OpenAI vs Anthropic IPOs, Anthropic $3T, Zuck's Price War, China Ends Open Source?, Trump Accounts
By All-In Podcast
Summary
Topics Covered
- AI Has Hit a Productivity Asymptote
- Intelligence Is the Largest TAM Ever
- The Frontier AI Gap May Widen
- China's Catch-Up-Then-Close AI Playbook
- More Capitalism Is the Antidote to Socialism
Full Transcript
All right, everybody. Welcome back.
Number one podcast in the world. It's
July Allin episode 280. Freeberg is on a little vacay. We'll leave it at that.
little vacay. We'll leave it at that.
And uh yeah, bestie Brad is here. How
you doing, Brad?
I'm doing great. I'm do vacay in maybe Idaho or somewhere. Jal,
I know. Who knows? Who knows?
Who know? It could be anywhere. He could
be anywhere. I mean, there's lots of things. He could be in plenty of places.
things. He could be in plenty of places.
And uh looks like you are yeah somewhere in the northeast. I'll leave it at that.
You having a little uh vacay for yourself this week?
Very pat I'm in my flag room. Very
patriotic room here.
Very nice.
You know where I work on the east coast in the summertime and uh spent some time in DC this week and uh it's been a great week. Been a
great week celebrating America 250.
Great. And you're going to be out of there for the by the by the second week of August. Yes. So I have it August 10th
of August. Yes. So I have it August 10th through the 30th. I'm good.
Exact. Exactly.
Jason B&B.
Oh, absolutely.
You You don't know the half of it, man.
I am on a summer bender. I'm like,
"Where's your Where's your vacation?"
By the way, where are you? Where are you right now?
I am in Paris. I did uh about eight interviews for at the Rays conference.
They'll be coming out uh in the all-in feed. And of course, tackling from the
feed. And of course, tackling from the factory. Look at him. You're working in
factory. Look at him. You're working in the factory. Chimath Polyhapatia. It's
the factory. Chimath Polyhapatia. It's
going to be a hot software summer for Chimath. How's your hot software summer
Chimath. How's your hot software summer gone?
It's good. Selling enterprise software is hard, but it's good.
Chamat's like, "Man, I was such a dick to all my CEOs in the SAS period." And
now you know, I went to Geneva. Shout out to Markov. I
went to Geneva. He works out of Europe, sees all his European customers, and he had a dinner in Geneva, which I joined.
And then me, Jensen, Brad Smith, Anthony Tan from Grab, and a bunch of other folks were put on this UN Commission for AI that Mark is the co-chairman of. When
you see Mark Beni off in action, man, this guy is a master.
Holy He is the empasario of empisarios. Yeah.
You see how he's built such a ginormous business. It's impressive. It's
business. It's impressive. It's
impressive.
What is a commission by the United Nations for AI? What is their what is their uh calling?
Open source. No, but no, I mean it's like the United Nations actually do anything. Do they actually
anything. Do they actually It's so funny. Yeah. I mean, Anthropic was there too. Some one of the co-founders, Tom Brown, I think was his name.
Yeah, that's good.
Was the Anthropic guy running around saying, "It's the end of the world. It's
the end of the world."
No, no, no. He was he was very awesome.
Tom's awesome.
In fairness to him, he wears it on his sleeve, which is like, "Hey, we really believe we're doing the right thing, right?" and just trust us and I think
right?" and just trust us and I think the future's open source for all these countries.
Well, we're going to get into that.
That's on the docket for sure. But let's
start with the IPO update. You know,
there's a trillion dollar IPO rush to the exits and you know, this was a big topic of discussion, Brad, at the liquidity summit last month. And we'd
never seen a trillion dollar IPO. We had
one this year already. SpaceX trading
right about where it went public. So, it
was priced, I guess, to perfection.
and theoretically going to see two more.
Uh Brad has the inside information, so I'll try to get it at him. Open AAI and Anthropic are slated to go out. Let's uh
just go quickly over what happened with SpaceX. It ran up to $200 a share. Uh
SpaceX. It ran up to $200 a share. Uh
it's been down a bit. It's at $150 a share. As I said, that's right at the
share. As I said, that's right at the IPO price. So, it's trading at that two
IPO price. So, it's trading at that two trillion market cap. Currently, seventh
largest company in the world. And
Anthropic confidentially filed on June 1st. I I don't know why they call this
1st. I I don't know why they call this confidential filing when it immediately comes out. Uh but I guess the
comes out. Uh but I guess the information is confidential. Poly market
says 65% chance Anthropics IPO will happen this year on light volume 360K.
And uh two weeks ago, Gavin Baker, another bestie, said he thinks they're going to end 2026 with over a hundred billion dollars in revenue and very
profitable. He said a couple of us
profitable. He said a couple of us guests on the program that he thinks it would trade at three trillion right now if it went public. Chimath, you made a great call on the pod. You said, "Hey,
good idea for Elon to get out first."
What are the chances here, Chimoth, that these other two get out this year or maybe in like, you know, say 9 months in the in the first quarter of next year?
We'll start there.
Well, I think that these are all great businesses. I think the question is what
businesses. I think the question is what is the market clearing price? And I
think that's more of a function of how much appetite the markets have to absorb new issues and at what scale. That's number one.
And I think that's mostly determined by price.
So I think anthropic and open AI are probably in two different places. The
last time we heard from OpenAI, their cash burn was still quite high just because of the diffuse nature of their business and more reliance on consumer than enterprise. I think Brad
mentioned it in one of the pods that Anthropic may actually be accidentally profitable. I think he said something
profitable. I think he said something like that.
Yeah.
Let me tell you something really interesting. I sat down with my CTO
interesting. I sat down with my CTO today and I said, "How are we doing on token spend?" And he said the most
token spend?" And he said the most incredible thing. He said, "Right now,
incredible thing. He said, "Right now, our token costs are doubling every 45 days."
days." Okay.
And I was like, "Gh." And he said, "Yeah." And I said, 'Well, what is the
"Yeah." And I said, 'Well, what is the downstream productivity? And he said,
downstream productivity? And he said, maybe 5% max.
Okay.
And I said, okay, so my costs are doubling every 45 days. My upside is essentially flat. And he said,
essentially flat. And he said, basically, and I said, well, explain why that is. and he said, "Honestly, what
that is. and he said, "Honestly, what we're finding out is that you need to use a lot more tokens to get to this next
iteration of improvement because we've effectively already asmmptoted."
And I said, "So, what should we do?" And
he said, "Honestly, we have we have to figure this out." And so, we're going to take a step back and try to figure out what to do. I don't know how many other companies will actually go through this reckoning now, but the point is
everybody in the next three or four years will for sure go through it. So, I
suspect that if you can get out now, you should get out now before all of that starts to seep into the water table because I think that's probably what
allows you to get out at a huge price and and raise a huge amount of money.
All right, Brad, you are uh well invested and well known for being invested in these two uh next IPOs, so you probably have some good insights since you talk to them on a regular
basis. chances they get out in the next
basis. chances they get out in the next six to nine months. Both of them, you'd say 100% chance, unless there's some outside event, you know, blockade of Taiwan, some black swan event that we're
not anticipating. What do you think the
not anticipating. What do you think the chances are they're public when we're sitting here and I'm skiing in Hokkaido?
Yeah, I think I think it's very high.
But let me let me first say, you know, the SpaceX IPO where we were also investors and we also bought in the IPO.
I mean, it was textbook. It was a hugely successful IPO. They raised $75 billion
successful IPO. They raised $75 billion at 1.75 trillion. Okay, so it went out below where we are today. It's up 25%.
You know, and let's call it on 35 billion of forward revenue. So if you think about that revenue multiple, it's trading at 2 trillion on roughly 35 billion of of forward revenue. It's an
incredible achievement. I think it was textbook. I think Anthropic and OpenAI
textbook. I think Anthropic and OpenAI were watching very closely because frankly we had not had an IPO of that size and to Elon's credit and to the team's credit Brett and Gwen they really
pioneered some really smart and interesting things as part of that IPO.
So, you know, you heard from Gavin Anthropics rumored to be, you know, trending over a 100red billion in revenue compared to the 35, right? If
they exit the year at 100, that means their gap revenue next year could be well over a 100red. So, based
on the SpaceX success, I think it would be a blockbuster IPO. And I think SpaceX has shown them the way on things like the total raise, pricing, liquidity,
inclusion into the indexes, how to do the lock up. Like I think they've gone to school.
