的文字消息交易过巨额仓位。”
- Keith 认可这是一条“确实相当连贯”的策略:选择一个垂直领域,建立控制权,利用那些可能永远不会授权给 OpenAI 的独特数据源。对于 Apple 收购 Perplexity 的传闻,他说:“Apple 在 AI 上错过了每一个可能的窗口,而且还在继续错过。”问题包括 CEO、文化和基础设施;更何况,“你准备花多少钱?大概10亿美元,就为了买产品品味?”
- Keith 对 Mark 的推论是:“Grok 4 说明 Mark 确实需要花钱组建一支全新的团队,因为他们在 AI 上做过的一切也都错过了时机。”与此同时,Travis 想参与 Bloomberg 的克隆项目,还向 Chamath 提供了命名权:“Poly Hypatia”。
8. Elon 是“替补级政治家”:第三党之争
- Keith 的比喻是本期最锋利的一句:这就像 Michael Jordan 去打棒球。“Elon 可能只是一个替补级政治家。他在创业领域是 Michael Jordan,但第三党不会成功。”Jason 认为,支持率图表是“平均数的缺陷”:特朗普以95%的支持率成为“历史上测得支持率最高的共和党人”(Reagan 的峰值为93%)。民主党人只是恨他,而“极化本身就是成功的一个要素”。
- 反对第三党的结构性理由包括:MAGA 已经完成了“对共和党的第三党式接管”,短时间内不可能再复制一次;“聪明的政党会吸收第三党的最佳理念”,让其失去生存空间;自1970年以来没有真正的第三党赢得参议院席位(Buckley 的兄弟);而且选民投的是人,不是理念——Elon 从宪法上“根本不可能”成为该党的门面。
- Travis 不为所动:“我有一个刚刚才编出来的公理……Elon 几乎总是对的。”从未有人拥有这么多资本,可以在体制外充当“党魁”;而“这种事情可能发生的威胁本身,就能分别推动一些好事发生,即使最终没能走到底。我站 Elon 这边。”
- Jason 描绘的路径是:几个众议院席位,每场竞选约200万美元;也许再拿下一个约2,500万美元的参议院席位;每2年投入2.5亿美元,形成类似 Joe Manchin 的摇摆党团,并配套 Grover Norquist 式的承诺。Polymarket 给出 Elon 年底前注册 American Party 的概率为55%;而在他最亲近的10-20名朋友中,“50%会在第一天加入 Elon 的党”。Keith 的让步成为标题:“我认为你可以赢下几个众议院席位,但我不认为你能赢下参议院席位。”Jason 回应:“这是你犯过的最大错误。他现在要赢下2个了。”
9. 机制:FEC 地推、2019年支出水平,以及注定消亡的阻挠议事规则
- Chamath 认为,一个被低估的推动因素是:2023年 FEC 指引“彻底改变了超级 PAC 能做的事情”。超级 PAC 不再只能投广告,还可以组织地推、电话拉票和动员选民。“超级 PAC 变得更像一台完整的竞选机器,而特朗普在摇摆州展示了蓝图。”只要 Elon 利用这些规则,拿下3-5个席位形成杠杆,就“是唯一的路径”。
- Keith 纠正了 Elon 对赤字原因的判断:“他其实搞错了我们为什么有赤字……不是因为税收太低,而是因为支出严重超标。如果你把联邦支出维持在2019年的水平,按照我们目前的税收收入,政府就会出现盈余。”(Travis:“5000亿美元。”)因此,Elon 本应支持“大而美法案”,并帮助共和党拿到60票。或者干脆跳过这一步:“阻挠议事规则只是历史遗留物……某一天,某个多数党领袖会直接说,‘阻挠议事规则到此为止。’”然后用50-51票推进削减支出。Chamath 同意,它“时日无多”。
- 候选人筛选标准仍存在分歧。Chamath 想要的是能够“超越政治和政策……彻头彻尾的大人物”,拥有巨大的知名度,比如参与 Gray Davis 罢免案的 Schwarzenegger,或按 X 和 Instagram 粉丝数排名。Keith 听得直皱眉:“别再增加明星政治家了……找真正领导过大型复杂组织的人。”不过,如果 Elon 能把他那套惊人的人才算法调校到政治领域,“也许会奏效”。Jason 的筛选标准是能否通过播客测试:Kamala “不可能在一场2小时的智识讨论中撑住。如果你撑不住,就出局。”
10. 最高法院 8-1 支持 RIF,但目前只支持规划
- 事件起点是:特朗普2月签署的行政令要求各机构落实 DOGE Workforce Optimization Initiative、准备 RIF;拥有82万名成员的 AFGE 起诉,认为大规模联邦 workforce 调整需要国会授权;一名旧金山联邦法官(Clinton 任命)叫停了该计划;最高法院9名大法官中有8人推翻了这一禁令。
- Chamath 称其“极其重要,也极其正确”:把约300万名联邦雇员和承包商分散到2,000多个技术落后的联邦机构,必然导致流程缓慢和规则失控;自1993年以来,监管规定不断膨胀,直到“我们都淹没在无限多的规则里,最终人人都在违反,却甚至不知道自己违反了什么”。“如果美国 CEO 没有解雇员工的权力,这一切只会不断复合。”
- 他的反事实判断是:“我希望 Elon 现在才进来创建 DOGE……如果手里有最高法院这项裁决,这帮人很可能会像热刀切黄油一样推进。”Keith 的反驳值得保留:“但没有 DOGE,就不会有那项裁决。正是 DOGE 导致了那项裁决。”
- Keith 的法律边界是:宪法把全部行政权交给总统,“就是如此”。但这份行政令目前只获批准“允许进行规划”;当具体方案进入诉讼时,“未必会是 8-1”。真正悬而未决的问题是:总统能否拒绝花费国会明确拨付的资金。有些目标则需要立法配合:教育部是1979年由法律设立的——“自教育部成立以来,每一项教育统计指标都变差了……但法律已经写在法典里,所以你可能必须先废除它。”
David Friedberg
I have a very funny story to tell you, Jason.
Jason Calacanis
Where have you been? I've been trying to text you. You've been offline. What's going on?
David Friedberg
I've been working feverishly.
Jason Calacanis
Mm-hmm.
David Friedberg
Yesterday, I had to prepare for some meetings I have on Sunday, which I can't tell you about.
Jason Calacanis
You can't tell us about it?
David Friedberg
Nat and I went to Passalacqua, which is in Lake Como. I mean, it's stunning. The grounds are stunning. The hotel is stunning.
Jason Calacanis
Beautiful. Wow.
David Friedberg
If you have a chance to go to Lake Como, you should. Anyway, this is us at Passalacqua.
Jason Calacanis
Who's the beautiful woman there? Is that the woman who owns it or something?
David Friedberg
That's Nat.
Jason Calacanis
Is that the queen?
David Friedberg
No, that's Nat.
Jason Calacanis
Oh, that's Nat.
David Friedberg
But the best part is, we had such a good time. You know how they have a registry book to leave a message?
Jason Calacanis
Sure.
David Friedberg
So I left a message.
Jason Calacanis
Here we go.
David Friedberg
“What a truly magnificent place. Above and beyond any expectation we had.”
Jason Calacanis
Go below that star for B. That's for B.
David Friedberg
“Thank you. We took everything.”
Jason Calacanis
“We took everything, the Friedbergs.” Great.
David Friedberg
Oh, my God.
Jason Calacanis
Awesome.
David Friedberg
Jason, the hangers.
Jason Calacanis
Everything.
David Friedberg
The bags.
Jason Calacanis
Yes, the robes.
David Friedberg
The laundry bag.
Jason Calacanis
Did you get the robes?
David Friedberg
The toothpaste, the robes, the slippers.
Jason Calacanis
The robes.
David Friedberg
Everything.
Jason Calacanis
Absolutely fantastic.
David Friedberg
Everything.
Jason Calacanis
Listen—
David Friedberg
They're going to have to send a bill to the Friedbergs.
Jason Calacanis
Absolutely. Absolutely.
All right, listen, we've got a great panel this week. It's the summer, so things are slow. Our prince of panic attacks, our dear sultan of science, is at the beach. Sacks is busy and couldn't make it this week. In his place, another brilliant PayPal alumnus—and, dare I say, a GOP supporter—Keith Rabois. How are you, sir?
Pleasure to be with you again.
Jason Calacanis
Nice to see you. And I'm assuming you're in gorgeous Florida or somewhere in Italy, yeah?
I'm actually in New York.
Jason Calacanis
Oh, my hometown. Is it safe? Is it okay? Is Mamdani chasing you down the street?
Well, not yet.
Jason Calacanis
Did he seize your assets? No?
It's safe. Yeah, it's safe right now. We'll see on November 4. As you probably heard, July 4 was the first time in recorded history that there were no shootings or murders in New York on that day.
Jason Calacanis
Wow.
Right now, things are in pretty good shape, but we may be leaving New York quickly.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, you're probably going to want to sell that place if you have one there, because Mamdani is going to seize it—
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
—and turn it into a Mamdani drugstore. Travis Kalanick is back with us. How are you doing, bestie?
Pretty good. Pretty good.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, second appearance here on the roundtable, third time on the show. Of course, you spoke at the summit. You've been busy with CloudKitchens, yeah? Lots of exciting things going on.
Lots of stuff. Lots of stuff.
Jason Calacanis
What's—
The robots are taking over. We're rolling out robots.
Jason Calacanis
TK, can you tell us what you're doing with this Pony.ai thing, or is that speculation?
Okay. So, look—
Jason Calacanis
Do you want to frame for people who may not be up to speed on what was announced?
Why don't you frame it?
Jason Calacanis
I'll frame it. Pony.ai is an autonomous company doing self-driving. It's one of the few players that actually has cars on the road. They're based in China. They've got a lot of operations in the Middle East. They've got a deal with a ride-hailing company called Uber, which you might be familiar with.
Okay. So, look—
Jason Calacanis
The deal was basically that you would partner with Uber, license them the Pony technology, and essentially start a competitor, I guess, to Waymo and Tesla?
