#142 — AI Agents Destroying Internet Security (Anthropic's Leak, ClawCon Tokyo, OpenAI's $852B Valuation)
April 03, 2026 · Listen · All episodes · Chat with the show's AI
Jessica Lessin, Dave Morin, Brit Morin and Sam Lessin debate the tech of the week.
Full transcript (AI-generated — may contain transcription errors):
Sam Lessin: Basically, as long as someone in the world provides some digital service, it will be found and you can instantly use it, which means that there can be no rules. You're just gonna like have all these agents running around doing crazy shit and including things they have no idea what they're doing, and they'll check the APIs and be like, "Yeah, that thing works," and it sort of will, but there's gonna be like a bu- like something hidden in it. And like everyone's gonna do it, and no one will trust anything, and the whole thing collapses. It's, "I need something that does this, I need something that does that," and just pulling shit out of GitHub off the internet.
Guest: More or less. Is it no or is it yes? We'll debate the test that's best. But we get more or less. Dave and Britt plus Sam and Jess put it all right to the test. More or less.
Jessica: Why hello, friends. Welcome to More or Less. Morins, where are you? It looks dark and stormy.
Dave Morin: It's because it's morning time on the other side of the world. We are in Japan for an annual trip we do with some of our offline founders, but also because we got to put together ClawCon Tokyo, the first ever OpenClaw event in Asia, by the way. With our dear friend Michael Galpert.
Sam Lessin: Galpert's there? I love Galpert.
Dave Morin: Yeah, Galpert. Aaron Sittig's over here.
Jessica: Wait, Aaron's Sittig's there? You got Aaron Sittig on a plane? That's like the, the headline news.
Dave Morin: He loves Japan. It's like the design mecca. It's easy to get designers to come to Japan.
Sam Lessin: It's easier to get Aaron to meet you somewhere outside the US than inside the US. I've actually seen him far more outside the United States than inside. Hard to get him to the peninsula, easily to get him on a 12-hour flight.
Jessica: I want the three takeaways, Morins. What is the vibe in Kyoto? Give us the, the tea.
Dave Morin: So we had ClawCon, um, Tokyo, I guess it was the night, night before last. And, um, we had over 1,000 people show up in, uh, in Shibuya. Mostly in costume. Mostly in full lobster. Japanese love their cosplay. Yeah, we had great costumes, but also, uh, a lot of great Tokyo fashion. And you know, they put together a really beautiful event. They had, you know, a lineup of fantastic local speakers. Everything from, you know, your large language models. The biggest large language model provider in Japan, uh, actually provided a really amazing real-time translation feature. So we had a, you know, massive screen that, uh, showed the content that people were talking about, but then along both sides of it you had real time Japanese and English translation happening, uh, with the best large language model from Japan, which was actually a really cool experience. Like I've never seen that happen before in real time, uh, at the speed at which it was happening was... It was a real, uh, in my view, like a breakthrough in technical and business communication. Uh, it was really, really neat. So that was cool. We did a fireside chat. One of the top podcasters in, uh, Japan talked to both Peter and I on stage, uh, about what's going on.
Jessica: What was the toughest question you got, Dave?
Dave Morin: What was the... I don't know, Britt, what was the toughest question? They were pretty straightforward question. I mean-
Jessica: No, it was probably fluff.
Dave Morin: Well, it's early here, Jess.
Brit Morin: Yeah, it's interesting being here. It's like a month or two behind, you know. Like obviously super hyped about OpenClaw and all, you know, personal AI.
Sam Lessin: And respectful. They're just respectful.
Brit Morin: So respectful. Oh my God.
Dave Morin: Sam, that was actually the funniest thing for all of the Americans. We're like, like Michael Galpert was like ready to go in there to like energize the crowd like a rally, and everybody's so deferential and, and chill, and it was like a very zen environment. So-
Brit Morin: No one had to be asked to take their seats because they're already in their seats. They're in their seats 10 minutes before it started. No one's talking.
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Brit Morin: Everyone's being patient and kind. It ended exactly on time.
Sam Lessin: Dave, you're looking a little Asian. Did you get a haircut?
Brit Morin: Sam.
Dave Morin: I'm just not wearing a hat, Sam.
Jessica: That's what Dave's hair looks like. Okay.
Dave Morin: Yeah, I have hair.
Jessica: So you guys are out there. Any other... Like what's, what's like the ground of J- Japanese tech right now? Like what, what's everyone talking about over there?
Brit Morin: We actually talked to the lead a- one of the lead actors from Shogun and-
Jessica: Ooh
Brit Morin: ... also some of the Nintendo family we got to meet with yesterday, which was very cool. And like everyone's perspective on AI is quite positive here versus in the US it's like so negative, you know?
Jessica: Interesting.
Brit Morin: AI is less popular than ice in the US and like all kinds of terrible things. And in Japan they're just like, "Oh yeah, like it seems, it's fine. Like obviously we wanna know when something is made with AI or not, but we don't like hate it. We think it's just part of how-
Jessica: Mm-hmm
Brit Morin: ... we are evolving in, with technology."
Dave Morin: Yeah. One of the cool use cases that we heard, um, when we were talking with the actor from Shogun, he was the guy that played the sort of Judas character in Shogun, the guy who kind of betrays his, his master and, uh, ultimately in the end ends up dying, so he was kind of the vi- the lovable villain. Um, but they were talking about how one of the use cases that, uh, people are using things for is, uh, when you're developing a new script, um, being able to like embody the character into a contextual window in the language model so that you can then explore what the character might do, uh, in any given situation to make your acting better, um, which I thought was like a really cool, uh, use case.
Sam Lessin: Mm-hmm.
