#147 — Why the Met Gala Hates Tech, Elon vs OpenAI Drama, and the Rise of Chinese AI Models
May 08, 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):
Dave Morin: I think we've repeatedly talked about this. The AI business is a terrible business. Why is that? Every technology cycle has a infrastructure investment cycle. Like, if you just look at the level of investment at the beginning of the web era, at the beginning of the mobile era, at the beginning of the cloud era, there's always this huge investment in infrastructure. And it's usually, like, many years after the infrastructure investment that all of the value gets created, and we're just not even close to being there yet. These AI harnesses, like CloudCode, like OpenClau, like Codex, they're very small, but what they look like to me is the future of what the applications on top of the AI infrastructure are going to look like in 10 years.
Guest: More or less. Is it no or is it yes? We'll debate the tech that's best. Will we get more or less? Dave and Brit plus Sam and Jess. Put it all right to the test. More or less
Jessica: Why hello, Morans. Welcome to More or Less, Jessica, Dave, and Brit edition.
Dave Morin: Hey, Jess.
Brit Morin: I like that you introduced the Morans in your first line instead of the listeners. It's, "Hello, listeners," too, right?
Jessica: No, I'm saying hi to you. Okay. No, that's fair.
Brit Morin: Okay. All right.
Jessica: Let's go to you back.
Dave Morin: Here we are.
Jessica: The, the, the listeners are here for me to say hello to you. For better or worse, that's what they're here for.
Brit Morin: I think what you're trying to point out is that there is no other lesson on the podcast today.
Jessica: There's no other lesson. The other lesson's traveling.
Dave Morin: Doesn't matter.
Jessica: Which, Brit, doesn't matter. I think it matters somewhat, but guys, it did leave me an opportunity to rejigger my entire closet to- ... A, give more space for me, but also give more space from Sam. And viewers of this podcast on YouTube will notice my finger is taped because this went to a, um, a somewhat... You know, all, all suburban weekends begin with, "Do I need to go to the ER? No, I'll go to Home Depot instead." So that's basically what I've been doing.
Brit Morin: Wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on. Time out.
Jessica: The finger's good. Yeah. Okay.
Brit Morin: Time out.
Jessica: Give it to me.
Brit Morin: So first, first question. You removed clothes from Sam while he was gone to get more space-
Jessica: You know, Brit-
Brit Morin: ... AKA his space in the closet?
Jessica: ... I don't think my marriage would survive that, no. What I did is, he has a small portion of the closet. I decided to swap his small portion with another small portion so that all my things are together and all his things are together.
Brit Morin: Continuity. You want continuity of your space.
Jessica: So continuity, yes.
Brit Morin: Okay.
Jessica: But in order to make the place I relocated him to sort of, uh, hospitable, I decided to add more shelving to it-
Dave Morin: Ah
Jessica: ... so that I can argue he's getting more capacity.
Dave Morin: The old more shelving trick.
Jessica: Correct.
Brit Morin: And that's why you went to Home Depot.
Jessica: And that's why I went to Home Depot, because I needed more shelves.
Dave Morin: I respect this, Jess.
Brit Morin: Me too. I'm a, I'm a fan of a good DIY project, Jess.
Jessica: So right now we purchased the right melanite, but they would not cut it for me, so I have to go to the lumberyard-
Dave Morin: Ah
Jessica: ... sometime between now-
Dave Morin: This is even more advanced
Jessica: ... and Saturday.
Dave Morin: My respect is going up for you by this sentence right now.
Brit Morin: Is your AI agent teaching you what to do and walking you through every step?
Jessica: No. There's been no AI of any-
Dave Morin: Great
Jessica: ... I even used a real measuring tape, not my iPhone measure. I used measuring tape.
Dave Morin: I love everything about this.
Jessica: The finger's healing, and next week on the pod we can ask Sam how he feels about his new closet.
Brit Morin: About his relocated... When Dave goes out of town-
Dave Morin: This is the best thing ever
Brit Morin: ... I, the, I actually use that opportunity to just get rid of a few things that he won't remember.
Dave Morin: Oh, got it.
Jessica: I have discarded no clothing. I have discarded no clothing.
Dave Morin: Yeah, you don't wanna get rid of Sam's clothing, 'cause Sam's been wearing the same thing for 20 years, and that could be catastrophic.
Brit Morin: No, no. No, no, no. Sam had a major style upgrade. I saw some photos recently. He's popping collars. He's, like, all about the button-ups these days. He's looking-
Dave Morin: Ah, yes
Brit Morin: ... looking cute, Jess.
Jessica: Did you guys see the double collar? He double collared. The world was confused. The world was confused. Well, anyway.
Dave Morin: He pulled a Sam, he pulled a Sam Altman.
Jessica: He did. Yes, you know the reference.
Dave Morin: Yeah. That's a deep cut.
Jessica: He pulled a Sam Altman.
Brit Morin: I don't get why Sam Altman has double collars.
Dave Morin: No, it's an old, it, it, it's a very old, uh, like, 20 years ago WWDC story, right?
Jessica: Yeah. You, that's a deep cut.
Brit Morin: Oh.
Dave Morin: Gotta be around.
Jessica: Dave, that's good.
Dave Morin: Let's get into this. Let's get into the current things.
Jessica: No, we will. We've got this trial, the trial of the whatever raging ahead. OpenAI, Elon. Juicier by the second.
Dave Morin: Is it really, though?
Jessica: Uh, yeah.
Dave Morin: Okay. All right. Well, what else are we gonna talk about?
Jessica: I think it...
Dave Morin: I won't jump in. Tell us what else we're gonna talk about.
Jessica: Well, uh, we're gonna, we're gonna jump into that. We also need to talk about the Met Gala, not from a fashion point of view, because that is not why you're tuned into this pod.
Dave Morin: Obviously.
Jessica: But for the anti-tech sentiment-
Dave Morin: Sometimes you guys have good fashion
Jessica: ... that it...
Brit Morin: I think Jess and I ha- make good comments about fashion.
Dave Morin: You do, but it's not every, it's not why people log in to this pod.
Brit Morin: All right. Fine.
Jessica: No, it's not. Um, so we, we really need to talk about the knives being out for, for all tech people, because I think... It, it's, it's important. I'm not trying to dismiss this. I think this is very important. Also, you know guys, the enemy of my enemy is my cloud computing provider, because we have seen perhaps the strangest AI compute deal to date, which is Anthropic Colossus. So SpaceX, Elon Musk-
Dave Morin: What? Really?
Jessica: ... have given over their first Colossus project.
Brit Morin: 100%.
Jessica: 100% of Colossus ran.
Brit Morin: Not, like, 40%. I know.
Jessica: Dave, did you wake up this morning?
Dave Morin: Oh no, I've been on calls all day.
Brit Morin: Dave's very busy right now, I can attest.
Jessica: And it is fascinating, and clearly all these other dynamics, including this trial, I think help explain how this happened.
Dave Morin: Yeah, no question.
Jessica: And I, and, and we should talk about compute, because, uh, we also published an interesting chart in The Information that I think is my most commented-on tweet ever in history. So compute, compute, compute. Let's start with Met Gala. Brit and Dave, what are your thoughts?
Brit Morin: I saw a lot of venture capitalists that I know there, and I was like, "What's happening?" And-
Dave Morin: I'm just confused. What is the Met Gala for?
Brit Morin: Well, Lauren Sanchez Bezos and Jeff Bezos are now, like-
Dave Morin: No, in general
Brit Morin: ... the key sponsors.