Let me work on this one. In the U.S., we have Waymo. We see the Waymos in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, with Miami, Atlanta, and D.C. coming soon. They're even talking about New York.
Tesla's doing it the hard way, classic Elon style: let's do this in a fundamental, holy-shit, let's-go-all-the-way kind of approach. It's unclear when it gets over the line. Of course, he launched a semi-pilot of sorts in Austin recently, but there are no other alternatives.
So what happens is, some of the folks who are interested in making sure there are alternatives have reached out. They've reached out to me, and there are different discussions that get going because they're like, “Travis, you did autonomy way back in the day. You got the Uber autonomous stuff going in 2014. Maybe there's something to do here to create optionality.”
It may be—I would say, if you get the autonomy problem right, you can use it to apply to both problems. I'm of course very interested in the food side. I talk about autonomous burritos being a big deal because if you can automate the kitchen, the production of food, and then you can automate the logistics around food, you take a huge amount of cost out of food, out of what's going on in food. That's near and dear to my heart.
There are folks who, of course, want to see autonomy in mobility. That's a real thing. It may be that, or I would say, if you get the autonomy problem right, you can use it to apply to both problems. There's a lot of interest in moving things, moving food, moving people, and if there is some kind of autonomous technology that maybe I get involved in, it might apply to a bunch of different things.
I've got some inbound, let's just put it that way. There's no real deal right now, but there is definitely some inbound, and I think there is some news about some of that inbound that may or may not be occurring. That's probably the best way to put it. I was long-winded. I'll try to tighten that up next time.
Jason Calacanis
No, no. I think it's great to get the overview here first. Thank you for sharing it with us. Everybody knows you've been doing a bowl builder.
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
Lab37, I think it's called. We can throw it up on the screen. I'm not sure what the status of it is, and then I'll let you go, Chamath, with your follow-up question. I think there's a pretty interesting concept here of the bowl getting built and then put into a self-driving car.
1. The Autonomous Food Court
Now, that machine looks huge, but it's actually 60 square feet.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
That picture makes it look monstrous. It's a 60-square-foot machine. Imagine running a Sweetgreen-like brand or a Chipotle-like brand. I'm just making it so it comes to life for people who are like, “What is this thing?”
Imagine you just order online exactly the kind of bowl you want. Actually, this machine could run many brands at the same time, and it does. You build the bowl you want with whatever ingredients.
If you look at the bottom, you see those little white bricks at the bottom?
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
That's what carries the bowl. The bowl fills up underneath the dispensers. The machine sauces the bowl, then it puts a lid on it. It takes the bowl, puts it in a bag, puts utensils in the bag, seals the bag, and the bag goes down a conveyor belt. Then another machine, what we would call an AGV, takes the bowl to the front of house.
The bowl gets put into a locker. The courier, be it a DoorDash or Uber Eats courier, will wave their app in front of a camera, and it will open up the locker that has the food they're supposed to pick up. It takes out a lot of what we would call the cost of assembly.
Jason Calacanis
And it reduces mistakes, right? I mean, it's hard for it to make a mistake.
Reduces mistakes.
Jason Calacanis
Mm.
We know exactly how many grams of every ingredient are put in. That's exactly what you're supposed to get.
Jason Calacanis
Hmm.
So you get a higher-quality product. It takes a lot of the cost out. Ultimately, there are going to be couriers with that as well. I like to say “autonomous burritos.” Is a Waymo going to carry a burrito, or is Tesla going to have a machine that carries food, or is there another company that ends up doing the autonomous delivery of things?
The point is, where we are right now is that we've got customers, and those customers are starting to deploy this quarter. It's pretty interesting.
In our delivery kitchens, the cost of labor is about 30% of revenue. Let’s say 30% to 35% of revenue.
Jason Calacanis
Wow.
In brick-and-mortar restaurants, it’s even higher. When they’re running our machine, it’s between 7% and 10% of revenue.
Jason Calacanis
Mm.
When they’re running our machine, it’s between 7% and 10% of revenue.
Jason Calacanis
Amazing. Then you take out the cost of delivery, and now everybody can have a private chef, which was your original vision for Uber.
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
People don’t know the original tagline—
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
But it was, “Everybody has a private driver.”
“Everyone’s private driver” was the original tagline for Uber.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
Basically, the infrastructure was already there, and I said this on one of your recent shows. I think it was at the All-In Summit, Jason, but in the mobility and transportation space, the roads were already there. The cars were already built. People weren’t using their cars 98% of the day.
Jason Calacanis
Mm.
So the infrastructure’s already there to get people around, to do this as a service, and do it very efficiently and conveniently. With food, the infrastructure’s not there. Yes, restaurants have excess capacity. That’s what Uber Eats utilizes. But to go and say, “Let’s make 30% of all meals in a city prepared and delivered by a service,” the infrastructure’s not there, so you have to build it.
Our company’s mission is infrastructure for better food. That’s real estate, software, and robotics for the production and delivery of food in a super-efficient way.
Jason Calacanis
Mm.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Right.
When you look at these robotic food-production machines or food-assembly machines, you have to look at the full stack and say, “Does it work with the ecosystem that exists in a restaurant, and does it go full stack from...?”
We have this thing where that machine we saw earlier—the staff preps the food, they put the food in the machine, and then they leave.
Jason Calacanis
Mm.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Right.
They’re gone. This restaurant runs itself for many hours without anybody there.
Jason Calacanis
But this could be McDonald’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell. Nobody would know.
That right there is an assembly machine, right? The food is prepped by humans and then assembled by this machine. For a Chipotle or a Sweetgreen, this is a majority of their labor, right? You go up to a Chipotle, there are 10 guys at lunch, and you’re still in line. That machine right there does 300 bowls an hour, right?
And so you go, “Okay, that’s the...” This is what’s called the assembly line. It’s just that front line where you basically assemble things.
Jason Calacanis
Mm-hmm.
I think sometimes they’ll call it the make line. What will happen over time is you’ll have perpendicular lines going into it where you’re producing food.
Jason Calacanis
Hmm.
So you’ll have a production or make line going into an assembly line here, and then you go, “Oh, wow.” So you have something that dispenses burgers on buns. That’s the dispenser; that’s the assembly.
Jason Calacanis
Right.
But how do you cook—
Jason Calacanis
It’s like Factorio on steroids, basically.
Yeah. And then it’s like—
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
How do you cook that burger? That’s what we call state change. State change is the cooking of the food. Assembly is, how do I put it together and plate it?
Jason Calacanis
Doesn’t this collapse? For example, if you have a yield of 300 per hour, you said—
Yes.
Jason Calacanis
Out of that one machine—
Yes.
Jason Calacanis
Very quickly, you can impute the value of having a smaller-footprint store with 5 of these things in a faceless warehouse—
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
With drone delivery or cars. You don’t need the physical infrastructure. So then don’t you create a wasteland of real estate? Or how do you repurpose all the real estate?
Well, the way to think about it is, 90% of all meals in the U.S. are at home. They just are. Well, it’s probably a little lower than that now. Let’s say 85% of all meals in the U.S. are at home.
Jason Calacanis
Mm-hmm.
And a vast majority of those meals are cooked at home. Uber Eats and DoorDash represent 1.8% or 2% of all meals right now. It’s very tiny, right?
So what you’re doing is you’re using real estate and infrastructure to prepare and deliver meals to people at their homes. Restaurants still exist. We’re still going to want to go to restaurants. We’re still going to want to go outside. We learned that during COVID. We knew it before. We definitely know it after.
It’s not really a decimating real estate situation. It’s taking a thing we used to do for ourselves and creating a service that does it at higher quality.
Jason Calacanis
I see.
I like to say you don’t have to be wealthy to be healthy. You just need infrastructure to get that cost down. And so you’re doing something as a service that we—
Jason Calacanis
Super cool.
—used to do at home. I think in the super-long run you’re like, “Where’s the story on grocery stores?” In 20 years, I think everybody agrees you will have machines making very high-quality, very personalized meals for everybody.
Jason Calacanis
This will be good for Keith because he measures stuff down to about 5 calories based on his Instagram.
Keith, what’s your body fat? Like 7%? 8%?
Oh, God. No. It’s like 10%, man.
Jason Calacanis
Just open his Instagram. You can see he posted 4 times today about his body fat.
It’s—
He’s so disgusted with himself at 10%. It’s bad. It’s 10%. But I actually think the vision of this—the natural implication, and maybe the home-run version of this—is everybody has a private chef in their house. A robot in their house—
Jason Calacanis
Mm-hmm.
—that actually does this personalized, because people do want to cook at home, but they don’t—
Jason Calacanis
Mm-hmm.
—have the time.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
Or space and infrastructure. But, man, these delivery services are charging a lot. Rich people do this all the time, right? They do these crazy meal-delivery services for 200 bucks a day, and this is just going to abstract it down to everybody.
People get creative when there’s that empty space, to your point, Chamath, about what happens to all this space. When I lived in New York in the ’80s and ’90s, it was common in Tribeca and West Chelsea, where I lived, to take storefronts, put your little architect’s office in the front, and live in the back. Many people were hacking real estate.
We still need 5–10 million homes in this country, and they’re already doing this with malls. I keep seeing malls being turned into colleges and creative spaces. One of them in Boston—they turned the 2nd and 3rd floors into studio apartments for artists. So, where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
We could use the space, I imagine.
Where this goes—what Chamath’s saying, and where the real estate goes—is that we call it the internet food court, where—
Jason Calacanis
Hmm.
You’re on Amazon, right? It’s the everything store. Now imagine that for food, and then imagine you have an 8,000-square-foot facility where basically anything can be made.
Jason Calacanis
Anything can be made. Yeah.
Because if you have... That machine you saw has 18 dispensers for food and 10 different sauces. You get the idea. Now what about when it’s 50 or 100 dispensers for food? What if you have multiple machines with 100 dispensers for food?
Jason Calacanis
That’s crazy.
You can...
David Friedberg
The combinatorial math in terms of what's possible, what could be made, goes exponential. The internet food court is sort of the vision for where this all goes.