Dave Morin: That was neat. And then on more the frontier, Jess, we have a very close relationship with the Nintendo family. They're one of our partners at Offline, and they have a, a project here in Kyoto called the Artificial Life Institute. And so they're focused on evolutionary algorithms and how to embody life into computing, um, which is kind of a, a question beyond language models is, you know, can you, can you understand life well enough to im- imbue it into a computer? Um, and so they have a bunch of very interesting research going on around that, and some great partners at the University of Tokyo and, uh, you know, various tech companies in Japan. And so that, that's actually a very- Interesting area of, um, I think unique research that Kyoto is very interested in right now.
Jessica: Fa- fascinating.
Sam Lessin: Well, to be clear, the Japanese are also much more okay with this because they're running out of people.
Brit Morin: They just need agents to survive as... They're like, "We must evolve into agents so that we survive."
Sam Lessin: They're like, America doesn't have a population problem yet, but Japan totally does. They're like, "Yeah, we need robots. We've been in robots, and we want AI immediately because we're running out of humans." Right? So like, I think that's part of why the vibe is so different there on this stuff.
Dave Morin: I don't know. I think that it's just, I mean, y- yeah, I guess that's the funny take on it, but I think they're just more utilitarian about how they think about technology. They're just like, "Oh yeah, this is a good new tool. We should integrate it, and we should do great research." And they're much more pragmatic and matter-of-fact about it, in that it's just like this thing that's coming, and of course we should use it, and of course we should figure it out, and like, let's be really great at it, right? Um, like that's kind of more the vibe here.
Jessica: Got it. Okay. Well, I'm gonna break precedent and let you guys pick the first news that we jump into. So consider this a Russian roulette of- ... of headlines of all things AI. Okay. We have a Claude Code leak, OpenAI closing, uh, what is it, $122 billion round at some 800 and something-
Brit Morin: $852 billion now. Mm-hmm.
Sam Lessin: $852 billion. Is that pre or post?
Jessica: We've got Iran threatening US data centers.
Dave Morin: In the US or, or globally?
Jessica: No, in the Middle East, in the Middle East.
Dave Morin: Okay.
Jessica: So let's start there. We've got the fun, massive, massive, massive fundraise, Claude Code second leak from Anthropic in like a week. The first was the details of Mythos, their new model, and then this Iran story. Sam?
Dave Morin: This sure looks like a marketing strategy to me, not a, not a leak strategy.
Jessica: You think it's a marketing strategy?
Dave Morin: Yes.
Jessica: Okay. Say more, Dave.
Sam Lessin: Well, I agree with Dave. The first one's probably marketing. So powerful, we... Oh, no.
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Sam Lessin: T- don't-
Dave Morin: Yeah
Sam Lessin: ... like that's all. Any, any time the really, really powerful thing is leaked, it's not leaked. Um-
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Sam Lessin: ... it's, that's, that's fine.
Dave Morin: But I mean, that's kind of the same thing with the Claude Code thing.
Sam Lessin: Well, no. The Claude Code thing I think is like a legit fuck up, right? Like you don't-
Dave Morin: Really?
Sam Lessin: ... leak your source code.
Dave Morin: Is it the source code? I thought it was just a bunch of TypeScript related to the front end or something.
Jessica: Yeah, it's not like core like model weights and all that kind of stuff.
Brit Morin: Wait, can, yeah, can someone explain this? 'Cause I've been in Japan, I don't know what happened.
Sam Lessin: Isn't it the a- I, I mean, I didn't look at this in detail obviously, but like I thought they, what leaked was like the source code for the, like the code endpoint. It's not obviously the core engine's code. It's like the desktop installable leaked.
Dave Morin: Yeah, it's just all the TypeScript, right?
Sam Lessin: But it's still, there is some interesting stuff in there in terms of how it works, which I felt like you w- generally wouldn't want other people to necessarily know. Like I saw some... And this morning I woke up to like every single Twitter post was some hot take on what you learn by reading the core code, which is all probably generated by Claude eating itself. But it seemed like mildly interesting. I don't think you leak that on purpose. I mean, my, my big take on the leaks is simple, which is like i- there is a bunch of exploits going on where people are like effectively... There was this like end, this other NPM upstream package thing where someone got some keys and injected some shit.
Dave Morin: Yeah, that was actually the bigger, that was the bigger thing on the internet yesterday, which was like a serious se- security leak.
Sam Lessin: It's always been wild to me that like, this is the thing is like it's always been wild to me that you have all these maintainers of these like projects that get included and included and included, you know, r- in, into these projects, and ends up this small piece of code that some random dude on the internet maintains is like the linchpin of the entire internet, right? And then like something goes wrong with that, right, or someone gets some key, and all of a sudden that's compromised and everything is compromised. And like this has happened forever. I do think that what's happening with AI, this is just gonna get so much worse, because all of a sudden-
Dave Morin: Yeah
Sam Lessin: ... everyone dangerously skips permissions, 'cause why? And like you're not even evaluating the packages.
Jessica: Whoa, this was my experi- I was gonna get into Jessica's bot corner today, but you're jumping right to it.
Sam Lessin: Well, just like this is like, this is the way that all ends.
Dave Morin: I think this is a super real thing. You know, we've got obviously, uh, Peter Steinberger's over here with us. Um, we've got some of the top maintainers from OpenClaw, but we also, Guillermo from Vercel's over here, and, you know, this is like the premier question in security of the internet right now, is that-
Sam Lessin: Well, th- but this is not, it's, the, the thing about it, it's not a new question, it's just the speed.
Jessica: Can we-
Brit Morin: Yeah
Jessica: ... define the question for those of us who don't know what these letters mean? Let's start there. What's the issue?
Sam Lessin: The issue is is that when you're using a piece of software, it almost certainly references inside it shitloads of other software tons of people developed on the internet. And when you start using your thing, you're implicitly including all of the other software written by all these people. You don't know who they are, they're just like random keys on the internet that end up, and someone trusted it, and that person trusted someone, and that person trusted someone, and that person trusted six other people.