It was a staged release in terms of getting out of the lockup. It has to hit certain milestones and some of those are time early inclusion in the index raise $75 billion like you know
the early inclusion in the index. Let me
have you unpack that for a second cuz people said, "Hey, maybe this feels unfair that they should be forced to buy it." What's your take on that? Is that
it." What's your take on that? Is that
just like haters going to hate or is there something to that? I think there was legitimate concern, right? This
is legitimate concern. Yeah,
the legitimate concern is that a company that had not been through the process of being vetted post IPO, there's a lot of volatility. You've seen that chart Jason
volatility. You've seen that chart Jason that the the peak to trough draw down in the 6 months post IPO is 50%. We've seen
a pretty big draw down here from the peak to trough as well. So you don't want to jam it
as well. So you don't want to jam it into an index at the peak and then have a 30% draw down on top of people which often happens in IPOs cuz people get excited it runs ahead of itself. But
they didn't do that here. There was fear that that was going to happen. So both
the the exchanges and the indexes, they looked at this and they made some modifications because the the other side of the argument is it's so damn big and important that it needs to be part of the index. Right.
the index. Right.
Right. And so the reason the rules had previously existed is because most companies coming public were younger, earlier, less tested, less revenues, less profitable, all the things weren't
as important in the overall scheme of things. So I think that they pioneered
things. So I think that they pioneered some really smart things. It's worked
well. it's traded well and so I think that that provides a bit of a blueprint for anthropic but just in in in terms of the enthusiasm
is an alttimeter is a fidelity as a tro an enthusiastic buyer of anthropic based upon the things we know today around profitability and model improvement and
revenue growth etc. Yes, everybody would be pig piling in. everybody would be trying to get into the top of the book and you know uh the the last I heard you know again rumored that they would like
to get out this year on open AI everybody knows that anthropic kind of passed open AI on a revenue trajectory but I will tell you open AAI's kind of got its swagger and mojo back it's
coming out you know just today with a whole new set of models we know GPT6 you know there's a lot of talk of that coming out within the next 30 days a whole new generation of models
I think their revenue has really ticked back up. The most recent kind of rumors
back up. The most recent kind of rumors I see on Twitter is around $70 billion text the year. So just as a reminder 70 billion may not be over a hundred billion that's rumored and anthropic,
but it's still twice uh you know where where the revenue of SpaceX is at. So
can they get out at over a trillion on that type of revenue growth being one of the two frontier premier labs? I think
the answer to that is yes. Um, I'm not sure there's a huge race between the two of them to get out first. I think
they'll both go out when it's when it's time. I think OpenAI has a little bit
time. I think OpenAI has a little bit more complexity just associated with the corporate restructuring that they have to go through, etc. So, I would be surprised if they go out before Anthropic, but the fact of the matter is
I don't know. But today, as I sit here today, Altimter would be a buyer at scale and at size in both of those IPOs.
at three trillion, are you a buyer or are you a hey, you know, it's obviously going to trade up and down and I there's no rush because you I think were the one who said on the pot or might have been at liquidity live when I asked you point
blank, hey, should retail get involved in SpaceX? What's your thoughts? And you
in SpaceX? What's your thoughts? And you
were like, hey, listen, it's a 4% float, 5% float. It's going to trade up and
5% float. It's going to trade up and down, but you know, a year from now, it might be trading at the same basic price. It's it's going to be priced not
price. It's it's going to be priced not to perfection, which it seems to have been, but you I think your position was it's going to be priced reasonably.
There'll be plenty of time to get in.
You don't have to like, you know, panic about getting your shares. Yeah.
Yeah. I once a company's valued at over a trillion dollars, like the get-rich quick schemes are over, right? Like that you and I share a deep
right? Like that you and I share a deep passion, Jason. We got to get retail
passion, Jason. We got to get retail investors. We got to get the citizens of
investors. We got to get the citizens of the United States in on these value creating opportunities earlier, right?
The accredited investor laws are insane that we have in this country and keeps people from participating in these things, but it is what it is, right? So,
they're coming public at over a trillion dollars. I still think there's a lot of
dollars. I still think there's a lot of meat on the bone on SpaceX, on Anthropic, on Open AI, but you're not going to have things that are I don't expect that they're going to be priced in a way where you're going to get a 50
to 100% durable bounce out of the IPOs.
If so, that would mean they were probably mispriced right into the IPO.
But I do think that these things can be compounders. They're going to compound
compounders. They're going to compound at the rate they compound revenue. And I
think all of these companies are going to compound revenue at well over 30% for the next many years.
And 30% a year for just so people understand that this is high growth in public markets on very large revenue numbers already. You know, growing 30%
numbers already. You know, growing 30% when you have 100 million revenue is one thing. Growing 30%, you know, when you
thing. Growing 30%, you know, when you got a 10 billion or 100 billion, you know, this is this becomes a different uh task. So let's talk a little bit
uh task. So let's talk a little bit about these two companies, Chimoth, and what the public's going to perceive them
as. Chat GPT seem to be the
as. Chat GPT seem to be the public brand, the consumer brand for, you know, large language models. It's
the AI for, you know, people who are doing their homework or mom and dad are trying to fix the dishwasher, whatever.
And then Claude took the lane of, hey, we're going to be the one for corporate.
And it did seem like OpenAI got very distracted with Sora and you know Disney relationship. We're going to make a puck
relationship. We're going to make a puck with Johnny I everything consumer. Then
they realize oh wow the revenue seems to be an enterprise first.
Is that going to wind up being the the big mistake when we look at it? they
kind of gave the Google position, the high growth position to Claude and Anthropic and they took the Yahoo position or do you think they'll catch up on the enterprise or maybe they should just go back to trying to be the
consumer version? What how how are these
consumer version? What how how are these going to be positioned a year from now?
How's the public going to look at them?
The problem with enterprise revenue is at some point the person that's spending it has to see an ROI. I asked Fable five high
and props new model. Yeah,
anthropics new model. I first asked it, what is the lift of the S&P 500 earnings per share growth since 2024 from AI? And
they answered, oh, it's 50%. So then I looked through it and I said, well, no, you're including the money that Nvidia makes from selling chips to Amazon. So I
said, okay. I asked a different question, which is, then what was the EPS growth of the S&P 493? And the
answer was 9%. And I said, "Okay, well that's different." And I said, "Unpack
that's different." And I said, "Unpack that." And
that." And the overwhelming majority of that was from pricing power sitting on top of inflation.
And then the other 3% was from buybacks.
And so the answer as far as all publicly available data was that the actual ROI was somewhere between zero and 2%.
So I don't know. I mean I think that enterprise looks really good. The
problem is that very smart investors like Brad and Gavin and others at some point will start asking companies what's your ROI? What's the actual EPS lift?
your ROI? What's the actual EPS lift?
And if the answer is, well, I don't really know or I'm not sure and you know, you don't necessarily have the pricing power to continue to raise
prices.
Enterprise is probably a little bit more brittle because there are fewer buyers and they're more demanding. Consumer on
the other hand then all of a sudden becomes an incredible safe harbor because you have tens of millions of buyers and having those two orders of
magnitude more buyers at a much smaller price point inoculates you from the vicissitudes of an ROI discussion.
So it all really depends on what the actual ROI is of this money being spent.
I think that we're in the phase of just being astonished, as Brad said, about the scale of the revenue growth.
Yeah.
But at some point, you'd have to be an idiot not to ask, well, who is paying you this? And can they sustain paying it
you this? And can they sustain paying it to you? I just don't know what the
to you? I just don't know what the answer to that question is. And at some point, it may not be now, at some point, people will have to answer that question. and you're
spending million dollars a year on tokens and that million dollar a year is doubling and tripling and quadrupling.
At some point you're going to have to show an ROI that's above the risk-free rate of return otherwise you're going to have um some angry investors on your hands and our discussion here for the last
couple of weeks on the pod has centered around that and the industry has responded on the place where all the CTO CEOs and capital allocators hang out which is X.com formerly known as
Twitter. Here's Pine, the CTO of Uber.
Twitter. Here's Pine, the CTO of Uber.
And so when you ask like how are they getting how are they getting the ROI out of this? People are now bringing that
this? People are now bringing that conversation front and center and they're explaining it on X and he talked remember Uber was also the one that ran through all their tokens in the first
quarter. So then on the other side of
quarter. So then on the other side of the business which is legal, operations, marketing, customer support, HR and procurement which he lists here. He says
in this you know today 99% of our engineers use AI tools. Okay great right it's everybody's you know doing vibe coding and has coding assistance. Uh
more than 70% of pull requests are attributed to local or cloud agents. Our
engineers have built 200 agentic skills.