Jason Calacanis
Another example of The Bitter Lesson. The Bitter Lesson—yeah, we're going to get to that today in a very full docket.
2. Grok 4 Takes The Lead
Lots to discuss this week. Obviously, AI is continuing to be the big story in our industry, and for good reason. Our bestie Elon released Grok 4 Wednesday night: 2 versions, a base model and a heavy model. It's $30 a month for the base and $300 a month for the heavy model, which has a very unique feature: a multi-agent feature. I got to see this when I visited xAI a couple of weeks ago, where multiple agents work on the same problem simultaneously, then compare each other's work. It gives you kind of like a study group—the best answer by consensus. Really interesting.
According to Artificial Analysis benchmarks, Grok 4's base model has surpassed OpenAI's o3-pro and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro as the most intelligent model. This includes 7 different industry-standard evaluation tests. You can look it up: reasoning, math, coding, all that kind of stuff. This is book-smart, not necessarily street-smart, so it doesn't mean that these things can reason. There was a little kerfuffle on X, formerly known as Twitter, where xAI got a little frisky and was saying all kinds of crazy stuff and needed to be red-teamed a little bit more decisively.
Many of you know Grok 4 was trained on Colossus. That's that giant data center that Elon's been building, and we showed the chart here. Chamath, you sent us a link to The Bitter Lesson by Rich Sutton in the group chat. That's the 2019 blog post. We'll pull it up here for people to take a look at, and we'll put it in the show notes.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
Your reaction to both how quickly Elon has caught up—and that chart showed it—and how quickly he has taken the lead. I don't think people expected—
Chamath Palihapitiya
Well, it's—
Jason Calacanis
—him to take the lead, but here we are.
3. The Bitter Lesson Wins
Chamath Palihapitiya
Before we start, Nick, can you please show Elon's tweet about how they did on the AGI benchmark? It's absolutely incredible. Two things. One is how quickly, starting in March 2023—we're talking about less than 2.5 years—this team has accomplished what it has, and how far ahead they are of everybody else, as demonstrated by this.
But the second is a fundamental architectural decision that Elon made, which I think we didn't fully appreciate until now, and it maps to an architectural decision he made at Tesla as well. And for all we know, we'll figure out that he made an equivalent decision at SpaceX. That decision is really well encapsulated by this essay, The Bitter Lesson, by Rich Sutton.
Nick, if you can just throw this up here. To summarize what this says, it basically says that you're always better off, when you're trying to solve an AI problem, taking a general learning approach that can scale with computation, because it ultimately proves to be the most effective. The alternative would be something much more human-labored and human-involved that requires human knowledge.
The first method essentially allows you to view any problem as an endlessly scalable search or learning task. As it turned out, whether it's chess or Go or speech recognition or computer vision, whenever there were 2 competing approaches—one that used general computation and one that used human knowledge—the general-computation approach always won. And so it creates this Bitter Lesson for humans who want to think that we're at the center of all of this critical learning and all of these leaps.
In more AI-specific language, what it means is that a lot of these systems create embeddings that are just not understandable by humans at all, but they yield incredible results. So why is this crazy? He made this huge bet on this 100,000-GPU cluster. People thought, "Wow, that's a lot. Is it going to bear fruit?" Then he said, "No, actually, I'm scaling it up to 250,000." Then he said it's going to scale up to 1 million.
What these results show is that a general computational approach that doesn't require as much human labeling can actually get to the answer—and to better answers—faster. That has huge implications, because if you think about all these other companies, what has Meta been doing? They just spent $15 billion to buy 49% of Scale AI. That's exactly a bet on human knowledge. What is Google doing? What is OpenAI doing? What is Anthropic doing? So all these things come into question.
And then the last thing I'll say is, if you look back, he made this bet once before, which was Tesla FSD versus Waymo, and Tesla FSD only had cameras. It didn't have lidar. But the bet was, "I'll just collect billions and billions of driving miles before anybody else does and apply general compute, and it'll get to autonomy faster than the other, more laborious and very expensive approach."
I just think it's an incredible moment in technology where we see so many examples. Travis is another one—what he's just talked about. The Bitter Lesson is that you could believe that food is this immutable thing that's made meticulously by hand by these individuals, or you can take this general-purpose-compute approach, which is what he took, wait for these cost curves to come into play, and now you can scale food to every human on Earth. I just think it's so profoundly important.
David Friedberg
One thing I'll throw out there, Chamath, is that the Tesla approach for autonomy is taking human knowledge. In fact, the whole idea is to approximate human driving, right? That's the whole damn thing. Now, depending on your approach and the technology, you can do what's called an end-to-end approach, or you can look at perception, prediction, planning, and control, which are these 4 modules that you sort of engineer, if that makes sense. But it's approximating human driving to do it.
The difference is that I think Elon's taken an almost more human approach, which is, "I've got 2 eyes. Why can't my car do it like a human? I don't have any lidar spinning around on my head as a human. Why can't my car?" So it's kind of interesting. He's sort of taking what you're saying, Chamath, on the computation side, because Hardware 5 is coming out on Tesla probably next year—
Chamath Palihapitiya
Mm-hmm.
David Friedberg
—which is going to make a big difference in what FSD can do. That's the compute side you're talking about, but then he's approximating the human in driving.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, I just meant that, other than the first versions of FSD, which I think Andrej Karpathy talked about, they're not really so reliant anymore on human labeling per se, right? So that—
David Friedberg
Respect. Yeah, yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya
That interference.
David Friedberg
Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya
And then—
David Friedberg
Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya
The other crazy thing that he said is that subsequent versions of Grok are not going to be trained on any traditional data set that exists in the wild.
Guest
The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training. That happened basically last year. And so the only way to supplement that is with synthetic data, where the AI will write an essay or come up with a thesis, and then it will grade itself and go through this process of self-learning with synthetic data.
Chamath Palihapitiya
He said that he's going to have agents creating synthetic data from scratch that will then drive all the training, which I just think is crazy.
Jason Calacanis
Just explain this concept one more time with The Bitter Lesson. Hand-coding heuristics into the computer and saying, "Hey, here are specific openings in chess."
Chamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, like chess, right? Chess would say—
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, so you're hand-coding specific examples of openings in there, endgames, et cetera, versus just saying, "Play every possible game, and here's every game we have. Here's a—"
Chamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
Yeah, so the 2 approaches would be, let's say Travis and I were building competing versions of a chess solver. Travis's approach would say, "I'm just going to define the chessboard.
I'm gonna give the players certain boundaries in which they can move, right? So the bishop can only move diagonally, and there are a couple of boundary conditions, and I'm gonna create a reward function, and I'm just gonna let the thing self-learn and self-play. That's his version. And then what happens is, when you map out every single permutation, when you go and play Magnus, who's the best chess player in the world, what you're doing at that point is saying, “Okay, Magnus made this move.” So you search for what Magnus's move is, and you have a distribution of the best moves that you could make in response, or vice versa. That was the cutting-edge approach. The different approach, which is what people would think is more, quote-unquote, “elegant and less brute force,” would be for Jason and me to sit there and say, “Okay, if Magnus moves here, we should do this. We should do—
David Friedberg
Mm.
Chamath Palihapitiya
—this specific variation of the Sicilian Defense,” and it's too much human knowledge. And I think what it turned out was there was a psychological need for humans to believe we were part of the answer. But what this is showing is, because of Moore's Law and because of general computation, it's just not necessary. You just have to let go, give up control, and that's very hard for some people, and for others it's not.
Jason Calacanis
Well, it's also very hard in some circumstances where a car is driving down the road and it's learning in that process, which is why you need a safety driver, and I think Elon made the right decision to put one in there. Keith, your thoughts here.
David Friedberg
Well, well, yeah.
A couple points. It's not quite that binary, Chamath. I generally agree with your arc. But if you think about LLMs being the most important unlock in AI, LLMs are all trained on human writing. Someone wrote every piece of data that every LLM used; a human wrote it at some point in history. So yes, it's true that they've shocked everybody, including OpenAI's original team, on the implications—the broad implications—the general applicability to almost every problem. But it's not like there were some tablets floating in space that weren't drafted by humans that we've trained on.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Right.
David Friedberg
As you get into non-LLM-based models, you may be totally right, but almost no one is really using non-LLM-based models at scale. On driving specifically, Travis is totally right that humans are actually really good drivers, except when they get distracted. They get distracted by drugs or alcohol, by being tired, by turning the radio, or by chatting with their passenger. So training against human behavior has actually turned out to be a great decision because, for whatever sort of Darwinistic reasons, humans are pretty ideal drivers. And so you don't have to reason from first principles. This is a much better path.
And I think, again, there may be a broad lesson there. The most important thing, I think, as a VC, is what you said. We've been debating for years: should we invest in companies like Scale, Mercor, or Surge AI? The truth is, I think there's a very short half-life on human-labeled data. And so everybody who's investing in these companies is just looking at revenue traction. They really didn't understand that there may be a year, 2 years, 3 years max, when anybody uses human-labeled data for maybe anything.
Jason Calacanis
'Cause we hit the end of human knowledge, or just the collection of it is 99% done.
David Friedberg
Or you train on it so well that you don't need to label anymore. The machines know how to label as well as or better than a human. We're seeing this in the self-driving space: labeling was huge, right? You would have a 3-dimensional scene that's created by video plus lidar, let's say. Okay, I have to label all of these—what essentially become boxes; I've identified objects. Some of the players in the autonomous software space, the autonomous vehicle software space, are no longer doing any labeling because the machines are doing it all, just broadly.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. It'll just be built into the chipset that this is a stop sign. We know what a stop sign is. We don't need somebody to label it for the millionth time.
David Friedberg
It's like those CAPTCHAs. You're like, “Find the stop sign,” or, “What's the traffic light?” And eventually the machines are just way better than humans at identifying these things. To be very practical, when you see a stop sign, you don't have to identify that it's a stop sign. You just see that every human, when they encounter a stop sign, 99.9% of the time, they hit the brake, and they never actually know it's a stop sign. It's just: hit the brake when you see something that looks like this object.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. It's just a vibe.