Jessica: Mm.
Sam Lessin: So if you exploit any-
Dave Morin: Yep
Sam Lessin: ... of those, you start including stuff in your software that you have no freaking idea, and it's like six levels of trust removed, that if you change two lines you can steal everything, right? And like this is how it's always worked, and it's always been intellectually like, "Huh, that's kind of scary."
Jessica: Yeah.
Sam Lessin: But it's kind of implicitly worked, and like the reality is is the incentives were kind of fine, and by the way it did break a bunch, but it was like kind of okay. The velocity was low enough, and if you were like including a new package, there was like a process around it. Like, do I trust this? Do I not trust this? Like what are the implications? Someone, someone was on the hook. Now you have AI-
Jessica: Yeah
Sam Lessin: ... agents running around looking for capabilities. I need something that does this. I need something that does that. And just pulling shit out of GitHub off the internet, right?
Jessica: Oh, wow.
Sam Lessin: And using it. And because you're going so much faster, um, it's like just driving a car faster. You're moving faster, you're checking less, you're able to do way more. But the cost is that there's all this implicit risk d- and like subversion that's gonna like happen as a result, right? It's kind of like going around and just grabbing random pieces of writing off the internet and praying. And I think the reality is, is like people o- this is not a new problem. Everyone understands this at some level, and like what you're actually seeing it play out. And what it comes down to is everyone's gonna say, "No, no, we need like more secure XYZ." But then other people, and more people are like, "I don't care, I just wanna go as fast as possible," right? And like I think the as fast as possible crowd will generally win because they'll be able to get more cool stuff done faster, but it will create a huge security... It's a huge problem. The, the flip side is there will be like the secure core where like someone really checked all the packages, right? And like someone knows what's in them, and like you actually... The problem- And like, and you can say, "Well, AI will help us check more." And that's, that's sort of true, but it's so much more expensive and slower that there's gonna be this like tension. Like, I agree with Dave. I think all the money is not gonna be made on who can run the most tokens fastest or build the coolest shit, 'cause everyone will be able to go infinitely fast on that. You'll be able to charge an enormous premium for security and privacy. But the problem is, is like the cost is gonna be... Your stuff's gonna suck compared to the stuff that moves fast. It's gonna be slower, it's gonna be 10 times more expensive, and most people won't care, right? Per usual. A- And so I just think that's what's gonna happen. And like it's, it's... I mean, it's... I mean, I do think that we're kind of witnessing like the final internet disaster of AI.
Jessica: Yeah.
Sam Lessin: Like the first internet disaster of AI is like bye-bye web-
Jessica: Yeah
Sam Lessin: ... and like bye-bye ad models, and like bye-bye the entire business model for the whole thing. The second cataclysm o- of AI is gonna be you're just gonna like have all these agents running around doing crazy shit, and including things they have no idea what they're doing. And they'll check the APIs and be like, "Yeah, that thing works," and it sort of will, but there's gonna be like a bu- like something hidden in it. And like everyone's gonna do it, and no one will trust anything, and the whole thing collapses.
Jessica: So I wanna talk about... Dave, I just wanna share a personal experience for a sec, and then you as someone who's probably studying this deeply with OpenAI, uh, with OpenCloud, would love to know, right? So Jessica's journey through Claude Code yesterday is really a case in point of how these vulnerabilities can easily creep in. Sam set me up with a new version of Claude Code, working really well, has access to a lot of things. I decide I'm gonna be a ninja over here and connect all my Google services via an MCP server. Great. Claude's gonna walk me through every step of this. I am like largely following Claude's instructions, but e- every step or so, there's like a new thing that I have to accept or skip. And in the beginning I'm like, "I'm gonna be diligent about this," and call the wonderful head of engineering at The Information and a- get, uh, get permission for him to accept such steps, 'cause that's what a reasonable person does. But then I'm like, "That's taking too long, and there's really way too many steps, and I just wanna get my email set up." Then I'm like, before I know it, I'm just installing dev toolkits like, you know, I'm a whatever. And I feel like a rockstar over here.
Brit Morin: Did you press always allow?
Sam Lessin: Oh, no.
Jessica: I recognize... No. So first it was talking to a trained, experienced professional who runs an engineering team, and I'm like, "You know, Mike's busy. He has better things to do to help me." So then I'm like, "You know who could answer this for me? Claude." So I boot up- ... Claude in my CoWork, and I just sent-
Sam Lessin: Oh, no
Jessica: ... each message to Claude. I'm like, "Claude-"
Sam Lessin: Famous last words
Jessica: ... but these are... They're honestly logged in in different accounts. Not that it matters, right? And Claude is like... At first Claude's like, "Absolutely don't do that," because that's what Claude does, "Unless this is a server you set up." I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, no, I set it up." And they're like, "Great, go." So basically I feel so proud 'cause now Claude Code can tell me when my next meeting is, when I could really look at my calendar. So that's where we are in the cycle. But I had the same reaction. Like in January when I tried CoWork, and I wrote an article about this, so there's a record, I was like, "Oh, I'm not comfortable with giving all these permissions," and I i- instantly uninstalled it. You know, March 31st I'm just pressing one, you know, approve, approve until the cows come home. And what... And, and this is really... I'm curious what you think about this, smarter people than this. I've just decided I can't have anything important in any of these services because-
Sam Lessin: Well, that's why you're-
Jessica: I'm just like-
Sam Lessin: That's why you have a completely separate instance set up in the cloud running this stuff and you're not running it on your computer, right? Like, we've already sandboxed it out, but you can't put all the stuff that's on your computer into the sandbox, or then there's just the sand- we pissed in the sandbox.
Brit Morin: But then what use is it? She's just limiting her, her use in that case, right?