Dave Morin: I don't really care about any of this
Brit Morin: ... well, it's to support the Met
Jessica: It, it's actually to support the Costume Institute of the Met. It's not even to support the core Met, guys. It is specifically to support the Costume Institute, and it... but it's become both a fashion event, but a socialite gathering of the year. And for years and years, there have been a parade of tech CEOs sponsoring tables, getting involved, TikTok-sponsored, Instagram-sponsored, right? Like it-
Dave Morin: Yeah, but that's because those are, those plat- I always viewed it as, like, those that were relevant were involved in the, you know, and there was some semblance of editorial and taste and etc. involved. And so, you know, seeing, like, our, you know, our dear friend Adam Mosseri doing it, like, Instagram's, like, direct in the middle of the cultural conversation, right? Like, that made sense to me. It seems to me like there's a lot of just random, I don't know. Like, what... Like, did the editorial, did the editorial piece come off? Like, is, is that not-
Jessica: It isn't really edit- it's a fundraiser, right? And, and, like-
Dave Morin: Is it just money now?
Jessica: I think it's always sort of been just money, but with a sort of Anna Wintour creation layer on top, curation layer. But the big news this year was one of the honorary co-hosts w- were the Bezos and specifically Lauren, and this led to, it seemed, you know, from behind the scenes, just externally protests, internally a lot of consternation, people refusing to come. This drumbeat of tech lash, you know, is important to talk about.
Dave Morin: That's not tech lash, Jess. That's like-
Brit Morin: Mm, I think it's tech lash. I agree with Jess.
Dave Morin: That's... I think it's wealth lash.
Jessica: Well, I think it's all of it, Dave, and this is actually what I wanted to talk to you guys about because I think we're seeing, like, a crescendo and a convergence in a way that's, like, is probably quite consequential for these tech companies. So some of it's directly tied to, like, layoffs and AI, and so you see this commentary, like, comparing the estimated price of Lauren's dress to how many Amazon workers' jobs could be saved or something obviously ridiculous at that level, but gets at an issue in the public perception of tech in this moment that I think is very significant. So you've got sort of like AI and job displacement, then you just have what to me seems like more standard, like, hate the rich kind of things that you could lob against all galas.
Brit Morin: Standard, but I would argue is on the rise, especially with things like gas prices and everything else eating the economy right now, where I feel like the bifurcation of the wealthy and unwealthy is, is continuing to spread.
Jessica: I think this is, like, I mean, uh, and, and this is probably... It, it's a hard conversation to have, but it's so high level. But, like, I think, like, I just can't imagine, I mean, God forbid, we're seeing the violence against some women. I mean, I just think that this is, like, boiling over in kind of a big way, and it's gotta be something that these tech companies are taking kind of serious looks at. But at the same time-
Dave Morin: You mean big tech companies.
Jessica: Yes, big tech. As opposed to startups, or what do, what do you...
Dave Morin: Yeah, I mean the, the scale that we're dealing with, I mean, you know, Jeff Bezos is a hundred billionaire, right?
Jessica: Yeah.
Dave Morin: Like this is a totally different scale.
Jessica: Elon Musk could be a trillionaire, guys.
Dave Morin: Yeah, these are-
Jessica: Like what is, uh, yeah
Dave Morin: ... like we, we actually don't do justice to talking about this all as one thing. Like these are like very dif- the scales... We try to on this pod. The scales of it are all very different. Like these are, you know, Ama- what, what, what is Amazon and Meta and Apple and, you know, the Meg Seven, Meg Eight, whatever, like the big, big tech companies are very different animals than all the startups, all the... Even like the mid-tier tech stuff are just so much smaller. And so-
Jessica: So Dave, what do you think though, like I, I think we're at a point where especially with AI, it could all get washed up in the anti-sentiment. I mean, the other major bit of news so far this week, I'm gonna give you a take, I'm gonna give you one more data point. This is what I do, the headlines. We are now seeing a Trump administration seriously considering essentially taking a Biden approach to AI regulation which was much more hands-on, which was contemplating reviewing models and training ahead of time. Now you guys will remember that the Biden administration's stance on that was what pushed Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, along with crypto, into the arms of Trump. The Trump, uh, position has been like, "We wanna put a moratorium on AI regulation." And now, you know, in the snap of the fingers, we're seeing being contemplated, to be clear, not made into executive order territory yet, but a whole set of AI regulations that would really represent a sea change in the approach of the administration. I think there are many reasons potentially behind that, but one of which has to be they're taking the temperature on, you know, the broader sentiment around AI and what they believe the public wants, uh, from a regulatory point of view. I, I don't know why. I mean, I think they're... probably the technology itself is, is also shaping the change in that approach. But, but Dave, what's your take on this?
Dave Morin: I mean, I'm mostly hearing, at least in my back channels that I'm involved in, that that is fake news, that there's not really... You know, you look at, like, Sachs and these folks that are working on this stuff in the White House. Like this is not How they view things. Like, they view it as this is American capitalism, like we should, you know-
Jessica: Of course, but Saxe is, has a different job now. He's still informally an advisor through PCAST, but he is not the AI tsar anymore.
Brit Morin: There's no AI tsar, right? Like, who is the AI tsar?
Jessica: I think Sriram would say he's the AI tsar. I don't know, though.
Dave Morin: I think that there's a lot of games being played that are unrelated to what the White House may or may not think, and that, you know, I think An- Anthropic's out there fudding all kinds of things, OpenAI is... I mean, there's just a lot of, like, narrative games going on that are self-interested. And, you know, like I worry about this because America... Like, what am I seeing, uh, on the OpenClaw front? I'm going in reverse order on your things, Jess. Like-
Jessica: No, no
Dave Morin: ... America has absolutely no-
Jessica: There really is no order. I just try. There's no order
Dave Morin: ... Jess has absolutely no s- or, I'm sorry, America has absolutely no take, uh, on open source AI models, okay? Like, we don't have them. Meanwhile, China is printing them on printing presses. Like, you know, every single founder, every company I know, everyone I am talking to about OpenClaw is like trying to figure out how to use Chinese models to make their AI pipelines more efficient by the day. Because you know what? Like, I can now run, like I have this amazing little Dell box on my desk now that runs 120 billion parameter models with a Blackwell that is actually pretty good. Like, it runs a claw, like, really, really well, and-
Jessica: Wait, I have to pause. You're using a Dell box instead of an Apple box, and your name is Dave comma Morin? Morin comma Dave?
Brit Morin: It was, it was, it was a gift. It was a gift.
Dave Morin: Apple doesn't make a... Look at this. This thing is the size of a Mac Mini, and it runs an Nvidia Blackwell, like a GB10, has 128 gigs of RAM. You can run pretty awesome inference loads on it. It's pretty, it's pretty amazing.
Jessica: Oh, I wish Sam were here to see this.
Brit Morin: Times have changed, Jess.
Jessica: Can't wait to tell him. I can't wait to tell him.
Dave Morin: I mean, it's the thing we've been talking about on this pod for, like, two years. Like, I now can run, like, pretty powerful inference with pretty smart models, like, on my desk, and, you know, this thing costs $5,000. Like, it's not that out of reach. Now, the point is, I think you've got a big battleground playing out, right? You've got Chinese models and open source coming, like, really, really strong. The American answer to that has been, "We are going to let American capitalism create Anthropic and, uh, OpenAI and maybe Groq." Looks like now Groq is out the door, and maybe Colossus is, like, really the only thing that comes of it, and Colossus will run Anthropic's workloads, and that's great for xAI.
Jessica: No, they're getting, um... xAI gets Colossus 2. There's two Colossuses now, so they're not giving up on xAI.
Dave Morin: Anthropic gets the hand-me-downs, you know? Anthropic's like the little brother getting the hand-me-downs.