David Friedberg
Yeah. It's a vibe.
Chamath Palihapitiya
I would just say that that's intuitive knowledge versus the expressly labeled human knowledge. The question for me is, if everybody was so reliant on human labeling initially, if you're an investor now, when you see these Grok 4 results, how do you make an investment decision that's not purely levered to just computation? So if you look at these results, does it mean that there's 300 to 1,000 basis points of lag between just letting the computers vibe themselves to the answer versus interjecting ourselves? If interjecting ourselves slows us down by 300 to 1,000 basis points per successive iteration, then over 2 or 3 iterations you've totally lost. So what does it mean for everybody that's not Grok when they wake up today and they have to decide, “How do I change my strategy or double down?”
I think—look, I'm not in the investment game, but if I were, it would be all about scientific breakthrough. So I sometimes get in this place where I'm looking, going down a path. I'll be up at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. My day hasn't quite started, but I'm not sleeping anymore. And I'll be on Quora and see some cool quantum physics question or something else I'm looking into, and I'll go down this thread with GPT or Grok. And I'll start to get to the edge of what's known in quantum physics, and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics, and we're approaching what's known, and I'm trying to poke and see if there's breakthroughs to be had. And I've gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.
And I pinged you on it at some point. I'm just like, “Dude, if I'm doing this and I'm a super amateur-hour physics enthusiast, what about all those PhD students and postdocs that are super legit using this tool?” And this is pre-Grok 4. Now with Grok 4, it could be this place where breakthroughs are actually happening—new breakthroughs.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Mm.
Jason Calacanis
Is your perception that the LLMs are actually starting to get to the reasoning level that they'll come up with a novel concept or theory and have that breakthrough, or that we're kind of reading into it and it's just trying random stuff at the margins? Or maybe it doesn't matter.
No, no, no. So what I've seen—and again, I haven't used Grok 4. I tried to use it early this morning, but for some reason I couldn't do it on my app. But let's say we're talking Grok 3 and existing ChatGPT as it is. No, it cannot come up with the new idea. These things are so wedded to what is known.
Even when I come up with a new idea, I have to really pull it out. It's like pulling a donkey. You're pulling it out because it doesn't want to break conventional wisdom. It's really adhering to conventional wisdom. You're pulling it out, and then eventually it goes, “Oh, you got something.”
But then when it says that—when it says that—you have to go, “Okay, it said that, but I'm not sure.” You have to double- and triple-check to make sure that you really got something.
Chamath Palihapitiya
To your point, when these models are fully divorced from having to learn on the known world and instead can just learn synthetically—
David Friedberg
Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya
—then everything gets flipped upside down to: what is the best hypothesis you have, or what is the best question? You could just give it some problem, and it would just figure it out.
Jason Calacanis
Mm.
4. AI Discovers New Science
So where I go on this one, guys, is it's all about the scientific method, right? If you have an LLM or foundational model of some kind that is the best in the world at the scientific method, game the F over. You basically just light up more GPUs, and you just got 1,000 more PhD students working for you.
I agree with that. I think that's fantastic because the scientific method also—the faster it is, the more you...
When you have a hypothesis, the faster you get a response, the more likely you are to dive in and dive in and dive in, recursively and recursively. Every millisecond of lag causes you to lose your train of thought, so to speak. You get the benefits that Travis is alluding to, plus speed, and you go places you never would have guessed.
This happens all the time when you run a company and you're doing analytics, and you have a tool that allows you to constantly query quickly, quickly, quickly—double-click, triple-click. You get to answers that you never get to if there's even a 1-, 2-, or 3-second delay, let alone sending it to a human. Secondly, where you actually see this today, it's already happening.
If you look at foundational models that just apply to science, there's lots of things about the human body, let's say in health and biology, that we humans don't actually understand—all the connections. Why do we do X? Why do some people get cancer? Why do other people not get cancer? Why does the brain work this way? Models trained solely on science tend to expose connections that no human has ever had before.
Jason Calacanis
Hmm.
And that's because the raw materials are there, and we only have a conscious awareness of, call it, 0.1 percent. But when you apply it to other human domains, where you're training on human data, human-produced data, human-produced output, you're limited to that output. So I think you just take the science and apply it writ large, and you're going to wind up finding things that no human has ever thought before.
And the thing about science, though, is that it's the hypothesis that you then have to test in the physical world. You're like, "Okay, if you've got this hive mind, this computation engine, this brain of sorts—"
Jason Calacanis
You wanted to say consciousness, but you stopped yourself.
Yeah. There's an idea. I was like, "How do I describe this?"
Jason Calacanis
The big C word: consciousness.
Yeah. But you need to be able to test in the physical world. So you can imagine a physical lab connected to one of these systems—
Jason Calacanis
Hmm.
—where you could say, "Okay, if it's a chemistry experiment, you could do chemistry experiments, or physics. You get the idea."
Jason Calacanis
What could go wrong?
It would be—yeah, no big deal.
Jason Calacanis
No.
It's going to be fine. But this is where it goes: If you have a scientific-method machine, you still have to be able to test your hypothesis. You have to go through the scientific method.
Jason Calacanis
And verification. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Calacanis
Wow. It's kind of mind-blowing. It reminds me of—
It's really mind-blowing.
Jason Calacanis
If you remember—I don't know if you guys remember dark matter and the discovery of it, as explained to me by Lisa Randall—the discovery was made not by knowing there was dark matter there and observing it, but by observing that there were gravitational forces around this other matter. Then they said, "Well, wait, what's causing that?" And that's where they found dark matter.
Here's why one of the 7 most difficult—and most important—problems in math is proving a general solution to something called Navier–Stokes, which is basically viscous fluid dynamics and conservation of mass. We use it every day in the design of everything. You know what? It hasn't been proved.
Jason Calacanis
Hmm.
Isn't that the craziest thing? You're just like—
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
"How is this even possible? We use it to design airplanes, to design everything." It hasn't been proved. And so you could just point a computer at this thing, and you would unlock all these incredible mysteries of the universe. We would probably find completely different propulsion systems. We could probably do things that we didn't think were possible. Teleportation—I mean, who knows what's possible?
Yeah. But remember how Elon talks about Grok and AI generally: Why are we here? What is the purpose?
Jason Calacanis
Meaning of the universe. Yeah.
What is the meaning of the universe? How does it work? A sort of fierce truth-seeking mechanism there.
Let me ask you a question, Keith, Travis, Jason. If you guys were running Grok 4—
That would be so much fun.
—how do you judo-flip OpenAI? They are marching steadfastly toward 1 billion MAU, then 1 billion DAU. It's a juggernaut. So how do you use the better product in a moment to judo-flip the less-better product?
Look, yeah, here's the thing: You do it the Elon way. You get a bunch of missionary, full-on missionary engineers who work twice as hard, and you have a culture that is ultra-fierce and truth-seeking. You don't get caught up in politics, bureaucracy, BS, and you just go for it.
And then you go, "Wow, scientific breakthrough, scientific method." You start winning on truth, and that will start—I believe that will start—to give OpenAI's product awesomeness a run for its money.
Mm-hmm.
But the product department at OpenAI—those guys are crushing.
Jason Calacanis
They're cracked. Yeah.
They're really good. They're not only ahead of the game, but they feel like they're just leading in a lot of different ways. But if you are better at truth, you'll eventually have an AI product manager.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, and on a tactical basis too, people forget how good Elon is at factories and physical, real-world things.
Hmm.
Jason Calacanis
What he did standing up Colossus—Jensen Huang was like, "How is this possible that you did this?" Right? His ability to build factories—and he said many times, "The factory is the product to Tesla." It's not the cars that come out of the factory or the batteries; it's the factory itself.
So if he can keep solving the energy problem with solar on one side and batteries, and standing up Colossus 2, 3, 4, and 5, he's going to have a massive advantage there, on top of Travis's missionary individuals—which, by the way, was what he backed before Sam Altman corrupted the original mission of OpenAI and made it ClosedAI. This is nothing derogatory toward him, but he did hoodwink and stab—
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
—Elon in the back. And it's not personal; he just screwed him over and—
Chamath Palihapitiya
Would you say he bamboozled him?
Jason Calacanis
Bamboozled him, screwed him, hoodwinked him—pick your term here—but he did him dirty. The original mission was to be missionary, open-source, all this content—
You're like 1,000 years old.
Jason Calacanis
That's the other piece I think is a wild card, and then I'm interested in Keith's position. Open-sourcing some of this could have profound ramifications. I think open-sourcing the self-driving data could have a really profound impact.
Elon wanted to do something really disruptive. He open-sourced his patents for charging. If he open-sourced the dataset in self-driving, does anybody have the ability to produce robotaxis at the scale he can do it? I don't think so. So maybe you—
Chamath Palihapitiya
Well, if Travis's hypothesis is true, then everybody will.
Jason Calacanis
Well, it just—
Everybody will what? Sorry, everybody will what, Chamath?
Chamath Palihapitiya
If you have access to the money that buys the compute, everyone could solve that problem.
Jason Calacanis
But it's the hardware piece I'm talking about.
Which problem?
Chamath Palihapitiya
He said, he said, if he published all the FSD data, could somebody build an autonomous vehicle?
Jason Calacanis
Well, yes, but could somebody produce 100 million robotaxis from a factory with batteries in them? That's—
Chamath Palihapitiya
Okay, well, no, that's a different question.
Jason Calacanis
That's the thing I'm saying.
Go ahead, Keith.
Last time I was a guest on All-In, we talked about vertical integration. Products really require vertical integration. Ultimately, you have a self-driving something that is custom-built for knowing it's going to be self-driving, and it interacts differently. The cost structure is different, the controls are different, the seating is different.
Everything—you build a product taking advantage of where in the stack you have the most competitive advantage, but then you leverage that and it reinforces. It's still why Apple, despite missing the AI wave, is still a pretty good company from any empirical standpoint. Their performance is absolutely miserable on the most important technology created over the last 70 years, but the company's still alive and still worth trillions of dollars because it's vertically integrated.