Jessica: So here's where I really ended up. I, I went and I was like, "This is gonna be a security nightmare. People like me are gonna wreak havoc on all these things 'cause they're lazy and, you know, impatient." Then I was like, "Well, I'm also not gonna put anything in email. I'm not gonna put anything... Like, I'm gonna assume that things could be leaked." And then more relevant to like these broader debates happening now, I was like, I'm not yet sold on the interface being everything aggregated under these new AI chatbots versus just building these agent experiences in the services I already use. Because where I ended up after all of this is like all this drama, and I'm literally asking Claude Code. Now, I know I'm not being very advanced, but I'm asking Claude Code to do some analysis on my calendar, some analysis on my email, when what I really wanted is Google to do that analysis for me because it would've saved me like 19 steps and concerns about what permissions I'm giving. And so I, I know we've been talking about this on the pod, and I apologize for the length of this, but it has really been eye-opening. The bundling, unbundling, right? Is the primary interface gonna be one of these new chatbots, or are we gonna see this like agent functionality rolled out across all of these services? And after my experience yesterday, I'm like, you know, if I could just- Be in all these other environments and get this level of analysis. I'm not sure it needs to be like all together in one place. I'm done. Dave, tell me why I'm wrong.
Dave Morin: No, I mean, I think it can be both and, right? Like, if we're in the era of, of agents, and it's sort of like when the web took off, everybody was like: "Oh, I can build a website, I can build a web server, I can have a database connected to my web server, and I can build an application, and that application can be a CRM or a CMS for running a news website," right? And people started to figure out, like, I need to have these different architectures for, uh, security around, you know, all of my customers can access my web server through my website, and they can read my news articles. And in order to read some of them, you have to pay for it, so I need to put up a gate for that. And we went through this whole build-out of how web servers need to be architected and clouds need to be architected in order to have, like, safe, secure experiences for users and the enterprises that generate them, right? Like, I think we're in the same era with agents right now, which is that people are experimenting with agents. You know, like, if you remember, in the early days of the web, people were putting web servers on the computer underneath their desk, and you would, like, come to their website, and that website was being run off the computer sitting under their desk.
Sam Lessin: And some of us still do that.
Dave Morin: Yeah. I mean, some of us do. But we're in that era with agents where people are putting them on their desk, they're putting them in the cloud. Uh, there's all these questions about what's the best architecture, and then what's the best interface to interact with them. So, you know, Jess, I have, you know, I have-- I do not allow my email, for example, to be read by my core agent. Like, my core agent is super locked down, you know, has really tight security around it. But then I have other agents that do specific things that I want to get done. I've actually found that the GOG, G-O-G, uh, Google Workspace plugin that Pete built for OpenClaw is extremely powerful. It's way more powerful, it's way faster than the official Google one. And so I have an agent entirely set up just for my email, and that agent reads my email, project manages it like a great project manager or chief of staff would, and it actually talks to my main agent using English in a group chat about what I should know, you know, that's going on in my email. And my assistant can actually also talk to that, it, my email agent and get all of the use cases she needs to get done, right? And so that architecture is like a security architecture that enables me to feel confident that I've got things sandboxed in the places that I want, and I can still interact through my main agent for all of the interface that I want, and I've got the sort of the workflows and the things that I want going on, um, all set up nicely in my core agent, and then I know that it's secure over here, right? Whether or not that architecture works for you, like, doesn't matter.
Sam Lessin: So I don't know. I have a different take, which is like, first of all, I sandbox this stuff aggressively. So like, I actually don't run any of this stuff on my actual computer, right? Like, I have, like, instances running in the cloud, and, like, I'm very clear about what I do and don't give it. But here's the interesting thing. I actually got super mad at Claude this last week because I was doing something, and it was getting super mad at me because I'm just, like, pasting raw API keys into it, and for the first time it was like, "Don't do that." I was like: "I don't care. Just take the keys and use them." And I'm like, that's not-- ooh, I don't want this locked down. Like, I know why you want to lock this down. You're not wrong. But I'm intentionally using stuff that I don't mind. Like, I'm like, I'm smart enough to be like, it's fine, like, in this case, right? And so it's just this interesting thing where there's this race condition. I want the rawest tools available and then take responsibility for sandboxing them myself and, like, knowing what I'm doing.
Jessica: But you're, but you're, like, not a normal person.
Sam Lessin: No, no. But I think this is interesting to the, to, to architecting these things. I think there's, like, one version of the world. I, I just, it'll be interesting how it plays out, and I personally want the most completely unrestricted, don't you dare try to lock me down version of the world that I will then completely sandbox and take responsibility for, separate from my, like, actual core identity. Now, on the flip side, Dave, to your point, I'll tell you my thing is I would never give it access to my email.
Dave Morin: Ever.
Sam Lessin: But I do need it to be able to draft and send emails for me.
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Sam Lessin: So I just have a totally parallel universe set up where it can draft and send things that are from me, and then, like, CC my actual email. But, like, I treat it as, like, a separate universe. I'll tell you a funny thing, though. It actually screwed up yesterday. I asked my CRM, I was like, "Hey, we're doing this creator bot school. Go find the twenty to thirty most important people that creators would wanna s- meet with in New York-- I'm sorry, in San Francisco, and invite them if they wanna stop by." And like, you know, it pulls up our friend Adam Messery and whatever, and it's like... And I'm like: "Great. Just send them each a draft. Like, create a draft to go out from, not even my real email, from my secondary email that you're allowed to touch, effectively, inviting them to this thing, and CC my real email," right? And hilariously, it screwed up, and instead of sending drafts, just sent them all. And I was like, "Ooh." And so then I replied to each of them. So like it sent, like, probably thirty, forty of the most important people in Silicon Valley notes inviting to this. And they weren't bad. They weren't terrible.
Dave Morin: It probably just was like, what would Sam do? Sam would just fucking send it.
