#148 — Google's AI-First Laptop, Meta's Spy Games, AI Monks in Middle America
May 15, 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):
Jessica: The tech workers of the world are, like, sitting at home while their agents are running, whispering to themselves all day?
Brit Morin: Yes.
Dave Morin: Yes.
Brit Morin: And those that do work in person now have these co-working spaces where everyone's whispering to their computer, and it's super weird.
Jessica: Oh my God. Guys, this is so weird.
Dave Morin: Your hands can only type so fast, and it's just more context per second.
Jessica: Guys, I hope we still talk to each other. Do we have podcasts for that?
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, friends. Welcome to More or Less. The gang's all here. Hi, everybody.
Dave Morin: Hey, Jess.
Brit Morin: We're back.
Sam Lessin: Jess, you, you, you and Brit are both looking very nice right now.
Brit Morin: Thank you. I can't handle how nice Sam is these days. What's going on, Sam? Is it peptides or something? Something changing in the diet?
Sam Lessin: I got a lot of supplements, and I got a Nueropod.
Dave Morin: What's a Nueropod?
Sam Lessin: It's awesome. It's this thing that I was marketed on Instagram that clips on your ear and stimulates your vagal nerve.
Dave Morin: Oh, yes.
Sam Lessin: It's wild.
Dave Morin: I've had... I've tried one of those. They're pretty wild.
Brit Morin: What is the outcome of the Nueropod?
Jessica: Oh, I'm glad you asked, Brit, because it is tracked on the Oura Ring.
Sam Lessin: I was super jet lagged. I was up at 3:00 in the morning. Let's do a hit of the Nueropod. And so I tried it, and it's wild. My Oura Ring, it's like my HRV went through the roof. Like, it doubled. My heart rate dropped-
Dave Morin: Because it's terrified because you're electrocuting yourself?
Jessica: Yes, yes. Exactly.
Brit Morin: Wait, HRV is supposed to be low, though. You want low.
Jessica: No, no.
Sam Lessin: No, no, no. You want v- high heart availability.
Dave Morin: Yeah, you want high HRV, Brit.
Brit Morin: I want low heart rate, high HRV.
Dave Morin: High HRV.
Jessica: Okay, I'm gonna step back and sum this up, 'cause this actually was topic number one. We've got Google Hardware, we've got I/O, we've got a company called Microsoft we never talk about on the pod. Have a lot going on, but I do want actually to hear the greater public's opinion on whether Sam should be stimulating his vagal nerve every night s- for, to diminish his stress receptivity. But it seems appealing. Seems appealing.
Dave Morin: It is a well-trodden path to regulate one's nervous system.
Brit Morin: Jess, you're the wife. Is it working? I just need to know what the outcome is there.
Dave Morin: Yeah, do you feel better? Do you feel un-jet lagged?
Sam Lessin: Yeah. I felt great waking up.
Dave Morin: Interesting.
Jessica: Really, Sam's, like, heart rate, I mean, you can see it in the charts. My second topic of conversation is my new Oura Ring, which it turns out is not a fitness tracker, folks. But, like, your heart rate tanked.
Dave Morin: Did you just upgrade?
Jessica: Yes. His heart rate tanked, and his variability spiked exactly when he was done doing it, and he said he felt great. I just wanna know how much is too much. Like, when do we get into, like, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest territory here?
Brit Morin: At least Sam can be our guinea pig, and we'll just do the things that work after that.
Dave Morin: Some vagal nerve stimulation is good for everyone. You can do it in many different ways.
Jessica: Is some, like, 10 minutes a day? Like, Dave, what's some here? Y- I need a recipe.
Dave Morin: I don't know what the actual recipe is, but, you know, parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system stuff is regulated through the vagal nerve, and it's one way to, to... Cold plunging, there's all these different ways that you can shock the system.
Sam Lessin: I got it all. I got the cold plunge. I love the cold plunge. I got the vagal nerve. I got the red light. I just ordered, I ordered so many supplements while I was on the airplane.
Brit Morin: Sam is like Bryan Johnson 2.0, I think.
Sam Lessin: I do like Bryan Johnson. I once, I was very proud. He, like, published his score on the Bryan Johnson test, having done all this stuff.
Jessica: Oh, I knew this would get here. Yep. Mm-hmm.
Sam Lessin: And I took his test, and I was, like, half a point off him, and I messaged him. I was like, "Look, I do nothing, and yet here I am, half a point behind you." And then he was like, "No, no, no. The, the, the public things are all... I'm that much lower."
Brit Morin: By the way, I'd like to say there's a white space opportunity because there's no real female version of Bryan Johnson yet. I think there will be. That's gonna happen soon. Like, the women that are doing the biohacking to the level that he is on all women.
Dave Morin: Isn't his girlfriend kind of doing that?
Brit Morin: Nah, but she's not like... Most women I know couldn't name who that is. There's no one with the popularity.
Dave Morin: Women are naturally good biohackers. You have to be, right? Like, you don't need to be led anywhere.
Jessica: Let's be mansplained to, B- Brit, about our longevity and our-
Dave Morin: I'm down. I'm happy to keep going.
Sam Lessin: It's not clear to me that, like... Do women wanna experiment on themselves constantly?
Brit Morin: Yes. We do it with our faces a lot.
Sam Lessin: Do you wanna look like Bryan Johnson?
Brit Morin: We do all kinds of things to our faces, and I think women, this is the tip of the iceberg.
Dave Morin: They probably do want Bryan Johnson's skin, I would guess. Like, he's got, like, the ultimate skin, apparently.
Jessica: Yeah, skin is the way into women.
Brit Morin: Cellular rejuvenation is a thing that's happening, and I'm really excited about it.
Sam Lessin: The thing is, do women wanna live forever or be young forever? 'Cause Bryan Johnson just wants to live forever.
Jessica: Women don't want wrinkles.
Sam Lessin: 'Cause wrinkles are a sign of poverty.
Brit Morin: And we don't want saggy stuff.
Dave Morin: Should we talk about tech?