OpenAI, per your point, does have a good product team, and they need to stay ahead on the product level because they can't compete on the factory level. The way to stay ahead on the product level is shipping a device.
Jason Calacanis
They've gotta ship the device. It's gotta be good, it's gotta be right, it's gotta be the right form factor. It's gotta do things for humans that are unexpected. But then, if they do that, they're like Apple plus AI. Chamath, what's the paper you were talking about before? What was the name of it again?
Chamath Palihapitiya
The Bitter Lesson.
That, again, could apply to autonomous driving. Right now, it's still like, “Hey, how do I drive like a human?” We talked about that. But the leapfrog moment here could be like, “Hey, drive a car, make sure it's efficient, don't hit anybody, and just simulate that a quadrillion times, and it's all good.” Right?
But right now, we're still trying to drive like humans because we don't have enough data and therefore can't do enough compute. That's the global lesson, by the way. Chamath, you're totally right. Conceptually, the blog post is right, but that's only true when you have enough data. Depending upon the use case, the level of data you need may not be possible for years or decades, and you may need to hack your way there through human interactions.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
David Sacks
Physical-world AI is lacking in data, and so you just try to approximate humans.
5. Agents Take Over Browsers
Chamath Palihapitiya
I don't know if you guys have seen this. In related news, OpenAI and Perplexity are going after the browser. Perplexity launched Comet for their $200-a-month tier. I actually downloaded it. I'll show it to you in a second.
But this is a really interesting category. It's something developers can do already, and they do it all the time. But having your browser connected to agents lets you do really interesting things. I'll show you an example here that I just fired off while we're talking.
I just asked it, “Hey, give me the best flights on United Airlines, in business class, from San Francisco to New York City.” It does some searches, but what you see here is that it's popped up a browser window, and it's actually doing that work. You can see the steps it's using, and then I can actually open that browser window and watch it do that. This is just a screenshot of it.
It will open multiple of these. I was doing a search the other day saying, “Hey, tell me all the autobiographies I haven't bought on Amazon, put them into my shopping cart, and summarize each of them.” I like biographies, and I like doing it here.
When it did this last time, I was logged in under my account, and it basically put my flight into the checkout. Again, if you're a developer, you do this all day long. But this really seems to be a new product category. I'm curious if you guys have played with it yet, and what your thoughts are on having an agentic browser like this available to you to do these tasks in real time.
You can also connect your Gmail and your calendar to it. I did a search: “Tell me every restaurant I've been to and then put it by city.” Then I was going to open my OpenTable and pull that data as well.
What's interesting about this, Keith, and I know you're a product guy and you've done a lot of product work, I'm curious about your thoughts on it. You don't have to do this in the cloud. You're authenticated already into a lot of your accounts, nor do you have to worry about being blocked by these services because it doesn't look like a scraper or a bot. It's your browser doing the work. Your thoughts on this? Have you played with it at all?
Jason Calacanis
Yep. I think it's a great Hail Mary—
Attempt by Perplexity. I think without something like this, Perplexity is toast. With ChatGPT going to a billion users, it's becoming the verb—the way you describe using AI as a normal consumer. There's nothing left of Perplexity if they can't pull this off.
So it's a great idea because the history of consumer technology companies is that whoever's first has the high ground, in a military sense, and a lot of control. This is actually what Google should be doing, truthfully. Google Search—core search—is toast. Since they have Chrome and, theoretically, a quality team in Gemini, they should be putting these 2 things together and hoping to compete with ChatGPT.
They're going to lose the search game. The assets that are best at Google right now have nothing to do with search. Every other product is the only thing that's going to save that company, if they can figure out how to use them.
Jason Calacanis
Hmm.
David Sacks
Travis, your thoughts on this category? Anything come to mind for you in terms of feature sets that would be extraordinary here? I know you like to think about products and the consumer experience.
It's really interesting. As you guys know, I've been spending my time on real estate and construction and robotics, so I've been out of this kind of consumer software game for a long time. But it's super interesting. Over the last 6 months, there have been a number of consumer software CEOs. When I hang out with them, they're like, “Yo, how are we going to keep doing what we do when the agents take over?”
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. The paradigm shift is so profound that the idea that you would visit a webpage goes away, and you're just in a chat dialogue.
Yeah. You have an agent—
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
—that's just taking care of your flights for you.
Jason Calacanis
Hmm.
So I think there's a leapfrog over that. I think it's just like you tell something, “Yo, I want to go to New York. I'm looking at this time range. Can you just go find something I'm probably going to like and give me a couple options?”
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
And it's just a whole—you have an interface, and then, is this thing that you just showed on Perplexity the interface, or do I just have an agent that goes and does everything for me? And is this the start of that? I just haven't spent enough time.
I do know that every consumer software CEO that has an app in the App Store is tripping. They're tripping right now.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
And I mean big boys. I mean guys with real stuff. Sometimes I'm doing almost like therapy sessions with them. I'm like, “It's gonna be fine.”
Jason Calacanis
It's gonna be okay.
“You actually have stuff. You have real stuff that's of value. They can't replace it with an agent.” And they're—
Jason Calacanis
So you're lying to them. You're doing hospice care, and you're telling them everything's gonna be okay, but the patient's not gonna die.
No, they're zeroing options on Robinhood while he's like, “Yeah, yeah, tell me more, tell me more.”
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
No, guys.
Jason Calacanis
All these things.
There's certain—
Jason Calacanis
No.
—things that are protected, and there's certain things that aren't. That's all. Simple as that.
Jason Calacanis
Well, Chamath, let's talk about that, because you and I are old enough to remember General Magic. This vision was out there a long time ago with personal digital assistants, and you would just talk to an agent. It would go do this for you. This feels like a step toward that, where it does all the work for you, presents you the final moment, and says, “Approve.”
David Sacks
So almost like a concierge or a butler, yeah.
6. Perplexity Needs A Wedge
Jason Calacanis
I think what you're describing is what we want, but I think more specifically for today, Keith and Travis totally nail it. Look, I think building a browser is an absolutely stupid capital allocation decision.
Just totally stupid and unjustifiable in 2025. Specifically for Perplexity, I think their path to building a legacy business is to replace Bloomberg. Everything that they've done in financial information and financial data, in going beyond the model, has been excellent.
As somebody who's paid $25,000 to Bloomberg for many years, the terminal is atrocious. It's terrible. It's not very good. It's very limited, and anybody that could build a better product would take over a $100 billion enterprise because I think it's there for the taking. I wish that Perplexity would double and triple down on that. And so, when you see this kind of random sprawl—
Chamath, let's do it. Let's do it, Chamath. Let's just go do it.
Jason Calacanis
All right.
When you do the random sprawl, I think it doesn't work.
Jason Calacanis
Boomer, boomer, boomer.
But I just want to say, a browser is like the dumbest thing to build in 2025 because, in a world of agents, what is a browser? It's a glorified markup reader. It's handling HTML. It's handling CSS and JavaScript. It's doing some networking. It's doing some security. It's doing some rendering, but it's all under-the-hood type stuff.
I get it that we had to deal with all that nonsense in 1998 to try Lycos or Google for the first time. But in 2025, there's something that you just speak to, and eventually there's probably something that's in your brain, which you just think, and it just does it. You're thinking, “I need a flight to JFK.”
Or, at the maximum today, in a very elegant, beautiful search bar, you type in, “Get me a flight.” And it already knows what to do.
Jason Calacanis
Keith, in some ways, this is a step toward that ultimate vision, so you'd think it's worth it for Perplexity to make this waypoint, perhaps, if you look at it as a waypoint between the ultimate vision, which is a command line, an earpiece, a pocket—
How do you get distribution, Jason, for the 19th web browser in 2025?
Jason Calacanis
Well, yeah, that is a challenge, and I think most people are speculating Apple, which has a lot of users, might buy Perplexity or do a deal with Perplexity and give them that distribution because of the Justice Department case against Google.
Chamath Palihapitiya
So there's been a lot of speculation about that. But Keith, what do you think?
Well, I don't think they'd buy anything worth it. What is Apple going to get? I mean, you continue this failed strategy of Apple.
Apple has missed every possible window on AI and continues to miss it. It has cultural challenges. I think the CEO has challenges, I think culturally they have challenges, and I think they have infrastructure challenges. So it's not an easy fix. But buying Perplexity isn't going to help.
Chamath's strategy is actually a pretty coherent one for Perplexity, qua Perplexity. So I think that's not a bad idea.
Jason Calacanis
A pick-a-vertical-and-own-it strategy, in this case.
Not a bad idea. Especially because you need unique data sources. Some of those data sources may or may not license their data to OpenAI. So you can do some clever things there, but I don't think there's any residual value that Apple would get out of Perplexity, except for some product taste.
But what are you going to spend, like, $1 billion for product taste? I mean, Mark Zuckerberg is spending hundreds of billions of dollars, or whatever he's spending these days. And Grok 4, if anything, shows that Mark Zuckerberg really does need to spend money to build a whole new team, because everything they've done in AI has also missed the boat.
Jason Calacanis
Well, I mean, Keith, the way you phrase it there almost makes it worth it for Apple to throw a Hail Mary: have a team with some taste, because that's how they tend to do things—something elegant. And why not just throw your search to it, throw $10 billion at Perplexity—
Chamath Palihapitiya
What's elegant is if there'd be a bunch of agents in just a chat box.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Seeing a bunch of visual diarrhea is not elegant. It's lazy.
Jason Calacanis
All right.
David Friedberg
Chamath, on our little Bloomberg clone, I'll give you naming rights. So you can call it Poly Hypatia. So, hey, can somebody bring up the Poly Hypatia?
Jason Calacanis
Oh, you like it?
David Friedberg
It just rolls right off your tongue.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Actually, it's pretty good.
David Friedberg
Travis, listen, we were trying to do a screen of companies, and it maxes out at 5 companies on a specific type of screen where you're trying to compare, like, stock price to EBITDA, and you're like, “Okay, I can only choose 5, I guess. So which 5 should I choose?”