Sam Lessin: Just send it. So then hilariously, I then, I then replied, 'cause I was CC'd on them, I replied to all of them being like: "I'm really sorry, my bot just fired this prematurely, but it is a legit invite."
Dave Morin: So like, look, I think one thing I wanna double-click on real quick is that I think Sam's right in that this kind of goes back to what started this whole conversation, which is, you know, what's happening here from a security perspective that's profound. Like, Jess, you asked this question like, what is the question? We're now at a place where the models can just speak any language in the entire software engineering stack, and they can move up and down the stack. Models can speak Assembly. They can speak- TypeScript, they can speak HTML, they can speak everything in between. And so Sam's kind of right here, which is that the raw compute, the raw power of a single, like, computer box is now the thing that you want. You want it to just talk to the metal directly and do exactly what you want it to do in a highly sandboxed environment, and then you wanna, like, chain those together in ways that are interesting. And so that's, I think, the thing that's happening right now is that a lot of the way that we built software, which was like, we're gonna build all these little shims in between, and there's gonna be all this open source software, and I'm gonna use yours, and you're gonna use mine, and it's gonna make my life easier. Like, a lot of that stuff goes away when these models can just speak all the languages, and you can build anything against the compute. And I think that is breaking the entire cybersecurity model of not just the internet, but, like, the operating system, the whole thing. And so we're at... Like, like, that's the reckoning moment.
Sam Lessin: So but here's the other interesting thing about running the raw metal and, like, the moment we're at with everything can speak to everything so easily is there are no more limits you can set on anything. So I'll give you a really per- an example, and I'll be a little, uh, risque for the sake of being risque. You know, there's been all of these, all of... I'm getting eye roll already, Jess? We gotta, we gotta, we gotta get some clicks on the podcast. So here, here's the-
Brit Morin: You would never think Sam would say something risque.
Sam Lessin: Here's the risque thing. There's been this hilarious game which we all know about, like, OpenAI and Claude and Groq, and, like, what they do allow and they don't allow, and all this type of stuff with the image generation. And, you know, just again, in Sam experimental mode, you know, I was making images with, like, one of their APIs, and it was, like, content moderated. And I was like, "Well, that's stupid." So then I was like, "Hey, Claude, c- what's the best way to, like, have a completely unrestricted image generation pipeline?" And it was like, "Here, just, like, boot a GPU in this cloud, an H100. You pay two bucks an hour, and, like, download the software, and, like, run it, and you can just have completely unrestricted access to image generation." I was like, normally that's really annoying and hard to set up, right? Even six months ago, like, I don't wanna f- rent a raw GPU and figure out the six packages to install to, like, do this just 'cause, like, I'm annoyed that I got content limited on some stupid API. Now I'm like, "Just set it all up for me," right? And it works, right? And so, like, this idea that, like, any one service can lock down, like, what it will and won't do is ridiculous. Because as long as anything else on the internet will do it, like, it'll just happen. You just ask the thing to, like, b- do a much more complicated setup which costs you nothing now and is not, like, a time suck to do whatever you want, right? And so I think whether that's true with email sending, that's true with anything where, like, any one of these agents tries to be like, "Well, if you're using Groq, you can't do blank." You're like, "Yeah, I can. I can do whatever I want 'cause I have, like, access to the raw compute and a machine that will spend hundreds of hours setting up anything down to the metal I want." Like, it's an important paradigm shift 'cause it's like before, like, the, the, the idea that a mis- a service can be, like, historically be like, "Well, the thing you're using is blank," and, like, technically there's a way to do something else, but it's really hard and technical to figure it out.
Dave Morin: Yeah. None of this matters anymore.
Sam Lessin: Now it doesn't matter. And so, like, basically, as long as someone in the world provides some digital service, it will be found, and you can instantly use it, which means that there can be no rules.
Dave Morin: Yeah, and by the way, this also invalidates the entire, the entire marketing model of, like, Claude and OpenAI to some extent has been this, like, everyone should fear these models, and, like, you know, at the end of the day, like, we're, like, what? One person sharing all the weights of a model on the internet away from, like, anyone being able to do any of this anywhere, which is just, like, that is what's happening, right? And so we have to have a different kind of conversation about what's going on right now.
Sam Lessin: I, I even dig... Here's another example of practically as a builder. Like, I basically just re-implemented my own Granola 'cause I got annoyed with Granola.
Dave Morin: That's funny. I was doing the same thing.
Brit Morin: Wait, guys, what's wrong with all these services? Like, just use the services.
Sam Lessin: Well, you just want, like, customization.
Dave Morin: It sucks. Yeah.
Sam Lessin: I have a great one. I'll, I'll release it. It's called Record Clip or Request Clip. It's up. It's sick. It's actually running right now and doing the entire tran- multi-party translation, like, transcription, summarization. It's actually quite good. But here's the funny thing about this. I was like, "Okay, I, I need to, like, stop using Granola. Like, this is, like, annoying me with its features." So I like build my own version of it. So start building it, and then I'm like, "Cool, like, I need the transcription and summarization," and like, use it, and it's like, "Great, we'll use ChatGPT's Whisper or whatever to do it. I don't even think about it. It's done." But then it starts limiting me, and I'm like, "That's not right." So I'm like, "Fine," like, what's a better service to use, right, that's gonna actually do this properly, right? And it hilariously, it pointed me at Assembly AI, which by the way, we were seed investors in. I put 100K into their first round, but they're crushing it, and it's perfect. And so I'm like, "Great, this is cheaper. This does multi-party full transcription of everything." It's, like, way better. So again, this goes back to, like, there's no way for anyone to make real money on any of these things 'cause, like, if I don't like one service or it cuts me off, it's like it, there's no implementation cost. I'm just like, "Do the better one."