Jessica: Well, yeah. Okay. So guys, I don't know if you... The people wanted a different topic.
Dave Morin: Exactly. Everyone's like, "Please stop talking about what you talk about." So all right, we'll talk about skin.
Jessica: I do wanna say, because I polled the internet on whether I should get a WHOOP or an Oura Ring, and I got a lot of thoughtful feedback, and the dirty secret is I had both all along, but that would not have been a good poll if I hadn't. But I ha- I wasn't using both. Decided to go Oura Ring. Got the rose gold. Doesn't bother me wearing it all the time. But I did a 30-minute advanced Peloton Tread HIIT workout that it labeled housework and said it was moderate activity.
Sam Lessin: Is that because you're a woman?
Jessica: No.
Sam Lessin: It was like, oh, it's-
Jessica: I don't know
Sam Lessin: ... keep doing housework.
Brit Morin: That's what I was thinking.
Dave Morin: Is it trying to algorithmically encourage you to be a tradwife? Is that what it's doing?
Jessica: That's what it felt like. Because honestly, I was running, I'm not, like, really... I was running at a nine on the rate, which is not slow.
Brit Morin: That's really fast.
Jessica: Yeah.
Dave Morin: Housework.
Jessica: And it told me it was housework. And I had to walk 12 minutes briskly to meet my activity goal.
Brit Morin: I think your Peloton is trained on Sam Lessin's data set and it's ac-
Jessica: No, no, this is my Oura Ring.
Brit Morin: Oh.
Jessica: This is my Oura Ring.
Brit Morin: I think your Oura Ring is trained on Sam Lessin's data set.
Dave Morin: I love Oura Ring. I was a seed investor. I'm up 100X on that. Just lick the cookie as the number two angel investor in the world.
Brit Morin: Guess what, guys?
Jessica: Woo!
Brit Morin: Dave got demoted from number one to number two.
Dave Morin: Sam, I, I am out. I'm official 100X DPI on Oura.
Sam Lessin: Personally, 112X.
Dave Morin: Good. Let's like, like let's burn some of that jet fuel.
Jessica: But Dave, were you gonna say something about the state of their health ch- fitness tracking?
Dave Morin: No, I just wanna, I just wanted to lick the cookie.
Jessica: I am gonna put my Whoop on and start to track my activity with Whoop. I also love that Whoop is pro tennis, so I'm gonna support them. But I also pre-ordered, and here we get into the tech news of the week, folks, Google's new hardware, because they've l- launched a Whoop competitor.
Sam Lessin: Jess told me about it, so I bought it, even though I'm not gonna use it.
Jessica: I bought one, too, and I'm excited.
Dave Morin: I did actually see that. I actually wanted to buy one. I thought it wasn't available yet.
Jessica: Yeah, pre-ordered.
Dave Morin: I thought it was just pre-order.
Jessica: I pre-ordered.
Dave Morin: Okay.
Jessica: Pre-ordered.
Sam Lessin: You don't do pre-orders? Aren't you like an Apple fanboy? Don't you like l- stand in line for Apple shit?
Dave Morin: No.
Jessica: No, Apple hand deli- Tim Cook hand delivers, Dave- ... the latest Apple product-
Brit Morin: This is true. He does
Jessica: ... with freshly baked cookies. Let's not like... Or John Ternus, sorry. You got a new messenger.
Sam Lessin: Did you send John Ternus your address? 'Cause he might not have it in the transition.
Jessica: It's in the CRM. They've already pre-briefed everyone on the transition with, for Dave. Britt, we are on, by my account, like the ninth attempt to revive Google Health. So we should just at least notice that.
Brit Morin: Yeah, but here's what's happening under the hood. I have some intel.
Dave Morin: It does look good. I, it looks good. I wanna try it.
Brit Morin: Okay. Former Googler here.
Sam Lessin: That's Britt's look with it. Dave's like, "I made 100 times my money on Whoop," and Britt's like, "Did you know I worked at Google?"
Brit Morin: I just wanna remind Sam, the man who never bought Google stock during the AI boom of the last two years, so there you go.
Dave Morin: But I did.
Brit Morin: And I'd like to remind everyone that I'm still longest on Google out of everyone in the ecosystem. Okay, Google Health was a thing when I worked there 20 years ago. It's gone up and down over the years. However, with the AI revolution that's happening right now, Google DeepMind has an enormous interest in health, as do all the other frontier labs, and there's a lot of activity happening under the hood. Multi-billion dollar companies being created and invested in by DeepMind.
Sam Lessin: Only single billion dollar companies? Like, what is this, like fucking Farmville?
Brit Morin: There are a lot of biotech things going on, drug discoveries, this Whoop band. Google's now is, as y- we are gonna talk about today, starting to launch new AI-first hardware. So watch this space, because I think it's gonna get very interesting very soon, and right now, all the infrastructure is being laid by GDM to get there.
Jessica: GDM?
Brit Morin: Google DeepMind. That's how the cool kids say it, Jess.
Sam Lessin: What's the deal with everyone being scared? I heard something from my trainer that like apparently the net of like the OpenAI Elon trial is that they're, both Sam Altman and Elon are terrified of DeepMind. Like, that's the entire net of the trial.
Jessica: Well, yes, because it just relives history as documented in the information about that rivalry. So yes, that has been a theme exhumed in the old diary entries of Greg Brockman.
Dave Morin: Wait, they were terrified or they are currently terrified? I'm, I'm not understanding the narrative.
Jessica: Both. Both. But it has come up mostly through the history. Because remember, this all started when Elon, Sam, and Greg were on the same team, and they were all trying to compete with DeepMind.
Sam Lessin: Dun, dun, dun.
Jessica: Dun, dun, dun. And now they're fighting in court. By the way, after Altman's latest testimony, the odds that Elon wins this thing have tanked according to Polymarket and the prediction market. The trial is focused on those conversations, so that, that's why it's in the past. But very safe to assume everyone's still terrified by, by Google and DeepMind. And yeah, Britt, I think the health, I mean both in like drug discovery, obviously AlphaFold was one of the first big protein folding revelations out of DeepMind a long time ago now in relative tech years. But I'm excited for these tracking things. So Britt, what else are we seeing on the AI hardware front? We're entering what I call, um, developer conference season, or maybe other people call it that, too. So we're gonna see a lot of product.