So how are bringing agentic AI beyond engineering and what they've decided to do is essentially he talks about these agentic pods and this to me seems directionally how this should be done
which is you find engineers and you uh as as we uh talked about forward deployed engineers fancy way of saying put an engineer put them into departments and have them work with the
department heads who understand systems thinking how their process is done and um he uh he says he's making basically long and short of it is they're making massive massive progress on the
operational side of the business. So
Brad, you're pretty familiar with Uber and have been a long supporter of that.
This is a company that knows how to deploy technology pretty well and they're an operations machine run by an operations machine. DAR,
operations machine. DAR, they should report the EPS gains attributable to AI.
Yeah. Well, I mean, and this first step seems like they're really being thoughtful about this first. Hey, this
token spend got out of control with the developers. we're going to need to pause
developers. we're going to need to pause this and look at it. And then second, here's how it's going to lower cost and create more efficiency. So Brad,
let's talk about that side of it. Not
just token maxing with the developers hitting the slot machine of like, okay, let's see if this pull request and let's see if if this produces the right code or not to these departments in a more
strategic way. It's not just the person
strategic way. It's not just the person who works in HR, you know, using cloud code or perplexity or whatever and trying to vibe code something. This is
hey we're sending engineering in to work with your top systems architect and we're going to you know try to find that ROI. Yeah.
ROI. Yeah.
Yes. I you know first I would say Chimath is right. The only question is on what time frame. There's no doubt that there there's a lot of money being spent today that is in the experimental
bucket right where I I think there probably isn't direct ROI Chimat to your point but I think we're so early nobody cares. I think we're so early in terms
cares. I think we're so early in terms of enterprise adoption. Remember the
total addressable market here is every single small, medium, large company on the planet. And so we've never seen
the planet. And so we've never seen revenue growth like this because we've never seen a TAM like this. And if you look at the distribution of revenues across these businesses, it's not like it's concentrated with four or five
customers. There are millions of
customers. There are millions of customers independently economically making the decision that is rational for them every day that it makes sense like Pine at Uber and of course they're
trying to find things on both right now mostly the cost side cost takeouts to justify the investments that they're making in you know in tokens but I think
we're on the verge of breakthroughs in intelligence that's going to dramatically change the revenue side of the equation for a lot of these businesses breakthroughs in life sciences breakthroughs in in product
innovation etc where they could not divorce themselves from this even if they wanted to. For example, Jensen Hang has talked many times that all of his
design work all of his design work now at Nvidia is using AI to design the next generation chip. The machine is building
generation chip. The machine is building the machine. So you can't get rid of
the machine. So you can't get rid of that even if you wanted to. and tiny
intelligence advantages at the frontier where he sits are required. Like there's
no way I don't think that Jensen is going to use anything but the best models that he can to build out those capabilities. So I just think that we're
capabilities. So I just think that we're not going to see that in the next few years. You're going to see it under the
years. You're going to see it under the hood, of course, but that occurred at Snowflake. There was tons of
Snowflake. There was tons of optimization that occurred at Snowflake, but the revenue continued unabated.
their revenue growth continued under beta because they further penetrate penetrated use cases f further penetrated the enterprise. So let me be provocative here. If these guys end a
provocative here. If these guys end a year over a 100red billion, I think that they're on a revenue trajectory that they could 3 to 5x again next year.
We've never seen anything like this.
Never.
You're saying 100 to 300. 100.
And Jason, like you and I have talked about this. Our minds were blown. If a
about this. Our minds were blown. If a
company could go from 100 million Yeah.
to 300 million, we're talking from a 100 billion to 300 billion. 200 billion of incremental revenue is incomprehensible in the history of Silicon Valley. Okay.
And just the fact that we're even the world in the history.
Yeah. In the history of the world. So
the fact that we're even talking anywhere close to this tells us something different is going on here. I
think the thing that's different is that intelligence is the largest TAM we've ever seen in the history of the world.
These guys are penetrating it. So yes,
the super sophisticated companies, the 8090 and Chimath are helping optimize their token spend that are early adopters. 100% that's occurring, but
adopters. 100% that's occurring, but it's not really changing the trajectory that the Frontier Labs are on.
Yeah. And one of the interesting things about this technology that's really unique, we talk about intelligence on demand. When you would make a piece of
demand. When you would make a piece of software or you had some technological innovation, it would typically acrue to, I don't know, one group of people in an organization. You know, maybe two groups
organization. You know, maybe two groups of people, right? Excel comes out. Okay.
Yeah, the accounting department's having a field day with it, but it's not really affecting human resources or marketing.
Okay. Yeah, maybe it trickles down eventually. Every single person in every
eventually. Every single person in every single organization is playing with these tools. So if everybody's playing
these tools. So if everybody's playing with it, everybody's trying to apply it all at the same time. It's kind of like, you know, you got a thousand person organization. People are spending 200 a
organization. People are spending 200 a month. Okay. Yeah, Chimath, they double
month. Okay. Yeah, Chimath, they double it every, you know, x number of months.
Okay. Yeah. Now they're spending $400 a month per person. Okay. They're spending
$5,000. Well, if the average salary is 100 150k at this organization, it's only an incremental 3, four% on top of their salary. So the way I look at it is did
salary. So the way I look at it is did it make that person three, four, five times more effective at their job? And I
think the answer is yes. So that's why there's so much token maxing going on.
And it's also a bottom up type product.
You can just get into this product for 20 bucks a month and you know no CIO or CTO is like oh no you can't spend 20 bucks a month at your corporate card for this technology. So it when a bottomup
this technology. So it when a bottomup technology hits everybody at the same time that's what would explain this revenue ramp that we're all having a hard time adjusting to. It applies to
every single person like who is it impacted by the technology is my question to you Chimoth like in what organization you're working with with 8090 is there a department that says yeah the intelligence on demand not for
us we don't need it well it's less it's less about being dismissive that way it's more that regulators and other people won't necessarily allow to use it the way you want
okay so finance HIPPA yeah there's HR data you're not allowed to to to put that to work just yet what I'm finding is once you start using this and getting
some gains it's very addictive and we were sitting here Brad I don't know maybe in January and I got that open claw bug and then you know I started playing with this Hermes Hermes agent which is not a
French company by the way they just use you know French names is Nuvo research or whatever it is I started playing with that it's a very peculiar piece of software but it's very open piece of software so I went to open router I got
my own keys I've been playing with GLM Then uh I talked a little bit about BitSensor on the program known as Tao, dollar sign TAO. It's a it's a crypto project. Somebody who is creating a
project. Somebody who is creating a subnet that is putting GLM 5.2 and other models available at really cheap prices.
So I all of a sudden experienced because they gave me an API key having my token cost go down 95%.
And when you have unlimited tokens as an exercise, which is going to come to everybody, eventually everybody's going to learn how to drop the price by 95%.
And it's going to happen as well because people like rock with inference. This is
all inference, right? This is what people are using. They're they they're they're using inference to do this. Well, inference is being impacted like three or four different ways. The software is getting
different ways. The software is getting better. Open source at the same time.
better. Open source at the same time.
you're going to have distributed networks like Tao and uh you're going to have better you know chipsets from Grock and Cerebras etc. All that's happening
at the same time once I got down to 95% cheaper I started setting my agents instead of doing daily runs to doing hourly runs then I took my agents from doing one task and I broke them up into
three agents and have them doing three different things on the hour. And when
you start doing hourly tasks and then you wake up in the morning and like 14 jobs have been done, you're like, "Wait a second. This is completely different."
a second. This is completely different."
As one example, I have it has all the all-in episodes, all the This Week in startups episodes, and we set these crown jobs to go find what the new
trends are in technology. I have a trend spotting agent running every hour, informing me of the top three or four trends, and I just give it words. Really
does change your thinking. when costs go down, what do you think the tokens are going to cost, Brad? And you know, next year, yeah, we've se we we we've seen 90% reductions in the price to tokens for
each of the last two and a half years.
We've talked a lot about Jeban's paradox, which I think you you're referencing here, which is you're going to use a hell of a lot more when it happens. I think the central debate
happens. I think the central debate right now in AI is the one that Chimath keeps pointing us back in the direction of which is for 18 months since the
deepseek moment right when the deepseek moment happened the markets fell 40%.
And there was a reason for that. Many
started arguing that the frontier models were screwed, that open- source was going to kill them, that they were closing the intelligence gap, that model routing was going to make it easier
easier to route these tasks to cheap tokens. But despite all of those
tokens. But despite all of those arguments, and now we're 18 months into this, and I had this back and forth with Gurley a lot. I love open source. I want
all the competition in the world. Let's
be very clear. But despite all of those arguments, the facts in the field are just the opposite. The share of economic value, right? There's this quote,
value, right? There's this quote, there's this tweet this week from Jesse Zang that we ought to pull up here. You
know, the economic value, the share of wallet is actually increasing to the Frontier Labs while the share of tokens, these commodity tokens is obviously
going up, you know, to the other guys.