Brit Morin: But, like-
Sam Lessin: And it's done
Brit Morin: ... but Sam, just to push you on that, like, again, I think the theme in this episode about you, and I love all this experimentation is like-
Dave Morin: So far the theme is chaos.
Brit Morin: Well-
Dave Morin: I'd like to bring us back to, you know.
Brit Morin: I think it's like Sam, it, yeah, goes unhinged a- and, like, which is fine for Sam because he knows technology and how to manage and how to build new things. But, like, for the 98% of people who are just gonna stick with Granola 'cause even though they can, like, maybe vibe code a thing, they just don't fucking care. It's good enough. They've got a good brand. They trust it. They, you know... Like, I, I actually disagree with you 'cause I think that there are going to be a lot of services and pieces of software that maintain their stickiness because normies just want what they want, and they don't wanna change, and they just, like, want it to be good enough.
Dave Morin: I don't know.
Sam Lessin: Fair enough.
Dave Morin: The through, the through line is, like, I was walking through Kyoto last night with Guillermo, and we were talking about the la... We were here together, like, uh- ... year ago. And a year ago, like he gave this example. You can go back his, in his Twitter and look at it. Like, "Hey guys, I vibe coded this." You know, there's this annoying thing that I try to do, which is like change JSON into, like convert it into a different format, and all of the tools on the internet are really difficult for this, and they're filled with ads, and so I just made my own. And he got super negative feedback on the internet. He's like, "This is the era of personal software. Everyone's gonna make their own tools." And a year ago people were like, "That's not what's happening. That's like not what's gonna happen." It was like the super negative takes from everybody on the internet. Where are we today? Like, the use case Sam just said is like pretty insane. Like, he wanted his own version of Granola. He just built it. It took him a day, and Sam's a super high agency builder, right? The through line on this is that people are going to be able to just request the software that they want in like one to two years from now, and it will just materialize onto the internet.
Sam Lessin: Yes.
Dave Morin: And I do think that's like actually an extremely important trend that is, it's now just happening, and I think that's like a big, big change in the mental model of where we're going because, like it's going to happen, and I think normies are actually gonna request things.
Sam Lessin: That's why I'm so bullish on software and so negative on software businesses 'cause I'm just like, I don't like, uh... It just, these are just tokens.
Jessica: Okay, friends, you can keep on this topic, but I'm gonna bounce, and I suggest you go to OpenAI's monster fundraising, complete with $3 billion in raises from retail investors. What does that say about the prospects for an IPO?
Brit Morin: 3 billion out of like, uh, how much, how many billions? How many billions went in?
Jessica: Still $3 billion.
Brit Morin: But out of like 100.
Sam Lessin: That's right, 'cause 90- the 1% controls 99% of the wealth, right? So they put in 99% of the dollars, and retail puts in 20 bucks.
Jessica: When is the last time retail put money... I think you're missing the forest for the trees. When is the last time retail put money into a private technology round?
Brit Morin: How did the retailers put, how did they put money in?
Dave Morin: Well, now they are through these new synthetic instruments, right? Like isn't that-
Jessica: Yes
Dave Morin: ... one of the big, one of the big stories of the last two weeks is you've got these like crazy new synthetic venture funds that are being traded on Robinhood, and, uh, I can't remember the name of the other one that contains the stock.
Brit Morin: Right. And they're investing in like all the top 10 tech companies. Yeah, SpaceX and OpenAI, and just buying allocation, right?
Dave Morin: I don't know. Sam, do you know what these things are called?
Sam Lessin: I don't really care.
Brit Morin: Do you care about the valuation of OpenAI being 800 and like 50 billion now?
Sam Lessin: I just don't... I mean, like they're just, I just, this is like a ridiculous, this is just ridiculous. I mean, it's like whatever. It doesn't, like if you wanna buy 20 cents of infrastructure per dollar in a thing with like increasing competition where it turns out the story of whoever gets to AGI first doesn't win, God bless. I mean, I think the story is people don't know where to put any money, and money's cheap, right? But I don't know. Like it's fine. I have no opinion. It's like, I, I don't understand. I mean, the only opinion I would have is like it's so clear to me-
Dave Morin: This is the, "All right, everybody's annoyed with the topics we're talking about" episode, so let's move on.
Sam Lessin: Well, just like, I just, it's like so obvious that the, like basically hilariously, matrix multiplication is matrix multiplication, and Dave, we've talked about this. It's like whoever has cheap energy eventually wins. This is a commodity business with no defensibility. It's not even, it's not locally regulated. It won't be until someone makes some security argument, and there's no su- there's no capacitor issue. Like it's just infinitely available globally, and you can vibe code whatever the hell you want, and so God bless. I mean, I don't understand how any of these companies make sense.
Dave Morin: Did you see that Cotu chart which was like their underwriting of Anthropic?
Sam Lessin: Yeah, I think I did. I like, I like their charts. That's a Karen Mu- I think that's a Karen Maruni thing, which is awesome. The C backslash.
Dave Morin: Oh, interesting. Oh.
Sam Lessin: Very Windows.
Dave Morin: Good old Karen.
Brit Morin: What did the chart say, Dave?
Sam Lessin: That like once you have agentic, the basically number go up once the agent spends its own money. I mean, basically, here's the funny thing. It's like the big bottleneck on AI spend and AI stuff in general was that you had to have human input, and there's like the interfaces. And so what Claude Code does and what Open Cloud does and what Open Ra- like all of these things are doing and now Codex is just like, "Hey, let's get rid of the bottleneck, which is the human." So we just like can spin circles as much as we want, and then Sam can all of a sudden not hit accept, accept, accept or deal with whatever limitations exist in chat inter- ChatGPT's interface. I can just be like, "Build me Granola and change the limits and make it more shareable," and it does it, and it's great, and it works really well, which means there's no Granola.
Brit Morin: Did you actually t- prompt it to build a replica of Granola?