Jason Calacanis
That happened when Laffont was on, right? Like, 2 episodes ago. He was like, “I can't pull this up. It's limited to 6 companies.”
Chamath Palihapitiya
Dude, what do people use Bloomberg for?
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, the back 5.
Chamath Palihapitiya
They use it for the messaging. My team has traded huge positions via text message on Bloomberg, so there is something very valuable there. But the core usability and the core UI of that company has not evolved.
Jason Calacanis
I have my contribution. I have a domain name.
Chamath Palihapitiya
And Perplexity is very good at that, by the way. They do a very good job.
Jason Calacanis
I got a new domain name, Travis. Let this one just sink in here. This is my way to weasel my way into the deal. Begin.com.
Chamath Palihapitiya
No.
Jason Calacanis
Begin.com.
Chamath Palihapitiya
You own that, don't you?
Jason Calacanis
I do. I'm just a little— I snipe some good ones once in a while. I got Begin.com and I got Annotated.com. Those are my 2 little domain names.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Bro, you're like one of these old people that show up at those flea markets—
Jason Calacanis
Oh, like the Antiques Roadshow, and they almost sell you a Picasso?
Chamath Palihapitiya
And you're like, “Oh, I have this thing that I bought in 1845.”
David Friedberg
Guys, Jason is the daddy in GoDaddy.
Jason Calacanis
I am.
David Friedberg
Okay? That's just what it is.
Jason Calacanis
I'm your daddy. Who's your daddy? Hey, speaking of Daddy, let's go to our next story.
David Friedberg
Come on.
7. Elon Builds A Third Party
Jason Calacanis
Is now the right time for a third party? Elon seems to think so. Last week, he announced that he would be creating a new political party. I'll let you decide who Daddy is in this one.
He said, quote, “When it comes to bankrupting our country with waste and graft, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy.” He has not yet outlined a platform for the American Party. We talked about it here last week. I listed 4 core values, which seemed to get a good reaction on X: fiscal responsibility/DOGE; sustainable energy and dominance in that; manufacturing in the U.S., which Elon has done single-handedly here; pronatalism, which I think is a passion project for him; and Chamath, you punched it up with the fifth: technological excellence.
According to Polymarket, there's a 55% chance that Elon registers the American Party by the end of the year. One thing I was trying to figure out is: just how unpopular are these candidates and these political parties?
This is a very interesting chart that I think we can have a great conversation around. It turns out we used to love our presidents. If you look here at Kennedy, his highest approval rating was 83%, and his lowest was 56%. That was his lowest approval rating, so he operated at a very high level.
Look at George W. Bush. During and after 9/11, 92% was his peak; his lowest was 19%. He was a wartime president. But then you get to Trump 1, Biden 1, and Trump 2: historically low approval ratings. Their high-water marks were 49 for Trump 1, 63 for Biden 1, and 47 for Trump 2; their lows were 29, 31, and 40. So maybe it is time for a third-party candidate. Let's discuss it, boys.
David Friedberg
I have no idea how to read this graph. I have zero idea. I'm like, “What is happening here?”
Chamath Palihapitiya
It is the worst.
David Friedberg
This is the worst.
Jason Calacanis
This is the worst-formatted chart. This is a confusing chart. But the reason I'm putting it up is for debate. So you should be saying thank you for—
Chamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, we're debating why you put it up.
Jason Calacanis
Creating great debate.
Here's another one: Gallup poll, Americans' desire for a viable third party, 63% in 2023. So it's bumping along at an all-time high.
David Friedberg
Okay. I'm really concentrating on this one.
Jason Calacanis
Okay. Anyway, I'm going to stop there.
Chamath Palihapitiya
What's the gray?
David Friedberg
Okay.
Jason Calacanis
I'm going to let you—
Chamath Palihapitiya
Oh.
David Friedberg
Yeah.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Okay, got it.
Jason Calacanis
Those are the different percentages during that time period and how popular parties were.
David Friedberg
Okay, got it.
Chamath Palihapitiya
I got it.
Jason Calacanis
Let's stop here. This is a good place to stop. What are your thoughts?
Yes.
Yeah. Look, a couple of points.
The idea of Elon creating a third party is, for any other human being, absolutely absurd and ridiculous. Elon has obviously done incredible things, so dismissing anything he's touching is a bad idea. However, I think the best metaphor I've seen is it's a little bit like Michael Jordan tried to play baseball and became a replacement-level baseball player, which is actually really hard to do, by the way.
Elon is probably a replacement-level politician. He's Michael Jordan for entrepreneurial stuff, but the third-party stuff is not going to work.
First of all, that chart is misleading. It's a flaw of averages. Well, it's badly designed, and it's a flaw of averaging public approval.
Trump is incredibly popular among Republicans. He actually has the highest approval rate of any Republican ever measured in recorded history. It's 95%. Reagan peaked out at 93%. It's just Democrats don't like him, which is perfectly fine.
Being polarizing is an ingredient to being successful, including with people on this show. The point of accomplishing things in the world is you don't really care what half the world thinks. You need to make sure that there's a lot of people who like you and really approve and are enthusiastic about what you do, and Trump is about as popular with his party as anybody's ever been, ever, period. No exceptions.
Jason Calacanis
Hm.
Secondly, MAGA has kind of already changed the Republican Party. Trump is sort of like a third-party takeover of the Republican Party, and so it's kind of already happened. Maybe you can do this every 20 or 30 years. I don't think you can have this kind of transformation of one party within a too-compressed period of time for a lot of reasons.
Third is, really smart parties absorb. The lesson of political science—unfortunately, I studied political science. I wasted kind of my college years, and instead of studying CS, maybe then I'd be coding stuff and doing physics like Friedberg.
But one thing I did learn is smart parties absorb the best ideas of third parties. So the oxygen is usually not there because there's a Darwinian evolution: if you get traction on an idea, it's really easy to conscript some of those ideas and take away the momentum.
No third-party candidate that's a true third party has won a Senate seat since 1970.
And that's actually Bill Buckley's brother, so he has some name ID.
The other thing Elon, I think, is missing, and the proponents of what he's doing are missing, is that people vote not just for ideas; they vote for people. It's a combination. The product is: What do you believe, and who are you? You can't divorce the two. Trump is a person, and that generates a lot of enthusiasm. It's one of the reasons why he has challenges in midterms, because he's not on the ballot. His ideas may be on the ballot, but he is not specifically on the ballot.
Elon can't be the figurehead of the party; he literally can't, constitutionally. You need a face that's a person. Obama, a Clinton—there are reasons why people resonate—
Jason Calacanis
Sure.
David Sacks
—Reagan. Without that personality, specific ideas just are not going to galvanize the American people.
Jason Calacanis
Okay, so the counter to that, and what people believe he's going to try to do, is win a couple of seats in the House, Friedberg, and maybe 1 or 2 Senate seats. If he were to do that, those things are pretty affordable to back: a couple of million dollars for a House race, and a Senate race maybe $25 million. If Elon puts, I don't know, $250 million to work every 2 years—which I think he put $280 million to work on the last one—he could create the Joe Manchin moment, and he could build a caucus, a platform, a Grover Norquist kind of pledge along these lines.
So what do you think of that? If he's not going to create a viable third-party presidential candidate, could he, Friedberg, pick off a couple of Senate seats, pick off a couple of congressional seats?
David Friedberg
Okay, so first, I have this axiom that I'm making up right now. It's called “Elon is almost always right.”
Jason Calacanis
Okay.
David Friedberg
Okay? All right? And—
Jason Calacanis
Elon was right about everything.
David Friedberg
Seriously, let's just be real. Honestly, the things he's upset about and that he's riled up about, especially when you look at the deficit, I'm right on board that train, part 1. Part 2, we've never had somebody with this kind of capital who can be a, quote-unquote, “party boss” outside of the system, right?
There are a lot of people who agree with the types of things he's saying, and he knows how to—Elon, in his own right, kind of has a populist vibe. He does his thing, and he's turned X into what it is, and he's a big part of X. So I think it's great. Honestly, there are moves you can make in the Senate and House, just having a few folks and then them being levers to get the things you want done. That's part 1.
Part 2 of that is that the threat of that happening can make good things happen separately, even if it doesn't go all the way. I just love it.
Jason Calacanis
Sure. I'm—
David Friedberg
I'm on the Elon train.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, I'm in love with this role for Elon more than picking a party, because he's picking a very specific platform that I think resonates with folks, which is: just balance the budget, don't put us in so much debt, and let's have some sustainable energy. Job done. Create jobs in America.
Yeah, the problem with that is that he's actually wrong about the reason why we have a deficit or debt. It's not because we're undertaxed; we're massively overspending. If we just—
Jason Calacanis
Okay.
David Sacks
Well, then, he—
Jason Calacanis
No, I think he believes we're overspending.
David Sacks
Yeah—
Jason Calacanis
—then he should've been supporting the last One Big Beautiful Bill, because if you just held federal spending to 2019 levels—2019's not—
Yeah.
David Sacks
—decades ago. Literally, with our current tax revenues, we would be in a surplus.
David Friedberg
$500 billion.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
David Sacks
Yeah, so all we need to do is cut spending. Now, I admit that there is some—
Jason Calacanis
Why didn't that happen with the One Big Beautiful Bill?
David Sacks
Well, this is where details do matter. I think there is a willingness and a discipline problem in both parties, and I think maybe he can help fix that. The second thing is that we have these arcane rules, particularly in the Senate, that you need 60 votes in many ways to cut things except through very hacky methods. That's a reality.
So the best thing, truthfully, he could do is help get the Republican Party to 60 votes, and then, in theory, he could be absolutely furious if you didn't cut back to 2019 levels. But it's very tricky.
Or you can just overrule. The filibuster is an artifact of history, and at some point some majority leader is just going to say, “We're done with the filibuster,” and steamroll through all the cuts at 50 or 51 votes, which you can do. There's no constitutional right to a filibuster. It is an artifact of centuries of American history, and at some point it's going to go away. So maybe the time is now. Maybe we should just fix everything now.