And I had a little back and forth this week with Nikesh on this kind of trying to sus out why is that the case, right?
Because what people would have thought is, oh, cheaper, pretty damn good. 90%
is good enough to do all these tasks that you're talking about, Jason. So,
nobody's going to use the anthropics and the open AIs of the world. But despite
that, it looks like their share of wallet has gone up.
I think it's not that. I think it's more that when the iPhone was a novelty, everybody would keep upgrading because you expected that the new price was worth it. And then at some point there's
worth it. And then at some point there's a moment and you can debate when it happened where people said, you know what, I'm just going to keep the old phone cuz it's good enough and I just don't see the difference. And I think
that there's going to be a moment like that. Like when I use Fable 5, the
that. Like when I use Fable 5, the problem is that it's nerfed on a bunch of things that I would normally research. You know, I was with somebody
research. You know, I was with somebody this weekend and he was telling me about some health thing and I put it into Fable and I was like, it won't answer you. I'm like, okay. So, I think that
you. I'm like, okay. So, I think that everybody will get to a point, they'll get to it at different times where they just say, you know what, like it shouldn't really matter what model I'm
using. If I get an answer that I think
using. If I get an answer that I think is reasonable and I can kind of go about my day separately. I think when the corporate CFO gets involved, it'll be an entirely different conversation altogether. I think that what I can tell
altogether. I think that what I can tell you after this UN commission that I joined with Ben off and Jensen and Brad Smith, there is not a single country in the world that is not trying to figure
out its own sovereign AI strategy. And I
don't think they believe using a closed source American model is the answer. And
so, you know, we I think we have to keep in mind there's trends. One is just geographic penetration of humans and there are still many many many more people that don't use it than do which
is an upside and an opportunity for everybody.
Mhm.
And then the second is there is going to be the experimentation as you said that needs to transition to ongoing repeatable usage and then the third is that all of that
then needs to plug into the existing regulatory infrastructure that we use as societies to run the world. And I think when you put all of these things together, it's not clear to me who wins
except that you're going to have a lot of diversity of choice. Certain
countries, I can tell you after this week, have no desire to subjugate themselves to any technical risk and so they're willing to spend the money to have their
own. Now we can argue and debate whether
own. Now we can argue and debate whether that country has any chance but they would rather take an open source model like Nvidia's actually and stand up their own stack soup to nuts for their own people and their own companies
inside of their own country and if the models are 99% as good or 95% as good there's going to be a claim that some countries make which is it's just good enough.
That's the question. That's the
question. And then separately there are companies who will not have the earnings growth to justify this without going on some long protracted carveout of cost.
And most companies, you know this, they just don't do it. They don't have the nerve to do it. They're not capable of it. You know, you wrote that famous
of it. You know, you wrote that famous essay to Zuck. He was pressured into finally doing it. Absent to very few companies, most people just allow the problems to compound. So, I just don't
see a world where when you get clobbered over the head, you don't look at other ways of just displacing cost. And if it's like Coke
displacing cost. And if it's like Coke Pepsi kind of a thing and Pepsi is 1/ 1,000th the cost of Coke, I don't know.
I just think it's a it's a risk that I think has to be managed in the perception of the market participants and the underwriters. To add to that,
uh, Brad, just open source is very hard to implement when compared to just firing up Claude and having Claude already approved in your organization.
The number of steps it took me in order to, and I I'm pretty familiar with technology. It took me hours to
technology. It took me hours to configure my new setup to get onto this bid sensor network to get open router going. And to your point, Jimoth, it
going. And to your point, Jimoth, it does dynamically route now. So, I'm
dynamically routing and I'm, you know, GLM 5.2 too. And then if I fall back to Claude, but which Claude am I going to fall back to? And here's another piece of evidence to your point, Schmoth.
There are some organizations that just aren't capable of this. They don't have the the team that, you know, does this naturally. We just talked about the CTO
naturally. We just talked about the CTO of Uber. Now, let's talk about another
of Uber. Now, let's talk about another CTO. Andy Fang is the CTO of Door Dash.
CTO. Andy Fang is the CTO of Door Dash.
Shout out to Stanley. And so he, as you can see here in this uh tweet, I a lot of people listening to All-In over the last couple weeks are coming out and as I said explaining what they're doing to address this exact issue. He says, "Hey,
with our internal coding benchmarks, we're able to confidently in introduce openweight models into our AI code review without degrading code quality.
Have the frontier model fable from anthropic to do the hardest work, delegate lower level work to Kimmy 2.6 and they are now releasing their benchmark." So another group releasing
benchmark." So another group releasing their benchmarks and saying hey we know this is an issue the CTO has been charged to your point Chimath again CFO says hey make sure this is profitable we
get the ROI they put that on the CTO here's another CTO from another leading tech organization that knows how to implement this yeah the really interesting thing we have to forecast right now is what happens in an
earnings miss and I think what happens in a in a moment where for whatever reason maybe there's just an externality that there are a series of earnings misses.
Where are people going to look? And I
just think that people find it very difficult to lay off other people. I
think it's much much easier to cut other costs. And I think that the more
costs. And I think that the more successful these companies get in a very quick amount of time without really proving the ROI, I just think the bigger the risk is. It's complicated. the game
on the field when you're working with these enterprises and just trying to explain it to them is I think that they're they're getting smarter quickly is what I would say.
I would just say I I I think that Chimath's absolutely right about the sovereign uh stacks that are going to get built around the world. This is not either or. We are going to have open
either or. We are going to have open source and we are going to have frontier intelligence. Um, the preponderance of
intelligence. Um, the preponderance of the tokens today are already shifting toward cheaper, lower uh uh uh lagging models out of open AAI or lagging models
out of anthropic or or the other frontier labs that are out there.
Obviously, we you know, we talk about those two. SpaceX has released an
those two. SpaceX has released an incredible model, you know, in the last two days. Meta's out with, you know, a
two days. Meta's out with, you know, a terrific model today. So, Gemini is still in the hunt. So, there are lots of choice. The meta thing was really
choice. The meta thing was really intense because I thought okay you know we talked about the game theory which was Mark should scorch the earth with open source. I think they flubbed that
open source. I think they flubbed that play but then I think he is now said he's going to create a price war and so if you look at the tweet or the quote there was a post Jason I don't know Nick if you can find it
I got it announcing it he was basically like hey guys I'm going to give you the same quality at like 1/100th of the cost. Now
again, there's a lot between here and there.
There's a lot of enterprise distribution that's required and you know this there's been a couple of misfires before, but I thought it was interesting that the vector of challenge was on cost.
Yeah. Here's the Mark Zuckerberg tweet.
Just sorry I queued up for you there, Brad. And he's at D, that was his old
Brad. And he's at D, that was his old handle back when he was in college, fd.
And he's done more tweets today over this Muse Spark announcement than he's done in his history. So he's getting into the X.com conversation. Quote,
"Today we're releasing new Spark 1.1, a strong agentic encoding model at a very low price. It's available through our
low price. It's available through our new meta model API and in meta AI." So
he's coming out saying, "Hey, we got the strongest agentic tool here. Please come
use it." He also wants to have his own essentially, you know, he he wants to jump into not the hosting space, but he wants to provide tokens as well. So again, I
think we're going to have a tremendous amount of selection. The competition is great for America, but I think if you look at the things people are doing, let me give you an example. The premium
workload, Jason, you talked about summarizing a document may take 20,000 cheap tokens to do. Of course, shoot that to a lagging model or an open source model, but if you're talking about replacing a software engineer for
2 hours, that may take 2 million expensive tokens. And the consequence of
expensive tokens. And the consequence of using something that's 95% as good is really high, right? Because you have a longunning task and if the task breaks
early or it breaks in the middle or breaks at the end, there's a huge cost to that. So
to that. So you still burn the tokens, right? You
and back to this analogy I was using, they're pulling the slot machine and you lose and the time and the compute. So if an AI agent is replacing a $200 an hour
consultant, right? Take that as an
consultant, right? Take that as an example. So, three consulting firms,
example. So, three consulting firms, they're competing. They need the
they're competing. They need the smartest consultant. It they're charging
smartest consultant. It they're charging 200 bucks an hour. The difference
between spending three bucks on a cheap model or 15 bucks on an expensive model to replace a $200 an hour consultant, it's just irrelevance. That inference
cost difference is irrelevance if you're getting something that's bulletproof for 15 bucks. And so, I think that's what
15 bucks. And so, I think that's what we're seeing play out. The best evidence for all of this is just revenue growth, right? We can sit here and speculate all
right? We can sit here and speculate all day long as to revenue, not from Anthropic and Open AAI, but from their customers.