Sam Lessin: No. I, I had a slightly different take on what I wanted, which is actually totally sweet. You guys are gonna love it.
Dave Morin: Here's the chart.
Sam Lessin: Are you on... Why are you on KuCoin? We're talking about crypto?
Dave Morin: I just was looking for this Anthropic Cotu chart.
Sam Lessin: And you found it on a crypto website?
Brit Morin: Explain this chart, and especially for people that can't see it visually right now.
Sam Lessin: Translate it. You can, you can...
Brit Morin: Request clip. Can you, can you get on that?
Sam Lessin: Probably. Actually, we'll translate it.
Dave Morin: Yeah. Today the valuation, or at the point they were doing this investment, the, you know, Anthropic's valuation was 360 billion, and that they're on track to a $2.4 billion value, or $2.4 trillion valuation by 2031, and that their, you know, EBITDA will go from negative 14 billion today per year to 48 billion per year in 2030 and 78 billion per year in 2031. Like Sam, do you, do you buy this?
Sam Lessin: No. And even if I did buy this, the funny part about that is while 40 billion in EBITDA is like a very large number, that does not justify the valuations we're talking about, right?
Brit Morin: Well, it's 18 billion... What do they say in that chart? It was 18 billion in 2026 revenue with 14 billion loss and, and their valuation's at 360 billion right now-
Dave Morin: Yes
Brit Morin: ... off of 18 billion.
Dave Morin: Yes.
Sam Lessin: It's like Facebook does 40 billion a quarter in EBITDA. Right? And like now, right? Like, so I'm just like, I just... It's, this is all just, like, narrative-driven. And look, I get it. People need to store their money somewhere, and they need to store it in hope, right? Is the upshot, especially when they don't know what else to put it in, right? You're gonna either put it in gold or hope, and like this is the hope thing at scale, and people need things for hope at scale. So, like, that's fine, but it's like from a fundamental business perspective, none of this makes any financial sense, and it's not going to, right? It's just a question of, like, how that plays out. It could be that because people need to put money in hope, it doesn't actually matter. Like, hope go up and everyone does fine, right? But it's a hell of a narrative to believe. It is quite religion.
Brit Morin: Dave, do you have a counter to that, or do you... are you more-
Dave Morin: No, I think it's-
Brit Morin: ... aligned with Sam these days?
Dave Morin: Uh, I don't... I think the wild card is local inference. Like I, you know, my, my bet's been made here. Like, I've taken an extremely long bet on local inference by, you know, we're going, we're going maximum deep in, in OpenClaw and into, you know-
Sam Lessin: Well, how is that... But just to push you, is that local?
Dave Morin: It's both.
Sam Lessin: That's like just inference in the cl- inference anywhere. Like, it doesn't matter where the inference is.
Dave Morin: It's both. I know, but I think it's both. Like, we're going maximum deep and taking a maximum long position in local inference and OpenClaw because we just believe-
Sam Lessin: Are you buying Apple stock then? They're the local inference company.
Dave Morin: I already own a lot of Apple stock. You know, like Apple's-
Sam Lessin: So that's your bet. I mean-
Dave Morin: You know. Well, I think that's our bet, but we're also, Sam, we're gonna seed a, we're gonna seed a ton of companies, um, in this direction, and like, we think that this is like... I don't think it's a question of or. Like, a lot of people frame this as it's hyperscalers and cloud AI or local inference. I think it's and. I think it's gonna be both.
Sam Lessin: I just think it's whatever fit. Yeah, definitely. I mean, like I... This is again, I'll go back to my image generation blockage. I have like an image generation issue in a cloud service. So I'm like, all right, just like put it locally on my Mac Mini with 24 gigs of RAM. It's fine. It's actually better. And I'm like, yeah, I want it even better, so like I'm gonna go back to an H100, right? And like the reality is the fact that I can just sit there and in three commands while I'm doing other stuff do that is mind-blowing. But it means there's no lock-in on anything. I'm just gonna sit there and price and quality optimize, right? Like, there's zero lo- I can switch local, I can go, I can go cloud, I can go to China, I can go to whatever the hell I want, right? And like, again, it's a super powerful thing as a builder. I just don't know how anyone makes any money on it.
Brit Morin: We're gonna bring this to a close soon, but I'm curious with where things are at right now today, and Sam, you're obviously breaking a lot of the mold here, like we all are in different ways. But what would you advise our audience as the key takeaway of all this that we've been tes- discussing in today's episode? It w- we've gone from security to sort of like cloud, local, like future of all of this. Everything goes to zero, you know, Sam's everything goes to zero line. Like if, if our listeners are, are leaving this episode, what is it that they should do this week or think about more deeply this week?
Sam Lessin: So what they should do this week, other than if they haven't, if they've been invited, come to our creator bot summit, which is gonna be so fun.
Dave Morin: I'm bummed to miss it, man.
Sam Lessin: It's gonna be so good. I'm like so excited for it this week. The number one thing you must be doing is aggressively playing with everything.
Dave Morin: Yeah. Could not agree with this more.
Sam Lessin: This is a moment where, like, you should not be reading, listening to podcasts.
Brit Morin: Stop listening to this podcast.
Sam Lessin: I'm only half listening to this podcast. I'm-
Dave Morin: Yeah, listen to the podcast and learn, and then go play.
Sam Lessin: You, you should be playing with everything and having your own opinions and a lot, because the reality is... I mean, this was, my best experience of last week was that we were in Alaska, David left, so it was me and a bunch of very non-technical wonderful people and excellent skiers, and I back to back sat down with these great people and said... Actually, in this case, I did use Granola. I said, "Let's ta-" They had some app ideas. I said, "Great, let's talk about it for 30 minutes." We sat down, we just discussed it for 30 minutes. I literally all I did was take the Granola summary and the Granola transcript, and I stuck it in my Claude instance, and I said, "Make this." And it produced you cannot believe how good stuff. Like, I'm talking about fully deployed amazing things, one of which has actually almost certainly become like actually a very real thing that an amazing person wanted to build and just, like, didn't have the technical language to do it. But like-
Dave Morin: I guess I was there for the first part of this. Like, this was a really cool story.