Jessica: Yeah, I think Colossus 1 is fine, but yes. I don't think it's like-
Dave Morin: Okay, I, I don't know. I don't have much more to say on that, but I wanna come back around to your first point, which is around this bri- you know, the inequality question. My new take on this is that there are around 50 million or so, I don't know, if you go on Wikipedia or you look at any number, there's around 50 million software engineers in the world, and yet there are six billion people that use the internet, that use software in the world. And so up until this point in time in human history, only 50 million people knew how to create software and then therefore create software wealth. And what is coming with OpenClaw and Claude Code and Codex, these are tools that are only used today by single-digit millions people, right? There are, like, four million people using Codex, some number similar of Claude Code, probably about the same. And yet anyone can create software now. And I know I'm kind of a broken record on this on the pod, but I think this is... there's, like, a likelihood that the inequality that has been driven by software entrepreneurship up until this point is at kind of a local maxima, and that because today anyone in the world can create software at a pace that was i- impossible six months ago. Like, you can speak English to create software and then therefore create software t- style wealth. I think this is, like, a totally new pathway for wealth, and that we might actually see a reduction in inequality because of AI over the next 20 years, and that to me is the optimistic take.
Jessica: Dave, I think there's... Yeah, I follow the logic of that take. I just don't see it happening. I think that, I mean-
Dave Morin: Maybe not yet
Jessica: ... I also think anyone-
Dave Morin: But it's-
Jessica: I think anyone who says they know what... You're not... Like, the future is unclear. But what I worry about is that there, these tools, I mean, you were just talking about open source, are gonna democratize the tools, but not the economics that is inherently deflationary. So, you know, you may, you may... And also, like, markets tend towards, like, tech has a sort of consolidating power as well. It has a decentralizing power, but look at how many search engines there were. Look at how many search engines there are now. Look at how many social networks there were. Look at how many social networks there are now. I mean, I completely follow that the sort of AI revolution is different and is fundamentally unleashing very powerful tools far wider than some of these other things. But I think Technology does end up consolidating both the economics, the control, and, and other things as well, and that's what we've seen in other waves. And, like, the reality is-
Dave Morin: Maybe, but I guess, like, I think that the... I'm not focused on anything other than the software engineering piece, right? The idea that, like, only a small... I mean, we're talking-
Jessica: Look, you used to be able to make a lot of money relatively by being a journalist, and now everyone's a content creator, but journalists overall, e- except at the extremes, are not very well-paid. I mean, I... That's a bad analogy. I don't know that there are ever any super, super rich journalists. But, like, just because you've democratized access to the medium, it doesn't mean you've democratized access to the economics.
Dave Morin: Yeah, but I think that the economics were completely... Th- they were, they were absolutely unattainable unless you could speak this esoteric langu- these, like, esoteric software languages. Like, and you had to also be able to go speak the language of capital and raise huge amounts of capital to, like, put enough engineers in a room to build a software system that could capture any economics, right? And so I guess that's the thing here, is that the doomer narrative... I, I guess I refuse to let the doomer narrative take over our podcast, because I believe that the doomer narrative comes from a specific sub-
Jessica: I'm not a doomer. I, I-
Dave Morin: You know, it's a specific subset of Silicon Valley that, like... I, I think there's an optimistic take here, too, which is that now everyone can make software, and now everyone-
Jessica: I just, I think there's a widening... It's hard for me to see anything but a widening inequality from this vantage point, knowing that that's such a slim lens because so much is unclear. But Brit, what, what's your take on this?
Brit Morin: Well, I continue to believe that what, what Dave's saying is true, and if you use the analogy that, Jess, you and I went through, which is journalism to the creator economy, and the-
Jessica: Still going through it. Still going through it.
Brit Morin: Still going through. That-
Jessica: Still here.
Dave Morin: Well, no, guys, it was media companies to creator economy.
Brit Morin: Okay. Media companies to creator economy. Fine. Jess and I both have run media companies, and I still believe that there are great content people in this world, despite the fact Box is now getting acquired by Rupert Murdoch. We can talk about that later.
Jessica: Not by Rupert Murdoch.
Dave Morin: Did that happen today?
Jessica: Ru- Brit, guys, guys, you're-
Brit Morin: I thought there was a Rupert... What was the Rupert news?
Jessica: Guys, James Murdoch. Ken Mil- Kendall Roy.
Brit Morin: Oh, a different Murdoch.
Jessica: You've got the wrong Murdoch.
Brit Morin: Okay. We'll go back and talk about- ... the Box news. I clearly read a headline and not the story.
Jessica: And honestly, this Murdoch believes in climate change, and actually is devoted a shit-ton of money
Brit Morin: Okay, so we're happy. Great. My point is-
Jessica: We're very happy. We are so excited about this. I hope the deal gets done
Brit Morin: ... there's still a high level of quality that can get paid and have a great job in this industry, and I think the same will be true for software engineers. At the same time, there's now a new trillion-dollar economy for everyone else that wasn't a content creator before and didn't know how to write an article or make a video, and now can and does, and has, has profited off of that. And so I think, to your point, I think you're both right.
Jessica: Yes, but to what level of profiting, right? Like-
Brit Morin: I'm not saying they're gonna have, like, a venture-backed companies, but they're gonna make maybe hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, millions of dollars, some of them, on a spectrum, right? And so I think that's net positive and optimistic for people across the world to think about who might never have been kn- like, known how to write software to turn an idea into a company or an app.
Dave Morin: Like, they've been e- they've been extracted from by people who could create software. Like, I think this is really important to just point out.
Jessica: Every other week, we have this debate. I wanna have the same debate, but in the context of public sentiment towards all of this right now, right? So take away what tech people are saying, Dave, and the doomerism and all of that, with its multi-agenda, right?
Dave Morin: But it plays into it. Like, the doomer, the doomer agenda has become popular culture.
Jessica: Okay. But what do we do about that? Or what, we, what do you guys do about that? Because that's a reality today.
Brit Morin: Once people start realizing, once the everyday person in Texas that I grew up with is like, "Whoa, I made $1,000 from this random AI thing I created," which I don't think is gonna happen today, but, like, maybe a year from now, and that's gonna... That sentiment's gonna spread, and people are gonna be like, "Whoa." And by the way, Dave and I did an hour-long meeting with our head of school this week. And it was just like, uh, every time we do conversations with, like, normies, like the head of school or whatever, they're like, "What? I can, like, do all this stuff, but, like, all the parents hate it and everyone's, you know, everyone's disputing how we should use AI and how should we do all these things, but also, like, I could run my school more efficiently."
Jessica: So you think the pa- you think the path out is education?
Dave Morin: Mm, yes.
Brit Morin: I'm just saying, like, people have not even started using the most powerful parts of AI yet, and once they have, and once they realize how much more efficient they can make their business or they can start a new business or they can make their life, I think the sentiment will naturally change.
Dave Morin: Yeah, not just education. We actually have to have better products, right? Like, I keep telling everyone, like, it's 1984 and the computer was just invented. It's 1997 and websites are a thing. It's 2007 and mobile apps are now a thing, right? And at the beginning of all of these things, nobody had the slightest clue what all of those new objects were gonna be like. There were gonna... It turns out there were gonna be billions of computers made. There were gonna, there were gonna be billions of websites. There were gonna be billions of app- And we're n- right there right now on AI agents, and nobody has the slightest clue, even though everybody in town keeps talking about how, like, the future's already here. Everybody's already... Like, AGI's already happening. It's like, dude, no one is using this stuff yet. Single-digit millions of people are using this stuff, and the only thing between here and there, like more people using this, is going to be better user experiences, better design, better products. Like, we haven't cracked it yet. Like, ChatGPT itself still isn't beyond 800 million people, and it's declining in growth right now. And so, like, we have to make better products in order to get this vision to the rest of the world.