I'm no I'm talking about what is anthropic revenue growth compared to OpenAI compared to the open source models. Millions of independent actors
models. Millions of independent actors are choosing every single day. The open
source companies are growing, right? But
they're growing selling something that is really, really cheap. And there's a there there's room in every single market for premium products, for mid-tier products, and for commodity
products. And I think we see a lot of
products. And I think we see a lot of this token growth. People are
speculating that the that the intelligence gap between that commodity stuff and the frontier stuff is going to collapse to the point that people won't pay for the frontier stuff. There is no evidence of that on the field today. It
may develop over the course of the next couple years, but it's not on the field today.
Yeah. Yeah. And just to give people an idea, we we keep mentioning what sovereigns are doing. To give you the specifics on that, the UAE very famously has their own uh Abu Dhabi Technology Innovation
Institute shipping Falcon. You probably
have heard about that. The Saudis have Humane and they're doing their own models that are Arabic LLMs. And then this week, Japan is investing$6 billion
dollars in a consortium. It's called the Neoterra Neoter. Neo T r a consortium and they're
Neoter. Neo T r a consortium and they're doing that and skipping ahead to physical AI i.e. robotics. Okay. Joining
the conversation here, the one, the only Saxy Pooh Sax bringing you into the discussion talking a little bit here about the debate that we started here on
the podcast getting ROI from tokens.
Where are the tokens going to acrue to open source versus the frontier models?
Bunch of CTO's chiming in on X this week in the last couple days. is in fact talking about how they're managing intelligent routing first to open source models then falling back to Fable and
the Frontier models. How do you think this is playing out? And if you're an investor in the space, how do you think about the frontier models and their
growth when you have uh you know CFOs coming in and saying hey justify this cost and do you have a cheaper solution and what is that cheaper solution? Well,
look, I think that enterprise CTO's would like to shift their token consumption to cheaper models for the obvious reason that that would be more
efficient and they are seeing their compute cost or their token cost is skyrocketing right now. So, everyone's
trying to figure out how do we put the brakes on this or at least control it, you know, make sure we're getting ROI.
You also have the AI sovereignty issue that we discussed last week that Alex Karp talked about where they're worried about giving up the secret sauce or the alpha in their business to a frontier
lab that may one day be competing with them. So there's no question that
them. So there's no question that enterprises would like to diversify.
They would like to get off of these frontier models when they can. The
problem is I think in most cases they don't have the technical ability to do it. I mean Coinbase figured out how to
it. I mean Coinbase figured out how to do it. Door Dash figured out how to do
do it. Door Dash figured out how to do it, which is to say they built a token routing system, a layer of middleware that allows them to sort of send frontier task to frontier models and non-frontier task to more mundane
models. But I don't think your average
models. But I don't think your average enterprise has the technical capability to do that. So I think this is a case of the spirit is willing but the flesh is
weak. I mean they are willing they would
weak. I mean they are willing they would like to diversify off of these closed models but they are unable to do it and
so this is why the share of wallet of closed models it actually increased. I
think that opensource went from 19% last year to 11% this year. So open source as a share of enterprise spending is actually decreasing. Now I don't think
actually decreasing. Now I don't think that means that usage is decreasing. I
think usage is skyrocketing in both these categories. It also may be the
these categories. It also may be the case that because the whole point of using an open model is you just pay for the compute cost. You don't have to pay a lab. So it may be the case that it's
a lab. So it may be the case that it's hard to measure that usage in terms of spend. But nonetheless, I mean anyone
spend. But nonetheless, I mean anyone who's saying that these closed models are gonna lose or are somehow losing, you're just not seeing it in the data.
Like Brad's saying the revenue is skyrocketing and I think the most you can say is that enterprises that are technically capable would like to
gravitate towards hybrid architectures but at the same time it takes technical expertise and it is just phenomenally convenient whether you're a developer or an enterprise just to go with the
frontier labs and that's why their revenue is skyrocketing.
It is the easiest choice. It's the most refined Yeah. most refined product's
refined Yeah. most refined product's there's Yeah. And there's one other
there's Yeah. And there's one other thing here as well and this was discussed in a really interesting blog post by the founder of Decagon which is enabling
AI powered customer support for enterprises and what the founder said is look open models are great when you know exactly what you're trying to do why they're smaller cheaper models but you
have to do post training you have to have the data set and you have to know exactly what you're going to use them for. Totally. But if you don't know
for. Totally. But if you don't know exactly what you're going to use them for, you want the most powerful general intelligence that you can get. Right? So
what he said is that for mature use cases, yeah, you want to go open, but for immature use cases, which are all the new things people are discovering right now, you're just going to want to
use the most capable general model that you can. And then once you figure out
you can. And then once you figure out what the workflow is and what the workload is going to be and exactly what you're trying to accomplish, then you can use a small highly trained model.
And I think he said optimize in the post to get the game for customer support. Your model doesn't need to know physics, you know, for example, and so you don't need that capability,
but enterprise are still trying to figure out exactly what all these workflows are going to do. So I think that's another factor which is to say that you know it depends on the use case
and how mature that use case is and you really want the most powerful frontier models that you can at the discovery of all the potential for the technology.
Yeah.
And then let me just wrap up then there's one other interesting post that I saw was by Nesh Aurora who also said that what he's seeing is yeah enterprises would like to diversify.
They would like what he called model fungeibility. They would love to
fungeibility. They would love to commoditize these models, right? And
just hot swap them.
Yeah. Headless is the term being used, right? Yeah.
right? Yeah.
Yeah. That'd be ideal for enterprises is you sort of swap out the model for the cheapest one that gets your task done.
But then what do you do about memory?
What do you do about context? What do
you do about history? And what he said is no one's really figured out a way to abstract that stuff away from the model yet. And again, this goes to the
yet. And again, this goes to the technical challenge of creating this middleware layer that would do the most efficient token routing. It's well, you know, it doesn't work unless you can
make all of that context and memory and history fully portable to the cheaper model that you want to basically hot swap to, which means you have to have some technical ability sachs. And the people
with technical ability, the tip of the spear, the 1% of people deploying this technology are starting to figure that out. Here's another proof point and some
out. Here's another proof point and some more evidence. This is Ali the founder
more evidence. This is Ali the founder uh of data bricks I think a company you're very familiar with Brad and what he realized when you start taking apart
the harness and you start looking at the skills you look at the memory and all this acruant that you put around your tasks he said we find that the same
model using the same model not using open source versus open AI or or claude we found that for the same model the choice of harness can significantly save
costs by about 2x. So they found with GLM 5.2 that this performs extremely well and that their tasks literally are getting cut in half using the same model
but with a different harness. And that
rings true to me. I once you've built one of these agents and I was talking about one earlier I'm running every hour on the hour to find trends. I asked it
to please start optimizing it. And when
I optimized it, it was like 80% less token use. And now in these apps, you
token use. And now in these apps, you can go to your analytic stacks and you can actually see your token use by hour, by job, and across which models you're using. This is really sophisticated and
using. This is really sophisticated and hard for for a consumer to do of the technology, but it's definitely a trend.
So with that harness that he was using, is that something they built in house?
Yes, I think it's um Yeah.
Okay, got it. So they they basically creat Yeah. in front of these and that it can
Yeah. in front of these and that it can multiplex different harnesses and models for different tasks. So he's not only routing to the right LLM, he's routing to the right harness and people don't
even know what skills are. People don't
even know what the memory is at this point there. That's all abstracted into
point there. That's all abstracted into the claw product or the perplexity product etc. Yeah, there'll be a massive business. There already is. All these
business. There already is. All these
inference clouds, you know, the base 10s of the world, the fireworks of the world, every single hyperscaler in the world is going to do this. They're all
going to provide, you know, tools that allow you to achieve some level of model fungeibility. The big question is at the
fungeibility. The big question is at the end of the day, we're going to have it's going to be very heterogeneous, but what is the mix between these two? I again
think the TAM is so damn big here that you're going to have huge open-source use cases, sovereign use cases, etc. You're going to have plenty of room for the frontier labs. I Let me throw something out. I'd like to get your
something out. I'd like to get your opinion on. you know to a certain extent
opinion on. you know to a certain extent there's this implied assumption in the world that uh there's going to be this convergence of intelligence right and if you look at the benchmarks today seems
like everybody you know on the benchmarks they are converging but yet if you look at the revenue distribution it's not converging at all one of the questions I have will the model router
itself be smart enough to overcome David the inherent intelligence advantages of the generalized of the frontier labs the non One consensus argument might be that
intelligence is not converging at all that c super intelligence becomes fully self uh uh uh you know recursive and as it becomes recursive you actually extend
the lead because the smarter your model gets the more revenue you get the more compute you can buy the more compute you can buy the better the model is that you can build so I think there's a chance
that over the course of the next 2 to 3 years as we take on much more complex agentic tasks asks that the distance between the frontier and everybody else
doesn't converge. It actually extends.
doesn't converge. It actually extends.