Sam Lessin: Well, y- the second part got even better, but like it booted the whole thing, and it works, and it's actually leverage for them, and, like, that is wild, right? Like, this is the time... It's funny, I actually think that Silicon Valley, and at least, you know, let's call it your average PM/engineer in Silicon Valley hilariously did just completely disrupt themselves. You no longer have a stranglehold on anything in building, and the building is gonna go back to people who actually know what they're talking about and have community and have insight into the specific markets. I think this is like the best time to be a generalist. Buy Claude Max at least for a month. It's 200 bucks. It's totally worth it. And just go to town figuring out what you can do. And if you can, come to a bot school, come to someone who can teach you how to do s- like the little shim that's missing, because you do need a database, you do need to be able to spin up app servers. There's like a little bit missing, but it's like Dave knows this, I know this. The pieces that are missing are achingly small and simple at this point, and the second your bot can, like, send email, send SMS, remember things in a database, use an asset store, and have an app server, you can do unbelievable stuff, right? Like, and like that is the moment.
Brit Morin: Dave, what about you? What's your, what's your take for any of the listeners?
Dave Morin: I think that this stuff is just incredibly empowering, and that, you know, the, the use case that Sam was talking about is a dear friend of ours, and the web application that was built was, you know, something where this person was trying to, you know, get budget for this, build this thing for a couple of years. And, you know, the, the, the, the case that Sam explained became extremely empowering, and then once this person understood how to use these tools themselves... Like, Sam and I got a text message yesterday from the person and They said, "I just added my own feature to this, and I feel so powerful," right? And, like, that's such an amazing thing. And, like, to me, like, people were asking me on stage in Tokyo, like, "Why are you... You know, what, what, what's this... What's most inspiring to you about all of this?" And that's, like, what I keep coming back to, is the individual-
Sam Lessin: Yeah
Dave Morin: ... empowerment and the, the, the power that people feel to create their own, whether it's a website or a little app for their computer or, you know, even just seeing our 11-year-old create his own games and put them onto his phone and put them onto his friend's phone. Like, this is just fun and awesome, and it's not as hard as people think for a variety of different things. And I think that's, like, maybe why we went so long on this topic on this pod, is it's just very inspiring to watch people who are normies being able to create their own software. And I've said it many, many times on the pod, but there's only, like, 10 million software developers or so that make the software for over, you know, three to four billion people that use mobile phones and software in the world. And the amount people are using software is not going down, right? Like, in fact, the consumption of software is going up faster than it ever has in history. And so I think people are gonna continue to want software like they want music. And the fact that more people can make this than ever before I think is a really good thing. Does that mean that there's going to still be, you know, as many trillion-dollar companies? Maybe not. But does that mean that you can build, you know, deca-million, hundred million, billion-dollar companies and a lot more of them in the software world? Probably. And so I just think it's very, very empowering and inspiring, um, to watch people do this.
Brit Morin: I think that's where Sam and Dave m- do disagree.
Sam Lessin: Yeah, this is my closing question, which I think you're gonna know exactly what I'm gonna ask. Right? Which is, Dave, our big... We agree on so much. The thing we disagree on is I don't think this is, like, software development anymore. This is, like... And to me, like, the answer is the number of software devel- software developers goes down, just the number of people who, like, build software the way I write essays goes up, right? Do you still feel, we'll timestamp it on March 31st, that the number of software developers is gonna go up, or just the number of people who, like, build the way there's... software the way they write an essay?
Dave Morin: I just think it's a, it, the, it's, like, a semantic difference, right? Like, Sam, you have a fund for creators, right? Like, is a creator somebody who posts to their story on Instagram, or is a creator somebody who transitions from posting videos and telling stories on their personal Instagram to becoming much more professional about it and telling story at much larger scale? And, like, I don't know what you call someone who begins now to speak the language of computers and build their own software to, you know, give it to people that are, like, more than just their friends and start maybe perhaps building a business on it. Like, that's, like, a semantic, a semantic battle, I guess, that we can have. But to me, like, the idea that more than 10 people, 10 million people now can, like, make software for the, the billions of people that use it every day, like, that's a really positive thing. And whatever we call them, we call them, but, like, I think it's, like-
Sam Lessin: Fair enough
Dave Morin: ... very, very great.
Brit Morin: Yeah. I think, I think we're gonna... I think we got somewhere today, gentlemen. Sort of.
Sam Lessin: I hope so.
Brit Morin: By the end of this.
Sam Lessin: Enjoy Japan.
Brit Morin: We are gonna enjoy more of Japan. Uh, we've got some interesting stuff going on here in the next couple days. We'll report back further next week on this podcast. And, you know, Jess, we missed, we missed the rest of Jess. But I'm sure she's gonna have some big updates for us soon too. So thanks to everyone who listened in this episode. Thanks to everyone for liking, subscribing, commenting. I had some shout-outs, by the way, at Tokyo Clock Con for our pod from the Japanese, which was amazing. So we're, we're global, you guys. We're, we're going somewhere in the world.
Dave Morin: Wild. They must, they must love me in Japan.
Brit Morin: You came up. Yeah. We'll get Sam here one day.
Sam Lessin: Uh, have fun, guys. Talk to you soon.
Brit Morin: Thanks, everyone. We'll see you back next week for another episode of More or Less. Bye-bye. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find more information about each episode in the show notes, and follow us on social media by searching for @moreorless, @davemorin, @lesson, @jlesson. And as for me, I'm @brit. See you guys next time.