Jessica: ChatGPT is declining in growth?
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Jessica: It's actually using lu-
Dave Morin: MAU
Jessica: ... losing, losing users-
Dave Morin: On MAU, yeah
Jessica: ... or it's growing less slowly? Excuse me.
Dave Morin: MAU looks like it's growing slower on all the charts I've looked at.
Jessica: But growing slower isn't u- losing users. It's just growing less slowly. It's still growing.
Brit Morin: Slowing. S- s- growing slower.
Dave Morin: I don't know.
Brit Morin: Declining-
Dave Morin: Yeah, yeah
Brit Morin: ... growth.
Jessica: I don't think it's losing users. I think it's growing more slowly. I, look, I, I think, I think this will be a very interesting conversation to come back to in 24 months, because I think that, again, everything you guys are saying makes sense, and I can, like, chart the logic in it. I also think people aren't gonna buy it. And remember, layoffs-
Dave Morin: Which people?
Jessica: ... are a big reason.
Dave Morin: Oh, you mean, like, the public sentiment thing.
Brit Morin: No, normies.
Jessica: Yeah. N- uh, yeah, the public senti- And I think layoffs... Look, you, you... Coinbase just had layoffs. You know, Meta has had recent layoffs. Meta had recent layoffs and came out and said, "We can't confirm that there won't be more, and we don't actually know the optimal size of this company." That is corporate messaging that is telling people to batten down the hatches for more layoffs, right? By the time you're saying that publicly-
Dave Morin: Yeah, but this is, like, all post-pandemic, like... Uh, you know, Jess, you and I are in similar circles. Like, everybody ... is doing this because they overhired in the pandemic. AI is a convenient excuse
Jessica: Now they're doing it because they're spending $200 billion on compute as well.
Dave Morin: Not everybody
Brit Morin: I think they're doing it 'cause they also, they can do things more efficiently, for real.
Jessica: They can way do things more efficiently. I mean, I, I, I think it's both, right? I mean, Dave, think of, like, the things you can do with your agents, right? Doesn't mean you're gonna stop hiring people, but it does mean that there are certain people-
Dave Morin: I have to, like, hire more people. That's what I don't understand about this whole narrative is, like, everyone I know working in this stuff is more busy than they've ever been. Like, that's part of what drives my whole passion around this, is that everyone I know at the heart of the AI conversation and at the heart of AI innovation is working harder and more than they've ever worked in their entire life, to the point where they're not sleeping well, their health isn't as good. Like, it's like this stuff is not making us more efficient.
Brit Morin: Well, I also think there's, like, a dopamine hit this thing gives you, and they are obsessed with it.
Jessica: Yeah, look, the token maxing population is not the population we're talking about right now, right? And-
Dave Morin: But some version of that's coming. Like, everybody else is also going to experience this, right? Like, tokens are going to come and become part of your job.
Jessica: They're gonna experience something, but I think it's really hard to know exactly what, for la- for... to use a cheesy word, like, the diffusion of all this is gonna look like and how. Like, I, I think, I think it is so early that, like, we cannot... It's not easy to extrapolate how this is, and this is why you see wildly different project- projections.
Dave Morin: And I'm, I'm, like, open to that. Maybe I'm totally disconnected, and maybe I'm... Yeah, maybe, maybe I have no idea. Maybe I'm absolutely, like, to the listener, like, hit me on Twitter if we sound completely and totally disconnected-
Jessica: Don't worry
Dave Morin: ... from what's actually going on.
Jessica: People will tell us in the YouTube comments if we're totally and how we're totally disconnected. But, but I, I think it... You know, I, I've talked about, like, starting to get, you know, some, like, policy proposals around how to handle this out there. I think, you know, when, when OpenAI bought TBPN, that, that, you know, whatever you would s- fill in the blank acquisition of two months ago, it was, like, to change the public perception of AI was, like, one of the stated reasons behind it, right?
Dave Morin: Yeah, tell better stories. Like, these guys have only used the doomer, kind of... We've talked about it at length on this pod. Like, it's like a Christian theological doomer, like we are creating a god, you should fear it. They've used this one version of a message. It's actually ancient spiritual technology. They used, like, literally Christian theology to sell this thing to the world and scare everyone, and now they're stuck. They're like, "Ah, AI is less popular than ice. What do I do? I have to tell much better story," right? Like, "I have to give people the optimistic take." And so you're-
Jessica: And look, if people are gonna feel like it's coming for their jobs or their kids' jobs, like, it's gonna be very hard to come up with a narrative. As narrative-driven as the world is, that's gonna create that. Now, Dave, you're right. In the past, tech- the product itself has closed the gap, right? And Google ate all the world's information until it was super convenient, and then it was Google, and you could never live without it, right? Or name your privacy concern that went away with some, you know, new convenience. But it, it's like, it's just, it's crescendoing.
Dave Morin: I feel like I'm, like, the, the voice of Sam here on this or something. Like, that it's, you know, we're the product... Like, the... No, the policy thing, like, you just mentioned policy, right? Like, policy's, like, so far behind. We, we can't count on policy to help with any of this. If we're, if we're sort of staying up in this, like, if we're staying up in this, like, what is the popular, what is the conversation amongst all the citizens of the United States and the world, like, policy's not gonna help, right? The only thing that's gonna help is better products, right? That, like, do better at what we're... And then I guess that's kind of the breakdown in ideologies, right? Some people believe you need to slow it down and stop it and be Bernie or whatever in policy. Some people are technology maximalists, and they think, like, if we can make better technology, then maybe that will solve the problem, and that's the great debate.
Brit Morin: But don't you think speed is, like, a big or the biggest part of this? Because during the search era and the mobile era, that, those were both radical changes, even the PC era, for people, for their jobs, for how they lived, for how they worked, but they happened over, like, so many years that I think organically people adapted and companies adapted. And right now we're in this, like, crunch period where it's like everyone's racing at the speed of light to get to the next model, and so therefore everyone needs to keep up and every company needs to keep up and the jobs are... We're losing jobs faster, and everyone needs to pivot faster, and there's this amount of stress and anxiety.
Dave Morin: Who is everyone?
Brit Morin: Like, companies across-
Dave Morin: In where?
Brit Morin: ... the school, country, schools-
Dave Morin: No
Brit Morin: ... literally. I mean-
Dave Morin: No
Brit Morin: ... everyone's afraid
Dave Morin: Like, this isn't happening-
Brit Morin: The people that are afraid
Dave Morin: ... across the country.
Brit Morin: It is. The literal negative sentiment is because people are afraid of what AI means for them, for their kids, for their jobs, for all of this stuff, and how it's gonna take over their lives. And I always wonder if, if it was slowed down and all of this was happening over a five or 10-year time horizon instead-
Jessica: I don't think you can slow this thing down
Brit Morin: ... of, like, a one-year time horizon.
Dave Morin: No.
Brit Morin: But I think that's what the government's trying to do. The government-
Dave Morin: No, they're not, Brit. Nobody's trying to do anything.
Jessica: Guys, DeepSeek is raising, like, a gargantuan amount of money. Like, there's nothing
Brit Morin: Well, they're from China. Our government is, like-
Dave Morin: From China
Brit Morin: ... "Maybe we should put the brakes on some of this stuff." No, I know, but, like, I just think that, I think the human sentiment of change is not meant to, like, move this fast. Like, even, even high tech, like, or sorry, high growth tech startups are freaking out of, like, "Oh, we have to change. We have to do layoffs."
Dave Morin: Humans don't like change in general.