We shall see. But, you know, I think there's this implicit assumption in all the arguments today that everything's converging. I'm not I'm not sure that
converging. I'm not I'm not sure that we've really run that to ground. Another
piece of evidence to put in uh to this mix. I interviewed Anton, the CEO of
mix. I interviewed Anton, the CEO of Lovable. Lovable is an app that or a
Lovable. Lovable is an app that or a service that allows you to vibe code, you know, different pieces of software.
They've got a really interesting take on that. They went from 100 to 600 million
that. They went from 100 to 600 million in revenue over the last two years. They
went from zero to 350 in the first two years of the company. Products been out I think roughly for like 30 months. Then
I also spoke to uh the CEO of 11 Labs, Matti. And I asked both of them point
Matti. And I asked both of them point blank, are you guys uh you know your major customers of you know the the Frontier models? Yes. They're spending
Frontier models? Yes. They're spending
tens of millions of dollars with those frontier models. I asked them, hey, are
frontier models. I asked them, hey, are you concerned about data leakage and them compete, you know, releasing competing products? 11 Labs is doing
competing products? 11 Labs is doing voice and obviously Claude code, you know, is an obvious competitor to lovable. Are you going to make your own
lovable. Are you going to make your own models? Both of them said that they're
models? Both of them said that they're working essentially on their own models.
Those are major customers of the Frontier Labs who they want to get off of the Frontier models and they want to have their own proprietary model. The
the ability to create verticalized models is getting easier and easier every six months or so. So that's going to be another trend to look for is these verticalized models for voice,
verticalized models for building code.
And uh we're going to see uh people stop using the Frontier Labs and these are major major eight and nine figure customers. I think they're going to just
customers. I think they're going to just run for the hills and only use the Frontier models.
But Jason, the counterpoint there is 11 Labs. I love Maddie.
Labs. I love Maddie.
Yeah.
Do you really think he's going to use an inferior model? He's got to be have the
inferior model? He's got to be have the best voice voice agent in the world. And
if the best voice agent in the world is given to him by using the Frontier Labs, can he afford in a competitive marketplace to say, "I'm going to use the cheaper version, the thing that I built for myself, even though it's not
as good as the other thing." If he builds something better, I totally agree with you, which is what he believes he's doing. He believes he's making a better
doing. He believes he's making a better version. Yeah. So that's the question
version. Yeah. So that's the question that I just, you know, put on the table whether or not you're going to see this convergence, whether it in fact is that easy. I don't think it's that easy, but
easy. I don't think it's that easy, but we shall see.
Okay.
It may come down to how discreet and sort of predictive the use is. So like
Decagon, the customer support AI company, they said that 90% of their usage now is being sent to open models, but those are open models that they've
had the opportunity to post train on and do a huge amount of customization based on all of their learnings and all of the data that they've gotten. So again, it
comes back to maturity of the use case.
If you know exactly what you're trying to do, it's probably easier. But, you
know, I don't think that's most enterprises, though. And maybe there's
enterprises, though. And maybe there's going to be a pattern where, you know, all the immature use cases, which is to say, all the things you're figuring out, you're just going to want to use the most powerful model possible. And then
once it gets really well defined, maybe you start moving some of those workloads to post-trained open models, purpose-built models. Yeah.
purpose-built models. Yeah.
Yeah. Purpose-built. Yeah, it could be something like that.
That's kind of what's happening with the people who are the tip of the spear.
They're working on the routing of the jobs. They're working on the harness and
jobs. They're working on the harness and they want to be independent and have that AI sovereignty we talked about last week. Speaking
week. Speaking well, but just to take on Brad's point for a second, I actually agree with what I think you're saying, Brad, which is the market today seems to be pushing
towards duopoly or it has become a duopoly. Certainly measured in terms of
duopoly. Certainly measured in terms of revenue. If you're to look at market
revenue. If you're to look at market share based on token revenue, there's only two companies making meaningful revenue. Anthropics at what 60some
revenue. Anthropics at what 60some billion ARR open AAI at 40ome billion ARR. I don't know if anybody else even
ARR. I don't know if anybody else even registers and it may be the case that the more tokens that Anthropic and OpenAI produce, I
mean we got to remember every token that they're serving up is on behalf of a use case, right? So they themselves are
case, right? So they themselves are learning from that and they're getting better at then providing whatever offering that is and so who knows like the gap may be growing. A year ago it
seemed like we had five major labs you know now it seems like there's a top two and then everybody else. So I mean look I could see AI easily becoming another
tech market that becomes a duopoly which which by the way is the trend. The
historical trend is like monopoly or duopoly in most tech categories for better or worse.
Yeah. In this case though, however, we're using revenue as the metric to determine the winner. Keep in mind when you're doing open source, those are dark tokens. Those don't come up as revenue.
tokens. Those don't come up as revenue.
So, we don't know the utilization that's occurring at Door Dash when they're using an open- source model. We do know their fable and their anthropic spend, right? And because we see that in the
right? And because we see that in the anthropic revenue ramp, the more they deploy these things on their own hardware, using commoditized hardware, using the NeoClouds, you don't see that.
It doesn't come up as revenue. It comes
up as free. The only thing you're paying for there is the hosting cost, you know, and that's that will come up on Nvidia's balance sheet. So the gains you'll see
balance sheet. So the gains you'll see there will be Cerebrris, Neoclouds, Caruso Cloud, etc. So keep just keep that in mind when we're having this discussion. Let's talk a little bit
this discussion. Let's talk a little bit back to sovereignty here. The CCP
said that they might or there's a report out according to Reuters. Reuters
generally does a good job of this. They
dropped a couple of anonymously sourced reports about AI in China. And these
were published about 15 minutes apart the big scoop that CCP officials, Chinese Communist Party, are reportedly considering restricting overseas access to China's top models. So two Chinese
regulators met with Alibaba, Bite Dance and Z.AI. They are the ones who are
and Z.AI. They are the ones who are doing GLM 5.2 that we keep referencing.
They're discussing limiting access to the top open and closed models outside of China. Why are they doing this? Well,
of China. Why are they doing this? Well,
they're they're making uh any theft or leaks of AI research a national security offense and they want to control who can fund Chinese AI AI labs. And we saw this
with Manis which was a Chinese company tried to go to Singapore. the CCP pulled those employees from Singapore back to
China. And so here is their main
China. And so here is their main concern. The quote is that they're
concern. The quote is that they're concerned about Mythos. Chinese
authorities are deeply worried about the potential for Mythos to exploit software vulnerabilities and that Washington might deploy a model against Chinese interest. Saxs, last week I proposed the
interest. Saxs, last week I proposed the reverse to you in your previous position as Zar of AI. Do you think the United States should be banning those models?
Now we have the opposite. China saying
potentially according to these reports allegedly that they might restrict them.
So explain the game on the field here.
If you're going to look into what China's thinking, why would they want us to not have those open source models and and how is this chessboard development?
Well, last week I explained why it would be harmful to the US to ban open models.
So if you're China and you want to harm the US, maybe you would want to. I mean,
it does kind of make sense because our our companies are benefiting a lot from all this R&D that they're doing. Now, at the end of the day, I
doing. Now, at the end of the day, I think the story is probably a little bit overstated. I think there are a few
overstated. I think there are a few Chinese models that were open source that have gone closed source, but I don't think they're all I'd be surprised, let's put it that way, if
they all went closed. So, for example, the number one model in China, as I understand it, is bite dances model, which is already closed. That's kind of
like their chat GPT equivalent and it's always been closed. Then you've got Alibaba's Quen, which was open and now I
think is going closed, and ZepO, which has GLM 5.2, too, which we've talked about a couple weeks ago because it seemed to be catching up to what was then commercially available as the
American frontier at certain tasks. They
I think are going closed too after having been open. And so this is I think the tactic is you stay open until you catch the frontier or you get close to it and then there's a really compelling
incentive to go close because you want to capture all the value for yourself which by the way is exactly what Sam Alman did famously at OpenAI. Not only
did they go from a nonprofit to a for-profit, they went from open models to closed models. So, it's exactly paralleling what Sam realized 3 years ago. Yeah.
ago. Yeah.