Brit Morin: Yeah. I mean, this week Google announced a new AI-first agentic computer called the Google Book instead of-
Sam Lessin: What?
Brit Morin: ... the Chromebook. Yes. It was announced today.
Sam Lessin: Oh, I see.
Brit Morin: Built on top of Android, and made to not only leverage Gemini, of course, um, and all its products, but to actual do, do, actually do all kinds of interesting things with local compute on the laptops themselves.
Dave Morin: I love it.
Jessica: Yeah, this feels like Dave and his Dell.
Dave Morin: Yep. This is, this is the best. I'm a- I'm very into this.
Brit Morin: Dell is one of the OEMs that is coming to market with the Google Book, as well as all the other sort of Android OEMs. It's also s- creating this spark of activity amongst parents and schools nationwide, because Chromebooks have been now distributed to all these schools, and the question is, will Google Books be the successor? And that creates this whole wormhole of like, do parents want their kids using AI in schools? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which we can go down that rabbit hole. It's causing a lot of chatter so far on the internet this week.
Jessica: What makes it AI hardware?
Dave Morin: So I can answer that question generally, Jess. We'll see what the actual specs are. I haven't read it. But what makes it local AI hardware is usually some combination of a CPU with a GPU or a neural chip, and then a ton of RAM. You need to be able to hold very large models in memory. So you want like at minimum 128 gigs of RAM. Usually bigger. The Apple Mac Studio, for example, at 512 gigs sold out immediately when OpenClaw launched, and has never come back into stock. Because you want to be able to load an entire model into memory while you're doing the inference. And so having some kind of a chip, it could be a GPU or a neural chip. AMD's got a lot of new tech around this. Close to the huge amount of RAM locally is what you want.
Brit Morin: Right. So that's saying that some models may have up to 128 gigabytes of RAM. They're using Intel's Wildcat Lake, which is the Core series 300, and ARM-based chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek. They're running an operating system that combines Android and Chrome OS.
Jessica: I was wondering about this too because, um, it's been a minute since we've heard about the OpenAI hardware project, unless Dave, you have any intel that you'd like to share on the pod?
Dave Morin: It's not really... That, that's not what that project is about. That project is much more consumer it seems like. It's, like, much more focused on the ChatGPT consumer, and, like, the whatever 30 million people a week that are using ChatGPT.
Sam Lessin: Only 30 million a week?
Dave Morin: Yeah, that's my understanding is their weekly actives are around 30 million.
Sam Lessin: That's not good.
Dave Morin: The question you're asking is a different one, Jess, which is, like, if you're gonna run models locally, like, why are computers configured the way that they are? And the answer is large RAM, a fast ability to access that RAM, and switch between the CPU and the GPU to do the different operations. And that's actually, by the way, one of the reasons why Apple Silicon is extremely efficient for this use case because they carry the, the GPU or the neural chip and the CPU on the same chip, uh, rather than separate.
Brit Morin: Just to give context, just standard Chromebook today has, like, eight gigabytes of RAM, so the new Google Book having 128 gigabytes of RAM is, like, a big deal, 15 times.
Jessica: And we're-- The benefit to running models locally is speed.
Dave Morin: Speed and cost. You don't have latency, and you don't have to pay for the tokens, right? Like, my favorite joke of the week is, "Hey, guys, we used to be able to, uh, write code for free." Uh, because everybody has to pay for Anthropic's luxury tokens now in order to write code, unless you've got a, a computer that can do it for you locally.
Brit Morin: Sam Altman today tweeted that, uh, enterprises who wanna move to Codex can get their first two months of tokens free. Little competitive, little competitive warfare happening there.
Dave Morin: It's not just competitive warfare, it's just that they have the compute and nobody else does, so they can use it as a strategic weapon.
Brit Morin: I know. I thought it was a smart move. I liked it.
Jessica: Guys, Anthropic is getting the compute. They did a deal with Akamai.
Sam Lessin: Yeah, Akamai has the compute too.
Jessica: Do you guys remember Akamai?
Sam Lessin: Yeah, of course, but I'm happy for them to each just be like, "Two months free, two months free," forever.
Jessica: Yeah.
Dave Morin: It's great.
Jessica: It's gonna be like the... What was that, like, gig economy where you could, like, eat your free on-demand dinner, get your free massage, and then it all collapsed because none of it worked?
Sam Lessin: Well, I, I mean, this is the whole generation of, of kids who grew up in the VC-subsidized lifestyle.
Jessica: Yes, subsidized.
Sam Lessin: And then you had the clean girl aesthetic that came after that because they couldn't afford makeup anymore.
Brit Morin: No. That's not what happened. Women got excited about skincare, Sam.
Sam Lessin: I don't know. I think they just ran out of money when SoulCycle-
Brit Morin: Full circle to the beginning of our conversation.
Jessica: So this timer's really interesting, and obviously not related, but Apple and Intel are striking me. You know, Intel might be crawling back, crawling back here from the dead.
Dave Morin: It doesn't matter how you slice it. You need new types of chips that are very efficient at what we, what we were just talking about and the capacity to make them. And so it makes sense to me that Arm, all of the memory providers, Intel, you know, anyone who knows how to make this stuff is in a really good position right now in the ecosystem. And so I think you'll just see more of it.
Jessica: So while a different category of AI hard, uh, hardware, the consumer side, I am kind of waiting here. Like, do we think... You know, and again, if the information was something we could report, we would've reported it. We've reported a lot on, um, the various road maps for different devices that OpenAI's been cooking up. But somewhat unclear what we're gonna see when at this point.