Jessica: I think it's possible... I don't- I'm gonna try this out. I don't know if I believe it. I think it's possible it's not actually moving this fast.
Dave Morin: That's what I'm saying.
Jessica: That the-
Dave Morin: It's not
Jessica: ... the, the narrative, including the role of the press broadly, and the role of commentators and of everyone is like... You're right, Dave. They're piling into the doomer narrative, or they're piling into the, like, like, diffusion is here tomorrow narrative, right? And what's happening... But it's a hard line because you do need to... My experience is you have to somewhat evangelize this stuff to get experimentation-
Dave Morin: Yeah
Jessica: ... going.
Dave Morin: Of course.
Jessica: Right?
Dave Morin: Of course.
Jessica: And so, but then it's like, "You've been AI pilled." It's like, no, I haven't been AI pilled, but, like, I did, like, you gotta learn about this, you know?
Dave Morin: Yeah, totally. But look, the numbers, just look at the numbers. That's what I'm trying to do is, like, every conversation I'm in, I'm just, like, grounding people in the numbers. There are only four million people using Codex. That's, like, no one. Literally no one is using AI engineering tools. No one in the grand context of the world. It's gotta be the same number, right? If you just look at the numbers, right, there's around 10 million software engineers that build iOS and Android app. So the population of developers in the world is somewhere in the ballpark of 10 million, and Codex's last number was four million. My guess is that Claude's is the same-ish. You know, it's single digit million. And so that's awesome. Like, I love this stuff. I'm using it every day. It's so much fun. It's a new paintbrush that you can paint amazing new paintings with, right? And it's so fun, and it's a great new technology, but, like, the numbers are so tiny. Like, so tiny. And I get it, the revenue numbers are enormous, but, like, the numbers are still so small in terms of how far this is diffused into society. Like, it's so small.
Jessica: Well, I wanna t- I wanna transition this to the compute conversation, just some new developments there, because this is, like, the other side of the coin of this. But Dave, I also think it's interesting to point out that, like, you're making this point that it's so small, that so many few people are using it, that we don't know. You're also saying that you and everyone you know are, have to hire more people or, you know, going crazy. I've never... Like, so i-i- you know, the, the... It's sort of comments like that that have people extrapolating to, you know-
Dave Morin: Well, that's what I think, like, you know, I think we've well, we've well articulated it. Perhaps we, we tend to articulate it on the pod that there's, there's no good business in AI. Like, I think people are sick of us talking about it this way on the pod, that the, the-
Jessica: I don't think we all think there's no good business in AI, but yes.
Dave Morin: Well, I mean, I think we've repeatedly talked about this, that the AI business is a terrible business. Why is that? E- every technology cycle has a infrastructure investment cycle. Like, if you just look at the level of investment at the beginning of the web era, at the beginning of the mobile era, at the beginning of the cloud era, there's always this huge investment in infrastructure, right? And in this case, it's been in compute, which is a great thing to switch to next. But it wasn't until the application era started long, and it's usually, like, many years after the infrastructure investment that all of the value gets created, and we're just not even close to being there yet, right? Like, that's what I'm kind of trying to point out is that these AI harnesses, like Claude Code, like OpenClaw, like Codex, they're very small, but what they look like to me is the future of what the applications on top of the AI infrastructure are going to look like in 10 years, and nobody's started building them yet. Like, it's all just pretty new, and we're, like, figuring this out, and there's a huge amount of business to be made around how do you build stuff to use the AI infrastructure better and make it more usable to people? Because it's still very hard to use AI inference, like, in your job. There has to be a tool for you to use the inference to do the job that you're doing, right? And that requires user interface and design and well-thought-out tools, and, like, a lot of that is all just really new. Most people just use AI to get information today. They don't use the inference to do their job. And, like, that's going to be the next 20 years, right? And that takes a long time, 'cause everybody has to be... A tool needs to be made for their job or their new job, and then they need to be, learn how to do it, and, like, humans don't metabolize things very fast. And so I, I buy your take that it's much slower than people think, and the narrative is way out in front.
Jessica: Which is also, like, I, I... So we don't have to belabor compute, which I know is not everyone's favorite topic, but two important things happen. One, and let me just share this chart. So The Information had some reporting about Anthropic, which has been behind in compute capacity.
Dave Morin: Yeah, it's clear they made a massive strategic mistake.
Jessica: They made a massive strategic mistake. They seem to have remedied it pretty quickly.
Brit Morin: I think they remedied it really quickly.
Jessica: And at great expense.
Dave Morin: I don't know about that. What are the actual numbers? Yeah, I mean, they, they-
Brit Morin: Google and now Colossus, right?
Dave Morin: Yeah, but Brit-
Brit Morin: And Amazon
Dave Morin: ... this is probably costing them a fortune. Like, this is a massive mistake.
Brit Morin: I mean, 200 billion is-
Dave Morin: Whoever is the CFO or did the planning is, like... I don't know. It's just not-
Jessica: Krishna Rao, smart guy. They made a mistake. Look-
Dave Morin: Yeah, but this was a serious mistake
Jessica: ... it's a serious mistake. It will cost them. I think Dario said at their conference today that their revenue's up 80x where they thought it would be. They're doing just fine, okay? So, but here is an interesting thing. So The Information broke the news about the size of Anthropic's latest Google Cloud commitment at 200 billion, and then we charted of the b- we just had earnings, of the backlogs in deals for Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Amazon, what percentage are OpenAI's commitment and Anthropic's commitment. It's together they're about half, okay? On one hand, this is not surprising. Obviously, who else are the really big customers of compute at this moment? But it's also really striking how much growth that's happening in these multi-trillion dollar hyperscalers is coming from the spending commitments of these-
Brit Morin: From the private markets, basically. Of all venture capital
Jessica: ... from these two companies, right?
Dave Morin: Yeah, but am I reading this right? That OpenAI was just so much smarter. Like, the scale of what they were doing was so far beyond Anthropic.
Brit Morin: And why hasn't OpenAI invested in Google yet?
Jessica: Well, the, uh, so my other take is when they'll, these guys will... They f- they just view themselves as too competitive, but when they put that aside and OpenAI said-
Brit Morin: Yeah, but how is Anthropic not competitive to Google?
Jessica: Well, OpenAI thinks it's competing with everyone. But the other thing, by the way, Dave, I'll circle back to your question, is this chart just shows w- the, the money is invested, right? So this is sort of those who believe that this is a circular economy. So Microsoft-
Dave Morin: You have to believe it
Jessica: ... is investing in Anthropic-
Dave Morin: It just is
Jessica: ... and it's going right back up there. We should've put this in one chart, team.