I mean, in a way, that was what I think Meta's original strategy was was that Llama was going to be open, but then they actually they've sort of backed away from open a little bit. But this is
kind of an obvious strategy, right? is
is that if you want to catch up, you go open. Because by the way, you're not
open. Because by the way, you're not going to make any meaningful revenue on on closed anyway because you're not close enough to the frontier. So why
would anyone buy your product, but if you go open, you get the developer community on your side. So
and you get utilization, more people use it, which in AI gives you reinforcement learning. Yeah. Sex.
learning. Yeah. Sex.
Well, having having spent some time in DC this week, I and and and talking with both the White House and Treasury, etc. on this topic. What I can tell you is while there may be some, you know,
debates about regulation of US models, the one thing there's absolute agreement on is doing everything to stay ahead of China. And, you know, and and the
China. And, you know, and and the president all the way up to the president very interested how far are we ahead of China? What are the things we need to do to stay ahead of China? It is
a unifying force in Washington. And the
idea that we were going to kind of take our frontier labs off the field, off the playing field while letting Chinese open source models run free, you know, and on top of that distilling our models. I
will tell you GL GLM 5.2 has watermarks from mythos all over it, right? So we
know they were distilling, etc. And I think the US government's going to take steps against distillation, which they should do. So I think that you know
should do. So I think that you know China doing this in some ways I don't think it hurts the United States. The
United States can spin up open source models. We've got Reflection spinning
models. We've got Reflection spinning one up. Obviously we got the good work
one up. Obviously we got the good work going on at Nvidia with their open source models. The labs I've talked to a
source models. The labs I've talked to a couple of the frontier labs about open source models. I said why aren't you
source models. I said why aren't you guys making open source models? They're
like there's not a lot of demand for it.
If there was a lot of demand for it we'd make it. And so I think the US is in a
make it. And so I think the US is in a good position. And I think this is
good position. And I think this is probably more chess playing by China than actual threats because it would hurt them a lot more than it would uh hurt us.
Yeah. And then to just back up your point, Saxs, about when you're behind, go open and then once you catch up, start tighten things up. That's exactly
what they did with Android, right?
Google released Android. At a certain point, they were like, in order to use Android in the license, you have to include Google Search, you got to use Google Drive, you got to use Chrome. and
they started tightening it up. So, it's
not really an open- source project at this point.
Just, by the way, I think the absolute best thing that could happen for America in terms of winning the AI race against China is if China somehow sprouted their own doomer community.
Yes, we need uh like a Chinese yud over there.
We got to get their poom up. We got to get their poom up.
Exactly. We need a lot more people over there freaking out about, you know, job loss or RSI or whatever.
Yeah.
That'd be the best thing that could ever happen to us is if they start cracking down on their labs in the same way that the doomers want to do over here.
Yeah.
Brad, let me just say just one comment.
I mean, look, I I agree with you that from the president on down, everyone wants to win the AI race. And in fact, that was, you know, in the big AI policy speech the president gave about one year
ago. That was the whole thrust of the
ago. That was the whole thrust of the speech was declaring that we were in an AI race and America had to win it. I
think the big risk is more that and this would not be at like the top level. You
know, I think if the president could make every single decision, it'd be perfect. The issue is at a lower level
perfect. The issue is at a lower level in the bureaucracy, do people somehow do things that are counterproductive? Maybe
they think it's going to help us in the race against China, but they end up doing something that's hamfisted, they just like ban something or without, you know, really truly understand all the
implications of it. So, I think there's no question that the administration wants to win the AI race. The president
definitely does and at the top levels they will all make smart decisions. The
question is whether at lower levels of the bureaucracy, you can get mistakes being made. And then you have the
being made. And then you have the influence of Congress, whatever they want to do. Those guys, they're more responsive, I think, in a way to like the doomer community that's creating a
lot of political pressure right now.
Well, and the throttle, you know, paradoxically, to all of this might not be the software, might not be the chips, it might be energy. Yeah, Chimath. I
mean, when you look at your data center projects and the other ones that are going out there, if we need more tokens, if people need more inference, we have a gating factor in the United States, which is which is energy. There's a an
analysis that my team put together which I think is quite staggering. If you just look at the load growth that's expected between now and 2050,
we are about three entire California's worth of energy short. And that's just assuming regular consumption of devices and cars and fridges and televisions and
computers.
So yeah, we have a we have an enormous problem in the United States with respect to electrons.
Yeah. And if you put Taiwan into the mix here where the chips are coming out of, I had a really big wakeup call and there was a Wall Street Journal article about
this. The amount of LNG, which is what
this. The amount of LNG, which is what Taiwan runs on, is like they have two or three weeks of it. China decides to blockade Taiwan, they're going to run
out of energy immediately. So this is energy both in China and Taiwan and in the United States. It's all dependent on that. We have to get nuclear running,
that. We have to get nuclear running, more solar running, more batteries, more of everything. And uh that is obviously
of everything. And uh that is obviously a regulatory challenge here in the United States. All right, let's talk
United States. All right, let's talk about your time in DC. Brad Gersonner
went to DC, everybody. And uh huge huge congrats, Brad. you've been uh harping on about this um you know uh accounts now called Trump accounts, the
Invest America accounts and um tell us what happened in DC this week cuz I think you finally have the number one app in the world Trump accounts is the number one app in the world.
Congratulations and a bunch of announcements. So what what what's the
announcements. So what what what's the contours of the announcement and uh maybe you could take us behind the scenes. There it is. Trump accounts, the
scenes. There it is. Trump accounts, the official app number one in top downloads. Your kids can invest in the
downloads. Your kids can invest in the future.
This has been, you know, a four-year mission in the making thanks to you guys. You were early supporters,
guys. You were early supporters, backers. We talked about it on here.
backers. We talked about it on here.
And, you know, founders are crazy. And
you guys probably looked at what I was working on and and and thought, you're nuts. You're wasting your time on this.
nuts. You're wasting your time on this.
And so, you know, when it got signed into law last year, that's a huge moment in a founder journey that it's like getting your first round of funding maybe like, okay, we actually this thing is going to happen. But on July 4th of
this year, the app went live, right? So
that means millions of accounts got created, the accounts got funded. And to
celebrate that and to really kind of take the next step forward, you know, we designed a joint bell ringing first in history between the NYSE and NASDAQ from the Oval Office.
That was incredible. We had hundreds CEOs there, kids there, families that were impacted.
And the president really, you know, kind of laid out that this is much bigger than just a program to give a few people some accounts. This is really about
some accounts. This is really about making every child a capitalist. In
fact, the president suggested that we're going to autocreate uh accounts for all 50 million kids or upwards of 70 million kids under the age of 18. So he called
on us to get the accounts open faster for more people to have more impact to make sure no child is left behind.
Brad, just slow down because a lot of people don't even know what a Trump account is. Just explain the what it is
account is. Just explain the what it is and then you should contrast it to like a 529 account and some of these other things.
Great. So, as you guys know, the idea was very simple. $1,000 for
every child at birth that could compound for their life in a privatelyowned investment account. So you're born, you
investment account. So you're born, you get a social security number and you get an investment account. And if you do that, you start with $1,000 and somebody matches that and you save 10 bucks a
week, that's $50,000 at age 18. And the
idea and that's invested in the S&P 500.
S&P 500. So when these accounts are created, all that money goes into the S&P 500.
There's no cost. It's a free account for the lifetime of the recipient. And that
was packaged into the Invest America Act, which was passed into law a year ago as part of the reconciliation bill.
So that's what actually occurred on July 4th of this year. All those accounts were created for all of these kids.
That's the reason the Trump account app is number one in the app store because parents started hearing about this and saying, "Whoa, I need to go download and get this set up for my child." We had
over a million and a half counts created in the first 24 hours after the launch of this. We had over a billion dollars
of this. We had over a billion dollars of deposits. So, I was contributing
of deposits. So, I was contributing money into the accounts of my nieces, my nephews, my kids, friends, kids. Every
account h app has a QR code. Jason, so
somebody can just send you the QR code for your kid. You double you Apple Pay on your phone, double click and you send them 25 or 50 bucks. So that is kind of
the the most essential part of it. But
we also had a bunch of announcements around philanthrop when you're 18, 19, 20 years old and start putting it towards school or you can roll it into your IRA,
Roth IRA, I guess your your your retirement account. Obviously, Michael
retirement account. Obviously, Michael and Susan Dell were the were the anchors here. Over $6 billion, $250 for each of
here. Over $6 billion, $250 for each of 25 million children, primarily lower and middle inome kids. SpaceX's president,
Gwen Shotwell, she joined the party, put $350 million in her SpaceX shares, uh, and for children of lower income communities. So, with this, there's a
communities. So, with this, there's a device or some way to do it. So, you can target specific communities by geo uh, or by, I guess, their net worth. Um,
no, it's it's just zip code and age. Zip
code and age.