Dave Morin: I think it's also unclear what is consumer and what is developer and where we are in the cycle to some extent. One of the things I think that OpenClaw and agentic year that is 2026 has become has shown us is that there was a totally different way of thinking about computers and what computers should be and how to use them, and that was something that wasn't in the zeitgeist at all last year until we, we saw this new way to think about it. And so I think a lot of the hardware projects that you saw in the prior two years were things like Rabbit and, I mean, if you go back even in this podcast-
Jessica: Rabbit, oh my gosh
Dave Morin: ... we were talking about, we were talking about-
Jessica: DumbBones
Dave Morin: ... Rabbit, we were talking about-
Jessica: Humane
Dave Morin: ... um, Humane, we were talking about-
Jessica: Lick that cookie, Dave.
Brit Morin: Was ahead of its time-
Dave Morin: Yeah, yeah
Brit Morin: ... I will say. They're...
Dave Morin: But, like, that was really trying to go consumer, I think, a- almost too, too fast in a way, and a lot of this innovation that we're talking about here is, like, developer innovation. It's like, how do you get a whole model into memory and then do stuff with it? S- I still think two, three, four, five years away from being consumer today. And so I think it's hard to actually answer that question 'cause I don't know that we've figured out how to make computers that are even usable for developers yet, let alone consumers. Um, and I think we're a ways off still. So I, I don't know. It's exciting to me.
Jessica: Is there a device, Brit, or so- I mean, you're always tinkering and thinking that you feel like you crave-
Dave Morin: The Mac Mini. The Mac Mini is the breakout AI device of the year.
Jessica: But also, on the consumer side, I feel like recording is, like, the killer input of the AI era, which isn't that k- Like, a lot of things record.
Dave Morin: Actually, yeah. Here, let me get it.
Brit Morin: The thing about recording that a bunch of people have started to bring up to us is that remote work actually works best for, like, an AI brain within a company because everything is recorded and you have to record all your meetings and transcripts. But right now the culture of in-person work is such that, like, you don't wanna be, like, recording every conversation or every call- hallway run-in with your coworker or things like that, and so there's a lot of context that starts to become missing. So I'm starting to see a lot of founders who are actually second-guessing in-person versus remote-first work.
Jessica: No, don't do it, founders. Don't do it.
Dave Morin: We've heard it several times in the last couple weeks, Jess.
Jessica: You, I, I-
Dave Morin: But-
Jessica: Okay, you're hearing it 'cause it's summer. You're not hearing it because-
Brit Morin: No, I, I think there's, there's a reality to that. I understand it.
Sam Lessin: Look, I'm remote and I have everything recorded, and it's freaking awesome.
Jessica: I'm in person and I have everything, uh, recorded.
Dave Morin: Here's my answer, Jess. ... this thing. This is the DJI, um, microphones. So you can- they're super noise-canceling microphones that you can use to, like, with whisper flow. I think that's actually the... Of the hardware devices that matter, I don't actually think it's the ones that record things. I don't think those are good businesses, 'cause you can just use your phone if you wanna do that. But this whole thing, which is like, can I whisper or talk directly to the AI to give it dramatically more context? The number of people I see carrying these things has dramatically increased this year.
Jessica: Okay. So for those who are listening, Dave just showed, like, very large enlarged AirPods with very fuzzy tips.
Sam Lessin: No, it's a microphone. It's like a lapel mic.
Dave Morin: It's a microphone.
Jessica: Yeah.
Dave Morin: This is a microphone that you wear. You put it on like this.
Jessica: Okay. I see. Yes. I've seen the, the influencers do this. It's like Britt's, Britt's brooch that she wears.
Sam Lessin: Stick it on... You can stick it on your cl- I mean, the, the thing about this, though, Dave, is like, I mean, like, first of all, you're gonna be very excited with Q* AI.
Jessica: But Dave, so walk me through. So why do you n- Um, I... Granola records all my meetings. I- many of them are in person. But, so why do I need this?
Dave Morin: It's about putting more context into the computer so that the AI has a much larger context window to help you with whatever it is you're trying to create.
Jessica: So you finish a meeting and then you come back to your desk, and you're like, "That was a great meeting. I really love how so-and-so stepped up."
Sam Lessin: Mm.
Brit Morin: No, it's like you're prompting... It's like instead of prompting it with one sentence, you can prompt it with, like, three minutes of talking, which is, like, many paragraphs and... But it actually is gonna get you a much better answer 'cause it has so much context of what you are trying to get out of it.
Jessica: Why do I need a fancy microphone?
Dave Morin: Uh, you could do it that way, too, but these are designed for whispering and for extremely high fidelity capturing. And so you can just sit there and talk to your computer, and, like, it gives it tons more context.
Sam Lessin: I made my own app for this, which is great, uh, that I just use. Um, 'cause I, I don't, like-
Dave Morin: What are, what are the features of it?
Sam Lessin: It literally is just, like, click a button and it opens to, directly to a recording, uh, that's live. And then when I hit enter, it sends it up, transcribes it, and dops- dumps it into my bot, into the, into a table. But it's like, it's way better. Like, like, all I do is, like this. I literally have built an iOS app that just does this for me, and so like... But I don't need, like, anything special for it. And by the way, it took me two seconds to code it and deploy it in Claude. So, like, I have my own of that. I also built a version. I just got sick of clicking all the buttons for them, so now I just have a composer that I pull up, and it's like a, it's its own app, so you one tap it, and then you can talk or write and just one tap it to your bot. So, like, I don't know. I think, like, the... That's fine. Like, we're gonna do all this stuff. I just don't think it's, like, that important.
Jessica: But you tell me, like, the tech workers of the world are, like, sitting at home while their agents are running, whispering to themselves all day?
Brit Morin: Yes.
Dave Morin: Yes.
Brit Morin: And those that do work in person now have these co-working spaces where everyone's whispering to their lap- to their computer. And it's super weird.
Jessica: Oh my God. Guys, this is so weird.
Dave Morin: It just comes down to how much data can you get into the compu- I mean, it is, but it also isn't. Like, your, your hands can only type so fast, and it's just more context per second, right, that you can input into the computer. And I think that's the big change here, is that the models want more context to do a better job for you. And so we are shifting our way that we're interfacing with the computer to match the capability of the computer. That is actually a big change. Like, it's, it's something that's happening in real time right now, but people on the frontier, almost everyone I know, is doing this.