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Jessica: We have it, other graphics, right back up here. So Dave, I think you're... I, I think... How do I stop sharing? Okay. Yeah, Anthropic Screwed up for this compute, but also... And, and I think they will fix it a great cost. But y- you know, after striking Colossus, they instantly rolled back some of the limits, they instantly upped the capacity. I mean, I, I actually think they resolved it pretty quickly. And I don't think you can fault companies for having even more exponential growth than the exponential growth that they thought. I mean, they were obviously too cautious in compute, and that was obviously a mistake, but I- that's n- gonna be nowhere near existential for them. And I think it's hilarious that, I mean, Dario, Elon Musk, kind of the inverse of each other as humans. Like, they really are not similar on any metric except their hatred of Sam Altman right now. Uh, well, they're very different. Like, Dario, he's starting to be more outspoken, especially around his sort of doomer narratives, but like, you know, he has been... It, it's a good, it, it's a good point, Dave, of how to sort of describe it, but like, articulated very different principles around safety, articulated very different principles around capital than Musk. Like, is, I would say, while he, like, says some very bold narratives on certain topics, like he's sort of like an understated human being in many ways, minus, like, pushing those narratives. He's built a culture at Anthropic where, like, absolutely no one leaves. xAI is a revolving door of people. Like, they're, they're just very different type of leaders, and they have not... You know, they've had very different approaches to regulation. Like, Elon has been like, "Back off," Dario's been full court press. So I would just say there, there has not been many common threads on how they operate their companies, what they've articulated as important, you know, that, that I've seen, having followed this space pretty clearly. But now we have this, this mega deal where SpaceX is selling or renting computer, I don't know what you do, you know, to Anthropic. Elon is tweeting up a storm about all the time he spent with the Anthropic team and what great humans they are and how aligned... You know, the elephant in the room is just OpenAI, and Musk wanting to stick it to them every way possible. I mean, as this trial has un- And the SpaceX IPO, we're showing any customer demand for your compute. And by the way, I don't think it's a coincidence that Anthropic said it would be potentially interested in orbital data centers, which of course is the driving narrative of the SpaceX IPO, and which no one in the industry at all believes is actually a near-term thing. So it seems like they both got some extra juice out of this agreement. But, I mean, it makes a lot of sense, and I think it's a very smart move from Elon's perspective, and probably a, a prescient one on his part to have, you know, gone full steam ahead in, in building all these data centers, um, knowing that, you know, this opportunity would pre- present itself at some point. But it is kind of wild. They're, they're very odd bedfellows, is my take. I don't know, what do you guys think?
Brit Morin: I can't take Elon seriously anymore, and I feel like he's like, he's tak- he's taken the Trump pill of he's best friends with someone one day and not the next. And, and so I don't actually trust any of these deals, uh, like that they're all gonna happen, go through, that he's on one side or the other. I feel like no one... This is all, these are all characters, as we've talked about before, masquerading, and one month is very different from the next. And I think you're even seeing the same thing, like we've been so hot on Anthropic for the last few months, but also, like, ChatGPT's new model is like really awesome, and now there's a lot of people starting to use that again.
Jessica: Did you guys get invited to this party? I didn't get invited to the party. There was a 5.5 party or something.
Brit Morin: On 5.5, yeah, yeah.
Jessica: So companies now parties for model releases?
Brit Morin: Oh, please, God.
Jessica: This seems very something. Okay, sorry, Brit, it's swinging. So you like the new ChatGPT model?
Brit Morin: Yes, and I still use all of them, and I'm still, like I just think we're so early in this and what you... You know, Sam would say they're all just gonna go to the same place and be commoditized, but I actually think we're gonna be flip-flopping back and forth for the next many months, and we'll see who ends up. But you know, everyone's just getting their compute infr- infrastructure, everything in place and trying to build as fast as they can. Meanwhile, Google has 3 billion users with like registered accounts, so I'm still not, I'm still like long Google here.
Jessica: This is a cycle where Google goes slightly quiet, and then it's IO, and, and we'll see.
Brit Morin: Yeah, they're, two weeks from now, Google's gonna come out with a bang.
Jessica: And we just sorta don't know. Have you guys been following the trial?
Brit Morin: No. Can you fill us in?
Jessica: Well, like basically, so it was really Brock- uh, recent days have been Brockman's turn on the stand. And I think as we've talked about too, but you know, Greg diaried the entire founding of OpenAI, his hearts, wants, desires, financial goals, everything, and that is all in evidence, so he's been asked a lot of questions by that. I mean, look, Musk's lawyers are pit bulls, and I think they're actually very good at what they do. I was catching up with my lawyer yesterday, and I was just like, "What do you think's gonna happen in the trial?" And he was like, "Musk has great lawyers," you know? So I, I don't know. But basically, it was a lot of going back to the earliest days of OpenAI with Elon, with Greg, with Sam. It was revealed that Altman, 'cause it was a nonprofit back then, was paid Greg $10 million out of his like own family office and kept it from Elon. And so all these sort of alliances were being formed beneath the surface, and it just seemed like a complete tinderbox ready to explode, which it did. You know, the, it also came out that Brockman's stake is worth about $30 billion, which is a point that he was just grilled on and asked, "Well, why haven't you donated it?" And like all these questions, and it made me realize, I do think Altman, who's very shrewd, was really prescient in not having equity in OpenAI. And again, it can get paid in a lot of different ways. But I, I was actually the first to report that he didn't way back when in all these funding rounds, and it was Kind of peculiar to me, but the sense was that he really felt that, like, it would be better for everyone, including, like, coming back to bite him for having, like, personally made so much money on a particular technology. So we'll see. Mira Murati has been testifying, or her deposition is being played, and so questions about Sam's leadership are coming out and, you know, a little bit more TMZ than substance in some regards. Um-
Dave Morin: Yeah, I guess that's been kind of my read, is that everybody thought that this was going to be... I, I don't know which side thought the other was going to be the pariah in the eyes of the public, but it's all kind of like a thud in my view. It's like, eh. Like, uh, back to the beginning of the episode, Jess, to me, what this just looks like is sort of wealthy people bantering and, like, it, it's kind of a... It's kind of unfortunate. Like, it, it doesn't seem to serve the public interest, and maybe I'm mi- misreading it, but it, it looks to me like, kind of like a dud trial. Um, but I guess we'll see.
Jessica: Well, it's not... I don't know. I mean, again, I think, I think ultimately Musk has to show that OpenAI violated a contract or, you know, committed fraud, and I do think these lawyers are smart, and all of these things do potentially weigh towards that. But it, it's, it's a little bit circuitous and, you know, the jury obviously has a lot of power in this case, too, and so you're just trying to convince jurors.
Brit Morin: Polymarket gives Elon a 41% chance of winning the case.
Dave Morin: Has it changed at all? I haven't looked at the-
Jessica: It's been pretty stable.
Brit Morin: It started at, like, 56%, but-
Dave Morin: So he's losing?
Jessica: Yeah.
Brit Morin: Yeah, but you have to invert these things, right? 'Cause the betting pool is on the flip side, right? So, yes.
Dave Morin: So wait, the, the title is, "Will Elon Musk mi- win his case against Sam Altman?" and it dropped.
Brit Morin: Yeah.
Jessica: Polymarket's betting against him winning.
Dave Morin: It started out at 55, and we are at 41 right now. It's kind of-
Jessica: Yeah.
Brit Morin: Mm-hmm.
Dave Morin: It's been all down since it started, really.
Brit Morin: But there's been some bobbling in the last week, for sure.
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Jessica: OpenAI also revealed in a filing that Musk had approached them about this, Brockman about a potential settlement two days before. That doesn't really help his case, although I, I think that was more body language. But-
Dave Morin: Wait, sor- sorry, what happened? So-
Jessica: So OpenAI put out a filing saying that a couple days before the trial, at these... Well, they didn't put this in the filing, but at the Breakthrough Prizes, Musk had approached Brockman about s- you know, potentially figuring out a solution to this or something like that. So OpenAI put it in... I, I think the reason they issued a filing is they wanted to be able to ask Brockman about it, so they had to, like, submit that as, I don't know, testimony of some nature. But it also maybe, like, apparently according to this OpenAI filing, when Brockman rebuffed him, Musk said, you know, "In a couple weeks, you two are gonna be the most hated people on the planet."
Dave Morin: And, like, that hasn't happened. So it, it kind of... It actually goes to show how disconnected they are, all of this is from reality, right? Like, that I don't know that anyone cares, like, about this, even people in town. Like, it's like, "Ah, it's, like, interesting TMZ stuff."