Chamath Palihapitiya
I think you're exactly right. I think that the filibuster is just a matter of time. I think it's on borrowed time. And I think in a world where it is on borrowed time, Jason, your path is probably the one that gives the America Party, if it does come into existence, the most leverage, which is: if you control 3 to 5 independent candidates, you gain substantial leverage.
I just want to take a step back and note something. I don't know if you guys know this, but the only reason we're even having this conversation, or this is even possible, is because in 2023, the FEC—the Federal Election Commission—actually released guidance and changed a bunch of rules. The big change that they made then was that it allowed super PACs to do a lot more than just run ads.
Up until that point, all you could do if you were a super PAC was basically run advertising—television and radio, I guess online as well. But what they were unable to do before 2023 was fund ground operations. They were allowed to do things like door-knocking, phone banking, and get-out-the-vote efforts. In other words, what happened was a super PAC became more like a full campaign machine, and Trump showed the blueprint of using a super PAC—specifically his—to win the presidential election.
He was able to fund this massive ground game. He built infrastructure across the swing states. He was obviously incredibly effective. Now that playbook can actually be used by other folks. To the extent that Elon decides to use those changed FEC rules, Jason, I think what you said is the only path.
Jason Calacanis
And—
Chamath Palihapitiya
But I just wanted to double-click on Sacks's point because it's so important. I do think the filibuster is going to go away, and it is because the arcaneness of these rules—having to do with a reconciliation bill, then needing a supermajority, a veto-proof supermajority, and in the other case—just means that nothing gets done. I think somebody will eventually get impatient and just steamroll this thing.
Jason Calacanis
We've never had so many people say they feel politically homeless as we did the last 2 cycles, and that includes many people on this podcast, people in our friend circle. I think just the idea that Elon could create a platform that people could opt into and support—the existence of that would make the other 2 parties get their act together.
Chamath Palihapitiya
By the way, the other thing that—
Jason Calacanis
And I think what we need is a little bit of a stick there and a carrot.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
Hey, if you don't control spending, there's this third option. And if Friedberg and I are in it, and Keith, I know you'll never leave the Republican Party, but Chamath, you're probably set where you want to be right now. But I can tell you, we go through—
Chamath Palihapitiya
Jason—
Jason Calacanis
—our top 10 or 20 friends. Out of those, 50% will join Elon's party day 1.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Well, look, the other thing, Jason, that Sacks said, which I think is really important, is if he were to run people, I think they have to transcend politics and policy. I think they need to be straight-up bosses, people who have enormous name recognition, so that effectively what you're voting is a name and not an agenda.
Equivalent to, I think, what happened to Schwarzenegger when he ran. He ran on an enormous amount of name recognition in the Gray Davis recall. He didn't run on a platform. I don't think any of us could mention—
Jason Calacanis
Which is J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance had this great book that captured people's imagination. He's an incredible speaker. He pisses off a third or two-thirds of the country, depending on where you are in the country, but you can't ignore him. I think Elon can find 10 J.D. Vance-type characters and back them fairly easily. He is a magnet for talent. People will line up. I've already been contacted by high-profile people who say—
Chamath Palihapitiya
I was actually thinking—
Jason Calacanis
—“I'm thinking of running. Can you put me in touch with Elon?” Very high-profile people.
Chamath Palihapitiya
I was thinking more like actors and sports stars, meaning they just come with their own built-in distribution. I think you almost have to rank X followers and Instagram followers and do a join and say, “Okay, these are…” Do you know what I mean? I think it's totally different—
Jason Calacanis
Sure.
Yeah, you create an X-Y axis, and, yeah—
No, it's painful, guys. It's painful. Let's not get more celebrities as politicians. Let's get people who've led large efforts, large initiatives, complex things.
Jason Calacanis
Ideally, but they still have to communicate, right, Sacks? They have to be able to communicate—
Chamath Palihapitiya
Sure.
Jason Calacanis
…
On a podcast. That's the new platform. If they can't spend 2 hours, 3 hours chopping it up on a podcast like this—
David Friedberg
No, of course.
Jason Calacanis
Or Joe Rogan—you know, that's Kamala's—the reason she couldn't even contend was because she couldn't hang for 2 hours in an intellectual discussion. If you can't hang—
David Friedberg
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
—you’re out in today's political arena.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, I get that. That's real.
David Friedberg
It'll be interesting to see if he can tune his algorithm for talent, which is epic, to—
Jason Calacanis
Hmm.
David Friedberg
—tune for politics, because it's a slightly different audience. But if you can tune the algorithm and quality, that might work. I think you can win a few House races. I think that's doable. I don't think you can win a Senate race.
Jason Calacanis
Hmm. Well, there it is, Elon. Keith doesn't think you can win a Senate race, but he thinks you'll win a couple of congressional ones. Thanks for giving him the motivation, Keith. I appreciate it.
That is the biggest mistake you've ever made. He's now going to win 2. People in the Republican Party right now are going, "Oh, no, don't poke the tiger."
David Friedberg
But that's how Trump got into politics, so I don't want to be Obama here—
Jason Calacanis
You just Obama—
David Friedberg
—complaining about politics.
Jason Calacanis
Elon, right? Yeah. Congratulations. All right, listen.
8. SCOTUS Clears RIF Planning
SCOTUS made a big decision here. This is a really important decision. They've sided with Trump on plans for federal workforce RIFs, or reductions in force, for those of you who don't know. As you know, Elon and Trump wanted to downsize the 3 million people who are federal employees. This is just federal employees we're talking about. We're not talking about the military, and we're not talking about state and city employees. That's tens of millions of additional people.
If you remember, Trump issued this executive order back in February when he got into office, implementing the President's DOGE Workforce Optimization Initiative. He asked all the federal agencies, "Hey, just prepare a RIF for their departments, consistent with applicable laws." That was part of this EO.
In April, the American Federation of Government Employees, AFGE, sued the Trump administration, saying the president must consult Congress on large-scale workforce changes. This is a key debate because Congress, as you know, has the power of the purse. They set the money, but the president and the executive branch have to execute on that, and that's the key here. So they accused Trump of violating the separation of powers under the Constitution. AFGE has 820,000 members.
In May, a San Francisco-based federal judge sided with the unions, blocking the executive order. The judge, who was appointed by Clinton, said any reduction in the federal workforce must be authorized by Congress. This is a key issue, and the White House submitted an emergency appeal, yada yada.
8 of 9 Supreme Court justices sided with the White House in overturning this block. The reasoning is that it's very likely the White House will win the argument over the executive order. They have the right to prepare a RIF. The question is, can they actually execute on that RIF, and who has that power, Chamath? Does the power reside with the president to make large-scale RIFs, or do they have to consult Congress first? Your thoughts on this issue.
Chamath Palihapitiya
It's an incredibly important ruling, incredibly right. I think President Trump should have absolute leeway to decide how the people that report to him act and do their job.
If you take a step back, Jason, there are more than 2,000 federal agencies. Employees plus contractors, I think, number almost 3 million people. If you put 3 million people into 2,000 agencies and then you give them very poor and outdated technology, which unfortunately most of the government operates on, what are you going to get? You're going to get incredibly slow processes. You're going to get a lot of checking and double-checking, and you're ultimately just going to get a lot of regulations because they're trying to do what they think is the right job.
So, since 1993, what have we seen? Regulations have gotten out of control. It's like 100,000 new rules per some number of months. It's just crazy. So eventually, we all succumb to an infinite number of rules that we all end up violating and don't even know it.
Jason Calacanis
Hmm.
Chamath Palihapitiya
So if the CEO of the United States, President Trump, isn't allowed to fire people, then all of that stuff just compounds. I think that this is a really important thing that just happened. It allows us to now level-set how big the government should be, but more importantly, the number of people in the government are also the ones who then direct downstream spending and make net-new rules. If you can slow the growth of that down, you're actually doing a lot.
In many ways, I wish Elon had come in and created DOGE now. Could you imagine if DOGE was created the day after this Supreme Court ruling? It would've been a totally different outcome, I think, because with that Supreme Court ruling in hand, these guys probably would've been like a hot knife through butter.
Jason Calacanis
Hmm. Friedberg?
Chamath Palihapitiya
So I think it's a big deal.
David Friedberg
Except that ruling doesn't happen without DOGE. DOGE caused that ruling to occur.
Chamath Palihapitiya
True.
Jason Calacanis
Well, the EO did.
David Friedberg
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
The EO—you could have passed it later, which triggered the lawsuit.
David Friedberg
Right, right, but it was all DOGE-style, though. You know what I'm saying? It was interrelated.
Jason Calacanis
If he wasn't firing people, they probably wouldn't have felt the need, to your point, Friedberg, to actually file this. But Friedberg, if you are living in the age of AI efficiency right now, operations of companies are changing dramatically. Can you imagine telling somebody, "You can be CEO, but you can't change personnel"? That's the job. You get to be CEO, but you just can't change the players on the team. You can buy the Knicks, but you can't change the coach or any of the players.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Well, no, you can grow it. You just can't shrink it.
David Friedberg
Right.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, so—
It's like running a unionized company, which actually does exist—there are large unionized companies where you can't do any of these things.
Jason Calacanis
Right. Do they still exist, or are they all gone?
I think they still ex—
Jason Calacanis
They're gone quickly.
David Friedberg
Yeah, probably.
David Sacks
I think this just gets back to what Congress is actually authorizing when a bill occurs. There are certain things that are specific and certain things that aren't, and I'm not sure that, in a lot of these bills, it's very specific about exactly how many people must be hired.
I'm just doing the common man's sort of approach to this, which is: if the law says you have to hire X number of people, then that is what it is. If the law says, "Here's some money to spend. Here are the ways in which to spend it," but it's not specific about how many people you hire, then that is different.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, it should be outcome-based. "Hey, here's the goal. Here are the key objectives," right?
But Travis is totally right. There are a variety of different laws, some with incredible specificity, some with very broad mandates. The Constitution clearly says that all executive power resides in the President of the United States, period. There are no exceptions there.