Jessica: Guys, I hope we still talk to each other. Do we have podcasts for that? Like, what are we
Dave Morin: Yeah, I think so.
Brit Morin: Guys, s- social is, like, the new, the new tech.
Jessica: No, but everyone's just mumbling under their breath to their AI with their fancy microphones for their context window. Guys.
Dave Morin: Maybe that means the AI can get more done and we can all hang out with each other more and have better social lives.
Jessica: 'Cause that's always how it works. That's always how it works. Okay.
Brit Morin: I'm far more stressed than ever before-
Dave Morin: Yeah, exactly
Brit Morin: ... in the AI era. I'm not... I'm sleeping less and I'm socialing less.
Jessica: Okay. We've burned through AI. What else is happening? Speaking of AI, what do you guys think of all this keystroke logging tracking that the Meta employees aren't too happy about it?
Brit Morin: We called that.
Dave Morin: Meta is so good, Meta is so good at being a heel.
Jessica: Oh, Dave.
Brit Morin: Oh, gosh.
Dave Morin: It's true. Like, it's like, of course this was, of course this was gonna be the outcome.
Sam Lessin: The irony is they just shouldn't have told anyone. It's like they probably were like, "Well, if we're gonna do this, we should just, like, tell people," right? Because, like, that's, because, like, be, like, on the... And, like, "Look, just, just log the keystrokes. It's fine. Just-"
Brit Morin: No.
Dave Morin: But, but, like, I'm wondering if they intentionally did this. Like, isn't it... It's like they might as well. People always react negatively, so maybe it's just, like, it's a good, it's good they played it this way.
Sam Lessin: Maybe it's like, it's a, it's a, it, it's a honeypot and be like, "Oh, the people who reacted negatively to this, we should just fire them." Clearly they're not the AI people who get it. So it's like, it's a trap. It's a trap.
Jessica: Do, do you think... So I, I should have teed this up better. I, uh, uh, this is a little bit old, but Meta has been keystroke logging employees to train AI, their AI. Not so popular. Um, last week we did-
Dave Morin: I'm hearing even crazier things, which is, like, that people are building ad agencies or marketing agencies that are filled with people who, uh, used to work in ad agencies, and it's not a real agency, but they're just recording everything that they're doing in order to get the data set that is ad agency.
Sam Lessin: But of all the people that got fired, you're recording... It's, like, how to be a bad ad agency employee.
Jessica: So they... Wait, are they play acting their former lives in an ad- ad-
Dave Morin: Yes, they're play acting their former life.
Brit Morin: This is a great spin-off of The Office
Jessica: Wait, Dave, explain this in one coherent soundbite, 'cause this is funny.
Dave Morin: The soundbite is that there are AI companies, I'm not ... Doesn't matter which ones, that are hiring the former employees of ad agencies to do their job, to play act their old job, and then recording all of it in order to get the training data to learn marketing agency.
Sam Lessin: That's very funny, and, like, makes total sense.
Jessica: Let's call up Don Draper.
Dave Morin: Yeah. It's basically Mad Men. I guess they could have just trained on ... Just train on Mad Men. Maybe. Yeah.
Brit Morin: It can be a creative agency, because AI can't do creative ideas. You can't train AI to do that.
Sam Lessin: So look, here's the thing. The funny ... The irony of all this in terms of Sam Lessin is always right but wrong, but lick the cookie, is like- Look-
Jessica: I need to lick a cookie before this episode's over.
Sam Lessin: We were running-
Jessica: Brooke, you too.
Brit Morin: You have, you have said twice now, as Brooke, as mentioned by the information.
Jessica: That, I mean, that's just fact. That's just historical reference.
Sam Lessin: Listen, eight years ago, Cortina and I were running on the order of, like, 20,000 customer service agents on the Fin Analytics platform across a lot of very, you know, big unicorn companies, and recording the entire work stream click flow through our Chrome plugins to build a data set to automate work. We were, like, eight years ahead on this, and had a huge data set. It was a mistake only to ever get, get rid of it, 'cause we had the full click stream history of like ... It was awesome, right? It was exact- But this was exactly the use case.
Dave Morin: I have a question. Did you sell Fin to Intercom?
Sam Lessin: Isn't that so funny? No.
Dave Morin: Is that Fin?
Sam Lessin: No. Here's the funny thing. Everyone's like, "Fin, you're-"
Dave Morin: I was, I was like, "Sam, did you sell Fin to Intercom?"
Sam Lessin: No. Hilari- So here's a quick story. We were deep in partnership conversation with Intercom for Fin Analytics, which was ... We started out with the assistant service, which honestly is a lot of the interfaces I've rebuilt for myself now with AI, with just not gonna book restaurants. Then we pivoted it to Fin Analytics because we realized that while the assistant business was difficult, um, building the data set of opt- and, like, finding the errors in operations work was, like, what we got really good at. 'Cause we basically had the full click stream of humans completing tasks, and they were like, "Okay, this is where this gets fucked up, where you're losing all your time." And we, we sold this as a service to a lot of the biggest companies in the world, and had tens of thousands of operations agents at these companies. Literally we were, we were in their browser, we had a Chrome program, looking at the full click stream history of every single thing they were doing, everything they were interacting with, time spent, time series, everything. And we were building up this catalog of, like, how to efficiently complete tasks, and then finding all the errors and patterns where people were off, or what could be ... And we also were finding places you could automate. 'Cause you'd be like, "Okay, these four steps always happen in a row this way. Automate it," right? So we were literally building this data set and doing this, like, just probably six years too early, which is kinda hilarious to me.
Jessica: But this, we're gonna see more ... I mean, the fact that we're seeing these ad agencies, I also think you're gonna see more ... I assume all the AI labs are kind of doing a variant of what Meta's doing, although probably not as, i- intrusively. I mean, I don't ... Or they don't need-
Brit Morin: I, I for sure think Anthropic's doing this with, amongst all of their employees.