Jessica: Well, I know. I mean, again, not everyone has to care an equal amount about everything, but, but this, there's, there's things at stake here. I mean, OpenAI is important. OpenAI's IPO is something that's gonna be widely watched, and a lot of people are gonna have, you know, a clear stake in. So I, I, I don't think we have to over-index towards it for, like, drama's sake, although please, someone make the movie. You know, it is, it is happening. It is news.
Brit Morin: Guys, side news on you can actually bet, and there's $6 million of betting on Polymarket, on the number of times Elon Musk will tweet in a given week, and for this week, between May 1st and 8th, which is the s- there's $6 million that's gone into it. The current 48% is, uh, 160 to 179, but the numbers go all the way up to, like, 500-plus. This is a hilarious Polymarket.
Dave Morin: On this point, this is maybe a fun pop culture thing. One of the things I've been hearing a lot from smart people that I know that are running, doing interesting things with OpenClaus is people are doing Polymarket trading operations using several OpenClaus or several agents, and the best trading market is the Twitter mentions, like, whether or not something's going to be mentioned on, on Twitter. So a trade like that-
Jessica: But can't that be very easy to manipulate? Didn't Brian Armstrong, like, with-
Dave Morin: I think that's why it's, I think that's why it's so good. Like, that's why it's such a good-
Jessica: It has, like, Cameo-esque vibes. Like, you're just getting people to say things. I don't know. I-
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Brit Morin: Oh, Cameo.
Jessica: We had a G- uh, Polymarket story today in the Information about, um, the slow start for their US business, so worth checking out for people interested in such topics. What else, morons? Dave, you wanna give us the OpenClaus update? You're, you're in meetings all day. You're not even looking at your Information news feeds. You must be swamped. What's wrong with you?
Brit Morin: His claw, his claw is delivering the news nightly at 9:00 PM.
Dave Morin: That's fine.
Jessica: Are you getting, like, MCP'd in? You want an MCP deal? Like, I got you. We got you.
Dave Morin: We don't do... We're way more into s- we're way more into CLIs, uh, at OpenClaus. Yeah.
Jessica: Can you explain that for me? What's a CLI?
Brit Morin: Command line interface.
Dave Morin: Command line interface.
Jessica: Oh.
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Jessica: Oh.
Brit Morin: Yeah.
Jessica: But y- that... You could still MCP. Those are two different things.
Brit Morin: Similar.
Dave Morin: The main-
Brit Morin: Similar
Dave Morin: ... the main OpenClaus update is that we have had a lot of bugs and stability to work on for the last few weeks, and it's been... You know, there's a lot that has happened and a lot of people using this thing at very large scale. And so we've been very focused on stabilizing the core, reducing, reducing what is OpenClaus to only what matters, and then putting everything that is sort of third-party things that a lot of people use into a plug-in architecture so that the central core is safe, secure, fast, you know, as bug-free as possible. It's definitely taken us longer than we expected, and there was a rough week last week, but we're in a good place now. I think we're... You know, things are s- speeding up. People are happy. Maybe turning the corner. It's been a, been a lot of work, though, doing a release almost every two days right now, sometimes multiple times a day.
Jessica: Dave, d- is OpenAI helping with this too, or this is really just the open source network as it's been growing separate from them? I know they have some involvement.
Dave Morin: It's the open source, uh, network. They have actually a couple of people contributing, uh, from the OpenAI engineering team, have been contributing as open source maintainers. Obviously, Peter is the largest contributor, and he technically works at OpenAI. And then we're in conversations about... The other, I guess, big update is the foundation, I've already mentioned it publicly several times, but the 501[c][3] is set up- We are, uh, we actually have, uh, capital coming in the door now. We've actually begun onboarding a full-time team to work on the open source core at the foundation, which is great. That's a really important piece of doing a good job on this project, given how large a scale it is at this point. So we've been working through that, and then, you know, the conversation with OpenAI, we're still figuring out what level they're gonna support us. We, obviously we burn an enormous amount of tokens on this project. We haven't disclosed publicly how big it is, but the number is... It's, it's very large. Um-
Jessica: Mm-hmm
Dave Morin: ... and so the help of token providers of various kinds is very important to us. So we're, we're, we have ongoing conversations with many, many different partners right now, and we're gonna get a blog post out in the next couple weeks talking through a lot of that stuff. So I'll, I'll save that for then.
Jessica: Did you see the Meta news in The Information, a little bit more about their personal agent plans? I think this was out there to some degree, but-
Dave Morin: Yeah, I think it's been out there. You know, at OpenClau- We've been aware for some time that they have a fork, uh, of OpenClau, and, you know, we, we expect they'll do something pretty big, so that's cool. It's good to hear they're doing that. And, um, yeah. It's great. You know, we've got-
Jessica: It says end of June, I think, right?
Dave Morin: We see the same thing in, I mean, in China you've got huge deployments-
Jessica: Yeah
Dave Morin: ... on ByteDance and, let's see, ByteDance, Baidu, Alibaba, they all have forks. They've all, they're all deploying at large scale. So there's a lot of this going on all over the world.
Jessica: I, my big AI news of the week is I connected my Granola to my Claude code.
Brit Morin: Oh, you're late to that.
Jessica: Look at me.
Brit Morin: Jess, you sh- I did that six months ago.
Dave Morin: Great.
Brit Morin: You know what's cool-
Dave Morin: Great
Brit Morin: ... about... Oh. You can do some damage with that.
Jessica: Tell me, like, give me two examples of things now that I've made this connection I can do.
Brit Morin: Okay. One thing that's obvious, there's a partnerships business that you run at The Information, and probably, like, a s- the hot leads, like, you have CRM of some sort. I don't know what software you're using for your CRM. But literally today I just, like, within 30 minutes imported all my Granola notes from the last year and a half, two years, used anecdotes in all of them to populate a new CRM for me, um, on the fundraising side of things, and I have, like, little anec- I can now, like, rank... I had Claude, like-
Jessica: Are you saying anecdote as, like, a technical term, or you're saying you added notes? Like, we've had a sales meeting. You're pitching me on, you know-
Brit Morin: Okay
Jessica: ... buying Brit+
Brit Morin: ... you had a sales meeting. Okay. The s- No. You, one of your sellers, like-
Jessica: Yeah
Brit Morin: ... talked to Sony a year ago, and they were like, "Uh," on the si- out of the side of their mouth they were like, "Yeah, we really don't have budget this year, but probably, like, mid-'26 is when we're gonna, like, look at these opportunities again." You forgot about it 'cause they weren't on your hot l- leads list. Guess what pops up in your CRM now with a flame icon? Sony. 'Cause it's mid-2026, and you know you need to prioritize that, and you have the exact anecdote from those meeting notes.
Jessica: I think we pay Salesforce a shit-ton of money to do that-
Brit Morin: Well, you don't need to anymore
Jessica: ... so maybe you're saying we shouldn't do that.
Brit Morin: Bye bye, Salesforce. No. All of this is happening now. You can custom create it. You can feed in everyone's Granolas. Every time you have a new meeting with Sony, now you're, you're enriching the data over and over again. Just telling you, it's good.
Jessica: Yeah, I don't know. I'm, I'm interested in what my team thinks about sharing Granolas.
Brit Morin: They don't have to share all Granolas. You can auto-save Granolas to certain folders.
Jessica: Yes.
Brit Morin: So all of my fundraising meetings go to a folder, and that folder can be shared.
Dave Morin: There's a lot of different ways-
Jessica: I love it
Dave Morin: ... to do this. Shout-out, you know, to Gary Tan. Um, he's got, he's been doing a bunch of really interesting innovation around this with his G Stack and G脑 project. Jess, you should check out G脑. And I, I can take this offline with you, but there's, there's also a bunch of cool ways you can, like, embed all of your transcripts and whatever other data you need for workflows, like what Brit was talking about, into vector databases and then have your Clau- or your Claude code be able to recall things like memory in a way that's really powerful.