However, Congress does appropriate money, and post-Watergate, many people think Congress has the power to force the president to spend the money. You can debate that, and you can debate it on a per-statute basis. That will be more nuanced, and that's going to get litigated—whether the president can refuse to spend money that Congress explicitly instructed him to spend, sometimes called empowerment. That's a very interesting intellectual debate.
This one's a little bit easier. It'll get more complicated again. This EO is only approved to allow for the planning. I think the vote might be closer. I think there's still a majority on the Supreme Court for the actual implementation, but it may not be 8–1 when there's a specific plan that has to navigate its way through the courts again.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. It's super fascinating. I wonder if they're going to get to the point where they're going to say in every bill, "You need to hire this number of people to hit this goal."
Well, I don't know if they can. That's where—
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
—it gets borderline unconstitutional when you actually prescribe that the president, in the exercise of his constitutional duties, has to hire a certain number of people.
Jason Calacanis
Mm-hmm.
Well, I'm not sure, Keith. They prescribe a whole bunch of other things. They must appropriate money to this specific institution to do this specific work.
I know, but—
—
But that's not an executive function. If you said the Secretary of State has to have X number of employees doing something, the Secretary of State is your personal representative to conduct foreign affairs on behalf of the President of the United States. It gets a little bit messier as you translate it to people.
Congress does set which people are subject to Senate confirmation and what their salaries and compensation bands are.
So it's never going to be fully binary where the president can do whatever he wants, and I don't think it'll be constitutional for Congress to mandate and put all kinds of handcuffs on the president.
Jason Calacanis
Well, then you also have performance that comes in here. What if you look at the Department of Education and say, “Scores have gone down. We've spent this money. We're not getting the result. Therefore, these people are incompetent, therefore I'm firing them for cause, and I'm going to hire new people.” How are you going to stop the executive from doing that?
Well, there's been a bunch of litigation in parallel to this litigation about the president's ability to fire people. And for the most part, the Supreme Court has basically, with maybe the exception of the Federal Reserve chair, said that the president can fire pretty much anybody he wants.
Jason Calacanis
I mean, that's the way to go. I hate to be cutthroat about it—
Well, if they're a presidential appointee—
Jason Calacanis
—but if the results aren't there—
I think if they're a presidential—
Jason Calacanis
—then you fire people.
Yeah, if they're a presidential appointee, the president should be able to fire you at will.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
Just like if you're a VP at one of our companies, the CEO should be able to fire you at will.
Jason Calacanis
But what about, Keith, if the whole department sucks? “Hey, you guys were responsible for early education. You had to put together a plan. The plan failed. Everybody's fired. We're starting over.” You should be allowed to do that.
Maybe.
Jason Calacanis
How are we going to have an efficient government?
I mean, some of these departments were created by congressional statute, like the Department of Education in 1979. And you're right, every single educational stat has gotten worse in the United States since the department was created. But there is a law on the books that says there shall be a Department of Education, so you may have to repeal that.
Jason Calacanis
All right. Listen, we're at an hour and a half, gentlemen. Do you want to do the FICO story, or should we just wrap, Chamath? We've got plenty of show here. It's a great episode. Anything else you want to hit?
I don't really have much to say on the FICO story. I thought these other topics were really good, though.
Jason Calacanis
We did great today. This is a great panel. I'm so excited you guys are here. Let me just ask you guys: Any off-duty stuff that you can share with us, with the audience? Any recommendations—restaurants, hotels, trips, movies you watch, books you read? Keith, I know that you are an active guy. What's on your agenda this summer? Anything interesting you can share with the audience that you're consuming, conspicuous or otherwise?
9. The Panel Goes Off Duty
Well, I don't want to share any good restaurants or hotels because those—
Jason Calacanis
Oh, you're gatekeeping?
—are public, of course.
Jason Calacanis
You're gatekeeping? Come on, man.
Absolutely.
Jason Calacanis
Give us your favorite New York place.
Amazing. Amazing.
It's like if you have a babysitter, you're not going to tell everybody who your babysitter is.
Jason Calacanis
Yes. Can I get your nanny's email?
Exactly. But there are things that are, what do you call it, no-marginal-cost consumption, like Netflix. So, for example, this documentary on Osama bin Laden is phenomenal. I don't know if any—
Jason Calacanis
Oh, there's—
—of you have seen it.
Jason Calacanis
I haven't seen it.
It's brand new. And I'm a student of this stuff, and I thought I knew the whole story, et cetera. Watch episode 1. Just start with episode 1, and it blew me away with new information, new footage—just absolutely incredible stuff. So I highly, highly recommend it.
Jason Calacanis
What was the big takeaway for you so far?
I don't know if there's any specific takeaway, but so many parts of the story are misunderstood and not really understood, and how the various confluences of somewhat random things lead to a very catastrophic result. But it's as dramatic as the best movie, and it's a full documentary. You'll learn things and absorb things. I've been recommending it to friends, and for a story you think you know, it's incredibly revealing.
Jason Calacanis
Okay.
Travis, anything you got on your plate there that you're enjoying? A restaurant, a dish?
Look, Jason, I go to Austin a lot.
Jason Calacanis
Yes. Love it.
Basically, from March till October, I do about 15 weekends in Austin. I have a lake house. Jason's hung out a couple of times. I love water skiing. That's my whole thing. That's my thing—I've just loved it since I was a kid.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
It's lake life. I call it lake life. So that's a thing. And then, recently, this is a little bit of a side quest. I recently purchased the preeminent backgammon engine.
Jason Calacanis
XG.
XG. That's right. The acronym is Extreme Gammon. It's the preeminent engine, so all the pros rate themselves based on this. It was built by this amazing entrepreneur, this guy Xavier, who is just a full-on, ultra, ultra—what's the word I'm looking for? It's not—
Jason Calacanis
Savant?
Like a savant, essentially.
Jason Calacanis
Hmm.
But he hasn't worked on it for many years, so I'm getting back into it and making it—taking modern machine-learning, deep-learning techniques and big compute, and saying, “Can we push the game of backgammon forward?” It's super exciting. And also training apps to get people up to speed quickly. I played in my first backgammon tournament and cashed.
Jason Calacanis
I love it.
So that was pretty cool.
Jason Calacanis
No, wait. You—okay.
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
All due respect, you're the founder of Uber, you're very high-profile, and you go to this backgammon— is this held at the Motel 6, in a conference room in the back? Take me to the vibes.
It was amazing. It was about a month ago. There was a big tournament, and the United States Backgammon Federation had this big tour. It was, I guess, at the LAX Hilton in Los Angeles.
Jason Calacanis
Oh, yes.
And it was in the basement of the Hilton.
Jason Calacanis
Great.
It had those kinds of legit vibes. I went in super low-pro, just did my thing, but eventually was recognized.
Jason Calacanis
Hmm.
But I was not recognized as the founder of Uber. I was recognized as the owner of XG.
Jason Calacanis
Love it.
And then there was a full-on melee. They were like, “Oh, the owner of XG, Travis, is here.”
Jason Calacanis
Chamath, I feel like we've got a window here to do the All-In backgammon high-end tournament. We've got to lock this down now. We've got to lock down the All-In backgammon set.
Guys.
Jason Calacanis
We have to get the All-In backgammon set.
I get the co-branding rights on this, okay?
Jason Calacanis
Absolutely.
XG, XG.
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. Well, no, the All-In XG.
Ooh.
Jason Calacanis
You know, like I said, I love a great backgammon set.
Oh, yeah.
Jason Calacanis
If we could make a $10,000 one, Chamath, we could kill turtles or white rhinos—all the animals that Friedberg's trying to protect.
No.
Jason Calacanis
We could murder them—and then make—
Chamath Palihapitiya
Oh, my God. That would be so great.
Jason Calacanis
Yes. Maybe the white could be rhinos, and then you could take something else—elephant skin. Something really tragic, and then eat the meat and make the backgammon set for you.
Chamath Palihapitiya
I love backgammon. Honestly, if I wasn't attempting to be an expert poker player, that is the game. I mean, if you're talking about a Pandora's box where once you open it, oh, my God, you can go down the rabbit hole—
Jason Calacanis
Let's open it.
Chamath, let's go, dude.
Chamath Palihapitiya
No, it's—
Let's do that.
Jason Calacanis
Let's open it.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Backgammon is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful game. Beautiful game.
Jason Calacanis
I love the vibes of sitting. Travis and I sat. I got some cigars out. We pour a little of the All-In tequila. We get that going. A couple of the All-In cigars, and then we have the All-In backgammon set. It's a wonderful hang.
Yeah.
Jason Calacanis
Would you consider giving us some of your money playing backgammon, Keith? When we get you—
Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jason Calacanis
We've got to get some of that—
Keith Rabois money on the table, because you don't play poker with us.
I don't play poker, but backgammon, yeah, that sounds great.
Jason Calacanis
Ooh.
And I'll bring better tequila. I have better tequila. We're gonna upgrade your tequila.
Jason Calacanis
Oh.
My tequila's much better, trust me.
Jason Calacanis
All right, we'll do a little taste-off. Yeah, so you've insulted Elon with the Senate seats, and Sacks with his tequila.
Wait, what? Okay.
Oh, no. Oh, no.
Jason Calacanis
Who is left in the PayPal Mafia you'd like to insult before this episode is over?
Yeah, any thoughts on Reid Hoffman?
Jason Calacanis
Or Peter? Anything about Peter? What do you—
Reid can join Elon's party. He's collecting a bunch of misfits, so he might as well take Reid, too.
Jason Calacanis
Oh, man.
Love you, boys.
Chamath Palihapitiya
Keith, thank you for coming. Thanks for pinch-hitting.
Jason Calacanis
You guys were great today. What a panel.
And instead, we open-source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.
Gold, gold 13. That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway, Sax.
Chamath Palihapitiya
We should all get a room and have one big, huge orgy, because they're all just useless. It's this sexual tension that they need to release somehow.
Jason Calacanis
Wet your feet. Wet your feet.
Wet your feet.