Dave Morin: A- Anthropic has somehow convinced all of the CTOs to join Anthropic so that they can train on all of the CTOs to eliminate them. It's pretty wild.
Sam Lessin: I do think it's really funny, at this point with the OpenAI and Anthropic, I love the whole thing about them, like, starting these companies to, like, send people out into the field to convert them to usage. This is literally exactly what religions do. They've just sent all these monks into the field.
Dave Morin: Oh, that's funny. I hadn't thought of it that way.
Jessica: I thought you were saying it's exactly what Palantir does, but not ...
Dave Morin: I thought you were going a different way with this, which is that it's, like, counter to their entire message. The entire message is that AI is so good it's going to AGI and take care of itself, and if that's true, then starting a deployment company is the worst idea you could possibly have, because it will be deploying itself in two years.
Sam Lessin: The irony is, so the irony is, like, Palantir did actually the opposite, right? Which is, and the great trick of Palantir is they started in only were deployments. There was no central cloud to it. There was no ... Like, they, they, they were a consulting firm that had everyone in the field just with very, very high multiple. They've been trying to go backwards and stitch it into, like, a central religion of Palantir. Whereas ironically, OpenAI and Anthropic have, like, Rome, right? Or now I guess new, the new Rome is San Francisco, and they are now sending out their monks into the world to go sit in with the heathens in their companies and convert them to the word of God, right? It's just like, this is, like, hilarious. Now, what happens in, in proselytizing-
Jessica: With private equity backers. Like, with private equity backers.
Dave Morin: This is also, like, private equity salivating at the companies they can raid, right?
Jessica: Yes.
Sam Lessin: Well, it's also just, like, maybe, but they, they don't want OpenAI to send their monk in and, like, to fix it. They want it to be broken and take it over. It's just really funny because, like, the history of monk ... I mean, monks were crazy. Like, totally nuts.
Dave Morin: Yeah. How else do you think that they can talk to God and walk on water and all the ... And fly, and all the things they could do?
Sam Lessin: It's like they go to some Germanic town that worships a tree, and they, like, be like- ... they worship a tree for, like, hundreds of years. And the monk would come in and just fucking cut the tree down and be like, "I am the word of God." You're gonna get killed. So, like, what's gonna happen to these OpenAI engineers? They're gonna go to, like, Flint, Michigan, and bring the AI, which is so popular, and, like, I'm a little worried about they're getting crucified.
Jessica: That was, that was our pod last week. Yeah.
Dave Morin: So for what it's worth, you are right. And one of the things that's happening to me on the front lines of OpenClaw is we have a lot of people asking us to help them, whatever, do this. Forward deploy, deploy multi-agent systems. So I'm in a lot of conversations related to this, and the resistance on the front lines is absolutely enormous. People do not want ... And I- I've actually only really in the last two weeks really come around to having a lot of first party conversations about this. It's, like, a pretty serious problem actually out there, that, um, people do not want to deploy this stuff.
Sam Lessin: I gotta tell you, our, like, creator fun w- day hackathon was the opposite. I've, like, never seen such a hungry group of people excited to engage with using this shit to build- Their empires. So, like, I think it depends, like, but yes, I agree. Just as the monks would go to Germa- Germanic tribes and just get com- literally killed for cutting down sacred trees, the anthropic engineers will go to Middle America, and they're gonna need a large security force.
Dave Morin: Super interesting.
Brit Morin: There's... Did you guys see the UCF commencement speaker this week? So in Florida, they did a graduation ceremony, and the commencement speaker, I don't remember who it was, said one line. It was just like, "We all know we're entering the next revolution. We had the Industrial Revolution. Now it's the AI revolution." The students went bananas, starting booing, like, shutting it down, and, like, the whole commencement ceremony went sideways just from that one line.
Dave Morin: Right afterwards, they all opened their phones and started swiping TikTok.
Brit Morin: They're like, "Oh, I didn't know I was already using AI," or OnlyFans.
Dave Morin: They're all on TikTok and Instagram being, using AI all day, every day. The only way that they learned that AI is bad is through the AI that's feeding them the content that they're watching.
Jessica: So the great television show known as Hacks has also taken on this topic, so that's how you know.
Dave Morin: I no longer know where this is gonna go. It's a very interesting conversation.
Jessica: Okay. We're not gonna go there, though, because we went there last week, and the people don't want us to go, and we had to... Can I, um, do the sexiest pivot ever and ask you guys about Microsoft? So-
Brit Morin: Oh, God.
Sam Lessin: Oh, I was-
Jessica: Um-
Sam Lessin: I was hoping it would actually be sexy. Bummer.
Dave Morin: What, you wanna talk about the OnlyFans, uh, sale?
Brit Morin: How about Janitor AI?
Jessica: Do you guys really don't wanna talk about, like, the third-most valuable company in the world?
Sam Lessin: This is my only line on, on, on Microsoft 'cause I don't care about Microsoft.
Dave Morin: Wait, what are we... But what is the question before we get into it?
Jessica: There is a reason I put this on the agenda, which is not because they're activist investors. One of my columnists argued there might be, so we should be very careful about that. But no, Microsoft is the only of the big tech companies that has been consistently down this year, and is fa- Like, investors are really worried about Microsoft. And all the things we talk about day in and day out, and yes, there have been ups and downs to tech stocks this year. This isn't about that. We're talking about Google, Amazon, all the big guys, the 40% growth of their cloud business, you know, this whole AI boom. And here we have Microsoft. Two years ago, Satya was probably the most popular person at any founder conference from here to New York, and the internet just loved him, and founders loved him. Tech, what a genius, and blah, blah, blah. And now, today there are LinkedIn layoffs. They've faced a lot of heat over the gaming business, so they're really like Asha, the new CEO of Xbox. And investors are, like, not buying the story. So I guess my question is, as what do you guys think? And what should Microsoft do next, right? So that, I think that is actually an interesting question.
Sam Lessin: Why did they fold on OpenAI? Like, that's something I don't understand. They gave up, like, $300 billion in due revenue or some shit.