Jessica: I keep telling it to remember things, 'cause Sam taught me that.
Dave Morin: Yeah. Yeah.
Jessica: I like asking it what I did today.
Dave Morin: Yeah. No, that- ... that's one of the best use cases, for what it's worth. Like, synthesize my day.
Jessica: I'm like, "What should I do tomorrow based on what I did today?" Like, what-
Dave Morin: Yeah
Jessica: ... you know?
Brit Morin: You know how everyone's getting, like, their agent to send them a daily briefing in the morning with, like, the top news and the weather and all the things? Well, someone connected this to, like, a receipt machine to make a physical-
Jessica: Huh
Brit Morin: ... paper-
Jessica: That's cute
Brit Morin: ... they can leave for their kid-
Dave Morin: That's awesome
Brit Morin: ... in the morning on, like, the kitchen table to be like, "Remember, it's cloudy today. Pack your jacket. Here are the three things happening this afternoon. Ma- like, your math test is tomorrow."
Jessica: I'm also in favor of talking to children. I, I also believe that's a good thing.
Brit Morin: I know.
Jessica: But okay.
Brit Morin: But let's say you're traveling, and-
Jessica: Got it
Brit Morin: ... you know, you don't wanna be the nagging mom on text message-
Jessica: FaceTime
Brit Morin: ... reminding your nanny to then tell your kids.
Jessica: I just...
Brit Morin: Yeah.
Jessica: It's a novelty. I get it. Okay, that's good con- this is good, I, my AI homework. Brit, did you see Devil Wears Prada 2? Lot of journalism shout-outs.
Brit Morin: I can't... I invited eight women to go with me, and everyone flaked. I feel like we live in flake culture now.
Jessica: Well, Brit, we are ships passing in the night, because last Thursday I had a dinner date with one of our friends who stood me up, but she had a good reason.
Dave Morin: Look at this. What is with you guys and all your flake friends?
Brit Morin: Flake culture. Flake culture. Everyone has a different opportunity.
Jessica: She had a good reason, and she's an avid pod listener, so there's no, no resentment over this. But-
Dave Morin: I know which one it is
Jessica: ... I had a babysitter, and I thought, "What am I gonna do with this free time?" Because I, it was the only night I had a babysitter for, like, 10 days. And for s- because we had recorded the pod and you said you were gonna go, I ha- I had been seeing all the promo, but I had no idea where, where, when this movie hit theaters. I booked myself at the San Mateo Cinemark.
Brit Morin: Solo movie date?
Jessica: Solo.
Brit Morin: Yes.
Jessica: I don't, I think this is the only time I've actually seen a movie alone in my life, which is odd. I can't think of another one. I had the best time. The theme of the demise of journalism and the layoffs across the industry is, like, the backdrop to this whole thing. Yes, it's corny. Yes, it's silly. But it was a delight. I loved every minute.
Brit Morin: I'm thinking of doing this for Mother's Day, solo.
Jessica: You should go.
Brit Morin: Just be like, "Bye-
Jessica: I had a great time
Brit Morin: ... family." Okay.
Jessica: I really-
Brit Morin: I'm gonna do it
Jessica: ... enjoyed it. It's a nice two hours. You know, these movie theaters are really... Y- you've probably been in a while. I don't even know. I've f- maybe since SF1.
Brit Morin: Oh, I go to movies a lot. No, yeah, they're great. They have recliners now. Yeah, it's great.
Jessica: It was a great experience, the San Mateo Cinemark, and, um, I have to, I have to thank you for the idea. I would've just gone home and, you know, missed out on my evening out. And so highly recommend. Dave, what's on your list? What's on your pop culture viewing?
Dave Morin: Uh-
Jessica: Step away from the claw
Dave Morin: ... Ella Langley, in that she is the first country artist since Taylor Swift to cross over. Like, her, her song Choosing Texas is number one on the country charts and the-
Jessica: Hmm
Dave Morin: ... and the-
Brit Morin: Yeah
Dave Morin: ... Hot 100.
Brit Morin: She's a big deal.
Dave Morin: She's great. You know, she wasn't the best that we saw at Stagecoach a couple of weeks ago. She was amazing, but she's clearly young and doesn't have the stage presence of, say, like a Lainey Wilson or a Post Malone. Uh, she's a rookie, but, you know, I think that's pretty rad that she's, she's kinda got this crossover-
Brit Morin: She's ascending
Dave Morin: ... thing happening, yeah, which is cool.
Brit Morin: Yeah.
Dave Morin: And she's a great musician.
Brit Morin: Watch this space.
Dave Morin: Super great musician. I was also just so wildly impressed with Teddy Swims a couple weeks ago. Like, I, I've always liked his music, but he was unbelievable in person. Like, just kind of the, the-
Jessica: He's really good? Is Taylor Swift doing the s- uh, Toy Story song?
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Brit Morin: Yeah.
Jessica: Which one?
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Brit Morin: This, this got...
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Brit Morin: Oh, her team messed up. They accidentally, like, leaked an Easter egg, then they retracted it, but it's obvious she's, has a song. She's a- and now she has a credit on the Toy Story. It's coming out June 19th or 20th, something like that.
Jessica: Oh, so that countdown was early.
Dave Morin: Yeah.
Brit Morin: Yeah.
Jessica: But now we know. I bet everyone's-
Brit Morin: Now we know
Jessica: ... thrilled about that. Well, now we're talking about-
Brit Morin: Yeah, you're welcome
Jessica: ... the movie. I wouldn't have talked... What Toy Story are we on? 11?
Brit Morin: Five.
Jessica: Toy Story 5, okay.
Brit Morin: Five. And Frozen 3 is happening later this year too.
Jessica: You know, I have watched and enjoyed the first two Frozens back when-
Brit Morin: But you know what's not going well, in the spirit of May the Fourth be with you? Star Wars. Star Wars is not going well.
Jessica: What do you mean not going well? It's Star Wars. What are you talking about?
Brit Morin: No. Like, all the newer movies are, like, not... The new characters aren't really sticking with people, so, like, the Disney people are having to revive it all.
Dave Morin: Yeah, there's a rumor that they might split the, they might split the three sequels off into their own timeline or something like that because it's all going, it's been going so badly. And, like, the Mandalorian movie bombed in the box office. Um, and so they're like, there's, like, this potentially new storyline that they have to generate because the, everybody just wants to, you know, Luke Skywalker and the original characters. They don't want all these Reys and all these new things.
Jessica: Yeah, you know, there's a limit for how long you can stretch a franchise. But it's not gonna... If, if Star Wars can't make it work, I don't know what the prospects for-
Dave Morin: Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a bummer-
Jessica: ... the rest of Hollywood are, but-
Dave Morin: I thought that this Mandalorian... I don't know, I'll probably still go see it with the kids, but the, I thought maybe it was gonna be good, but it looks like it's bombing pretty badly.
Jessica: There you go. Okay, dear friends. Well, Morens, it's a, always a pleasure chatting exactly the same topics with you every week. Having exactly the same argument. It's like a Twilight Zone. What's gonna happen-
Dave Morin: No
Jessica: ... to AI job displacement? Just, just kidding. We're moving the ball forward, people. We're grateful for all you listeners out there. Please do, we, we do wanna hear from you, especially, I think, on the calibrating the tech sentiment and what to do about it, so. But with that, we will say farewell for now. Thanks for listening and watching, and we'll see you back here next week for another episode of More or Less. Bye.
Brit Morin: Bye, guys.
Dave Morin: See you later.
Brit Morin: 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.