Jessica: Basically, they ended up, as documented in The Information, ding, ding, ding, there were some key inflection points around Compute, call it 12 months ago. I, give or take. I could be off by six months, who knows? Microsoft had a right of first refusal on all new Compute from OpenAI, and Sam was saying, "We need more, we need more, we need more." And Amy Hood, the CFO of Microsoft, and Satya were like, "Uh, we're not gonna give you more right now." And they underestimated their needs and let them pursue other partnerships. And it turned out, like, that may be, have been the right decision from a CapEx perspective for Microsoft, but it opened the door for them to go and build these very major partnerships with others, including, of course, now Amazon. And so this has been a source of huge tension between OpenAI and Microsoft. And very recently they evolved what could've been heading towards a lawsuit by clearing the way for AWS to have more access to the APIs while still being the primary Compute provider, which is sort of meaningless. So they still have a very deep partnership. But the short answer to your question, Sam, is, like, amount of CapEx need, um, foisted them into the hands of other people because-
Sam Lessin: Didn't they also do a bad job contracting the definition of, like, AGI or some bullshit that put them in a weird spot?
Jessica: Yeah. Well, they wrote the partnership in a way... And I don't think you can fault them for this, to be honest, because who would have predicted back whenever this partnership was struck what form it would have taken? And so I think it's also kind of cool, to Microsoft's credit, they were willing to, like, fly by the seat of their pants a little bit in negotiating these things. A huge percentage of Azure is OpenAI. One of the things that came out in, in the trial w- as well as other reporting this week from us, is how much, you know, they've also benefited from this partnership, including owning a very sizable stake in OpenAI. So the idea, maybe when it was struck, the idea that there would have been e- some exclusivity held water, but the scale of everything, and especially the Compute... And, and there was a specific point at which Sam and Amy and Satya just didn't see eye to eye on the Compute needs, and so they went elsewhere. Um, and that opened the door.
Dave Morin: Or is it the only big tech company that bet, like, $100 billion on someone else's religion, and now that religion's starting its own church, and so they're kind of like, "Uh, I don't know how I feel about this"?
Jessica: Well, maybe. And history will tell whether, whether because they had that deal they didn't invest enough in their own stuff, which they've tried to do retroactively with Mustafa and buying Inflection. That has kind of gone sideways. But, but the flip side, what Microsoft comms tells me every time I tweet something to the contrary, is name a bigger incumbent suite of productivity apps today. They are still so dominant in so many key services. As long as they're not that far behind on adding agents to them over time, they'll be fine.
Dave Morin: But I think that's what you're actually talking about, Jess, is that this was a great financial strategy for Microsoft It wasn't a great product strategy. They, like, executed a massive trade. The trade looks like it's working out, but the product outcome that they wanted or that they perhaps needed hasn't materialized because they didn't build the church inside their house. They looked really, really smart for doing this thing, and it's financially been great for them. You don't see products materializing out of this. You see them putting, like, ChatGPT into the operating system and Copilot this and Copilot that. But none of it is really... Both Microsoft and Meta have had this kind of same problem, where they're making a lot of smart financial moves, um, but not making good product moves and kind of paying the price for it. And I don't know, we'll see, right? Like, maybe there's gonna be a second wave here after this big infrastructure investment that they'll go and do it.
Brit Morin: Can't you argue that Microsoft has just been trying to be, like, learning on the data of Anthropic and OpenAI while they're off now going to build their own models and use their scale to come in over the top over the next five years?
Jessica: Well, they've been tr- they've been trying, unsuccessfully.
Dave Morin: It's just not that big, Brit. Like, it's, like, 20 million paid seats or something like that in Copilot.
Brit Morin: I'm not talking about Copilot. I'm talking about Microsoft's base at large. If over the next few years they're able to take what they've learned, and, and aren't they doing this, like, that Mustafa, Mustafa Suleyman is, is the person that Satya's put in charge to pursue super intelligence.
Jessica: They actually restructured and, like, pushed him aside. Like, they've had, like, many reorgs.
Brit Morin: It seems like they're trying to build their own.
Dave Morin: They're, like, the only one whose entire AI strategy depends on a partner that's actively becoming a competitor, is another way to put it. They don't have a frontier strategy.
Jessica: Yes. And I think, to be fair, you could say maybe the same thing about Amazon. I mean, Amazon is Nova, and I think that-
Dave Morin: For sure
Jessica: ... and to be clear-
Dave Morin: I think you could say that about Amazon
Jessica: ... you, uh, I, I'm having, because this is how fun my life is, a running debate over whether you could say the same about xAI, right? And it's this question, like, is Elon... I don't think he's gonna give up on developing xAI frontier models.
Dave Morin: I don't think you can say that about xAI.
Jessica: No, I don't think you can yet either.
Dave Morin: xAI, like, did produce... I mean, just, like, I don't think you can say it about xAI or Meta because both xAI and Meta, despite the fact that their models are not performing at the highest level, they at least produced them, right? They went and they built out big infrastructure. They trained models. They built the teams. Whereas it's hard, it's, like, fuzzier to see that in the Amazon, Microsoft world.
Jessica: I also think there's a question, what is the xAI strategy going forward? Elon's gutted the team. But, but I think he's taken it to the studs to build it up in the way I like, but that-
Dave Morin: The strategy is to be Anthropic's landlord.
Jessica: I mean, I don't know. I don't know. Well, guys, let's, let's, here's some other, other quick news things we should weigh in on. Anyone have opinions? Anyone going in, you VCs, on the, uh, $1 trillion Anthropic fundraise that's around the corner here?
Brit Morin: There's a new fundraise every two weeks. I can't keep up with this.
Jessica: It's, it's not a trillion dollars. What is it? It's, uh, 800 billion.
Brit Morin: Rounds up. It's fine.
Jessica: Oh my God.
Brit Morin: Is that through a first, second, or third derivative SPV that people are entering? And didn't OpenAI allow employees to do a stock sale of up to 30 million each and now all of San Francisco real estate is, like, totally imploding right now?
Jessica: Yes. Those are all true facts.
Brit Morin: But this is also net valuable for our home prices on paper. Correct?
Dave Morin: I don't know that it's good. I think we got a... I, I love this map somebody made of all the abandoned buildings in San Francisco yesterday. Like, somebody AI created, like, a very sophisticated map of how little building is actually going on in San Francisco. Like, we also need to keep the building going so that the prices don't go absolutely through the roof.
Jessica: The prices are gonna go absolutely through the roof, but we can also keep the building going. I mean, there are different segments of the market. I heard an anecdote about someone who had a house on the market and then they decided they were not gonna take any offers until-
Brit Morin: SpaceX IPOs
Jessica: ... until the Anthropic fundraising closed.
Dave Morin: Smart.
Jessica: And then they would take... But yes, we're, we're, like, a month out from the SpaceX IPO, guys.
Dave Morin: The big news out here in Marin is that somebody's been trying to sell their house for, they'll only sell it for Anthropic shares, which is ridiculous.
Jessica: I can tell Sam's bored, guys, 'cause my email is full of, um, confirmation codes for things that he's signing up for. So-
Brit Morin: Why do you get the confirmation codes?
Sam Lessin: Guys, today's Jackson Hole, today's Jackson Hole ski pass-
Brit Morin: Oh, I got our ski passes. I already got them. Don't worry.
Jessica: Good.
Sam Lessin: There's, like, a whole new system. It's the worst. I have to figure out all the kids' birthdays again.
Brit Morin: Guys, get your agents to do things for you. You guys are so behind. I can't believe it.
Jessica: I would actually not trust my agent with this task.
Brit Morin: This is also, by the way, Jess, where you need to whisper a lot because the ski calendars with three kids and all the weekends, like, yeah, it's a lot. You need to, you need to get your agent on that ASAP.
Dave Morin: We've got a great... So OpenClau has a new computer use tool called Peekaboo that's incredible. Like, it will, it will use your computer very effectively.
Brit Morin: It's so weird to watch it do that.
Sam Lessin: What's the thing that OpenClau is built on?
Dave Morin: Pi.
Sam Lessin: Pi. Pi. What's your view on Pi?
Dave Morin: Pi is great. Uh, it's another harness. Um, it's a TypeScript-based harness. Um, it's really easy to modify. You can customize it in a lot of ways. The reason Peter used it was that it's built in TypeScript and it's so customizable, and it's very proactive.
Sam Lessin: So what, like, what's the... I was just talking to the founder of Pi, like, two days ago. Like, what, like-
Dave Morin: Mario?
Sam Lessin: Yeah. Nice guy. What's the deal with, like, where does that go?
Jessica: What is it? It's a language, a framework? What is Pi?
Dave Morin: It's a harness. Um-
Jessica: Okay. I don't know what a harness is. Sorry.
Dave Morin: Really?
Brit Morin: Jess, come on.
Jessica: No. I, I know what a horse harness is.
Brit Morin: Harness is the new word as of two months ago. You have to know what a harness is.
Dave Morin: A harness is the software built on top of a model to make the model useful. The models are not useful by themselves. They need to be given software that helps them think in d- certain patterns, repeatedly run loops to accomplish tasks, and there's a lot of different ways that you can build those harnesses. And OpenClau is a harness, Pi is a harness, Codex is a harness, Claude Code is a harness.
Jessica: Got it.
Sam Lessin: So it's just harnesses on harnesses on harnesses.
Jessica: Do you double harness-
Dave Morin: Yes
Jessica: ... or do you like-
Dave Morin: And in fact, yeah, no, I mean, a lot of people actually are really loving, uh, swapping Py out with Codex, uh, under OpenClaw currently. I still love Py, but some people like using Codex instead.
Sam Lessin: But what... Like, Dave, I guess that's the question. I go- a long time ago we had this conversation on what is this? Like, what is OpenClaw? And, like, I go back to this question again with like, well, OpenClaw is built on Py, is like how do you define what these things are?
Dave Morin: I think of them as the apps or the interfaces that help people use AI models more effectively for whatever it is that they wanna use it for. Like the operating system that sits on top of all these low-level things. Like, you know, we're talking, we're all using macOS right now. Underneath the Windows and the things that make up the screen that you're looking at are a bunch of different tools that technically don't matter to the end user, and Apple has brilliantly put it all together in a user interface that makes it possible to take advantage of the power of the computer. And so I think that's what harnesses are in this era. They make it possible to take advantage of AI models, types of, uh, AI models, different kinds of models to accomplish different things that you might want to do, and they make the user interface for doing that easier. And there's going to be, I think, lots more of them, right? And we're already seeing this at OpenClaw, where people customize it in 100 different ways to do the use case that they need from it.
Jessica: Dave, I'm gonna tell you that your wife is telling me you have to wrap. So can you wrap?
Sam Lessin: Ah.
Guest: I'm producing behind the scenes with you. Well, there's a flight we- we're about to miss.
Jessica: Yeah. Before we do bounce though, I've got a plug. I am excited for an interview I'm doing next week at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco with Joanna Stern. I don't know if you guys know Joanna. She was Wall Street Journal's wonderful, uh, tech video columnist, uh, who left the Journal to start her own media company. Can't imagine where she got that idea. She's wonderful. She has a new book out, and, um, so if you like such things, come see us in San Francisco at the Commonwealth Club next Wednesday. And with that, Morens, go do what you do.
Sam Lessin: And I'll, I'll plug it that I was able to finish buying our Jackson Hole ski passes just before this episode ended.
Guest: Sans agent. Th- good job, Sam.
Sam Lessin: I did. I, I did it with my own ha- I signed the waivers
Guest: This is your last year of purchasing without an agent.
Jessica: Well, I don't know how to land all these planes at once, so I will just say a big thank you. I think we covered some good ground, folks. Fresh topics, old topics. We're happy to be here with all our listeners and viewers. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you back here next week for another episode of More or Less. Bye.
Guest: Bye, guys.
Dave Morin: See you guys later.
Guest: If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcast, 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, @davemoren, @lesson, @jlesson, and as for me, I'm @brit. See you guys next time.