Zip code and age. Okay. And then Micron put in 250 million up to a,000 per employee. So that seems to be a really
employee. So that seems to be a really interesting way to do this. Like you can do an employee I'm sorry, an employer contribution.
And Brad Brad did it for all kids in Indiana, I think. Right.
Correct. All kids.
Brad, this is a big number here. I This
is a big announcement.
Brad, the guy who complains when we make him buy in for 10K after 10 p.m. at the
poker game and who like rage quits the game when he loses $6,000.
Somehow Brad dropped $100 million.
I mean, oh my god. Let's get a round of applause and a golf clap. Brad, this is I mean, I I've never heard of you doing any philanthropy. Like, sometimes you
any philanthropy. Like, sometimes you show up with a bottle of wine to the game, but this is a big number. This is
a big decision for you, huh?
Well, I think this will become the largest direct philanthropic platform in the history of the country. We told the president, we think we can raise a hundred billion dollars in the first 12
months. And so the scale of the
months. And so the scale of the philanthropy, the nature of the philanthropy directly to America's kids without a charitable middleman that's directing who gets what and and how it's
distributed. So you think about the
distributed. So you think about the people who now are, you know, we're 10 billion or a h 100red billion. How do
they give that money away at scale effectively? Now we have a platform they
effectively? Now we have a platform they can do that with. It goes directly into the accounts. The money can't be taken
the accounts. The money can't be taken out until the kids are 18.
for there was a bunch of noise about how some people won't do it because it's called Trump accounts and that some people said, you know,
this is going to create this weird class divide by people who had TDS and refused to give their kids because I think your website or something said something like 13 million
bucks by the time they're 50. And you
know, I tweeted something to the effect of that is an irresponsible amount of money to not give a kid because you don't like the fact that it's called a Trump account. It's it's it's patently
Trump account. It's it's it's patently insane.
If you go on Blue Sky, which is like the open- source uh lib TDS um social network, people are like just put one, you know, y'all trust those Trump accounts. I sure as hell don't. And so
accounts. I sure as hell don't. And so
there's a bunch of people.
Speak to that. Yeah, speak to that for one second. Mike.
one second. Mike.
So, I would say this, you know, it was the enabling legislation is the Invest America Act. Um, a lot of people, a lot
America Act. Um, a lot of people, a lot of Democrats call them Invest America accounts. They're officially Trump
accounts. They're officially Trump accounts. And the facts on the ground
accounts. And the facts on the ground are that parents aren't listening to that noise. The parents who are signing
that noise. The parents who are signing up for this are across the income spectrum, across the economic spectrum.
They're across the political spectrum.
They know and understand that their first responsibility is making sure their kids have a connection to the American dream, have savings for their life. But yes, they are called Trump
life. But yes, they are called Trump accounts. And I I've I've read some of
accounts. And I I've I've read some of that blowback. But the president
that blowback. But the president himself, let me just make this case very strongly. There's nobody who I've talked
strongly. There's nobody who I've talked to about this over the last two years who cares more about every child getting
an account than the president himself.
In fact, that occupied a lot of a lot of our conversation over lunch. He said,
"How do we get more people autoenrolled in this faster? I want every kid to have the shot to have this. I don't want anybody being left out and left behind because their parents are too busy
working two jobs or because their parents may have an issue with it being called a Trump account." So, the president is pushing us very hard and the Treasury Secretary,
he gave you instructions. He gave you an order that he wants you to autocreate the accounts. This is a brilliant move.
the accounts. This is a brilliant move.
He know we know the social security numbers of people who are under 18. He
told you get to work and automatically create the accounts. Are you going to do what the President Trump has commanded you to do, Brad? Are you going to autocreate them, Brad, or are you going to disobey the president?
We we we our intention is to get all 50 to 70 million accounts created over the course of the next 90 days using all of this data. But you know, listen, we got
this data. But you know, listen, we got to work through Treasury, the White House, Social Security, etc. They're definitely You also got to get through Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Roan who are going to try to stop you. Are they
going to try to stop you from doing this? Are they giving you blowback
this? Are they giving you blowback because they don't want to give Trump the win, which is totally but No, listen. I I I I'll give credit where
No, listen. I I I I'll give credit where credit is due. You know, Cy Booker's come out and supported these. And Gavin
Newsome, Governor Wes Moore, you know, John Federman, Senator from Pennsylvania. So there are plenty of
Pennsylvania. So there are plenty of Democrats who are able to get over that hurdle. But you bring up a good point
hurdle. But you bring up a good point and I said this on CNBC yesterday. On
the one hand, you have Bernie and Mandami. They want to take and tax all
Mandami. They want to take and tax all these corporations. They want to control
these corporations. They want to control all that money in Washington and decide who gets it. Right? It's a very dependent on Washington model. On the
other side, you have the president in this administration and frankly a lot of Democrats who are more in the orthodoxy, closer to the center, who say, "No, let's set up a private account for every
kid in America. Let's fund them. Let's
not make them dependent. Let's make them independent of the government to build wealth on their own, financial literacy on their own, more likely to graduate from high school, start a business, buy
a home." Those are two very different
a home." Those are two very different worldviews for America. And I think the antidote to more socialism is more capitalism. And as I told the president,
capitalism. And as I told the president, this is more capitalism.
Saxs, if this succeeds, and Brad does as he's been instructed by the president, we're going to go from 50% of people owning equities in the country to as
much as 70 maybe even 75% of the country having access and for the first time being part of equity nation. What's your
thoughts on this, Sachs? Look, I think that's a great thing and I think that this is a tremendous new philanthropic platform and that's really important especially in this time of growing anger
and backlash and populism against billionaires and people questioning whether the system is rigged and whether they can be successful in America, whether they will be able to be part of
it. This is a really important antidote
it. This is a really important antidote to that. But I almost think that the
to that. But I almost think that the philanthropic aspect maybe has gotten almost too too much attention because people are naturally attracted to the freebies and the part that I think
hasn't gotten enough attention or all the the comments I saw on CPA Twitter, you know, where all these accountants were talking about what an unbelievable I guess you could say estate planning
strategy this is or basically less advantaged. Yeah. like a wealth
less advantaged. Yeah. like a wealth management technique, whatever you want to call it, like planning for the future. And there's never been anything
future. And there's never been anything like this before. They were basically saying this is like in the top three, you know, there's certain things that you just have to do, like if your employer offers a matching 401k, you have to do it because otherwise it's
just you're losing out on free money and if you don't do a health savings account or you don't max out your Roth IRA, there's just certain things you have to do because they're so tax advantaged or
you're getting free money, right? And in
this case, you're getting both. There is
the opportunity for, frankly, the free money for your kids, right? But also,
the tax advantage is huge. So, let's
just go through this, and Brad, correct me if I get any of this wrong. So, you
can donate up to $5,000 a year to your kid as long as they're under 18. And
it's not just you, it's any friends and family or others can contribute as well, which is new. And then they get taxfree compounding till they're 18. And your
employer can contribute up to $2,500 taxfree. So at a minimum, you should go
taxfree. So at a minimum, you should go to your employer and say, "Sign up for this and if you have to take $2,500 out of my salary and make it a donation to
my kid's Trump account because then that's a huge tax savings, right?
Neither side has to pay tax on it." So,
you know, like Brad said, this is basically like an IRA. You get taxfree compounding. Then when the kid turns 18,
compounding. Then when the kid turns 18, they can get access to it and they can do a a rollover into an IRA or into a Roth IRA, which is even better because
when the Roth IRA matures, you don't pay tax on the money that gets distributed out of it. Where whereas with a traditional IRA, all the taxes get deferred until the end. The difference
is that when you do a IRA to a Roth IRA conversion, you're supposed to pay taxes at that point. And I saw one really clever CPA say that well the best way to do this is wait till your kid is
actually not a dependent anymore. Like
so maybe they're in college or they just graduated from college and they're in like the 0% tax bracket because they're not making any money and then do the conversion. And so you'll be able to
conversion. And so you'll be able to convert the Trump account very cheaply into a Roth IRA and now they're going to have $2 to $300,000 potentially in that
account that they can then do tax-free investing for the rest of their life or they could potentially start a company with that. Other things you can do with
with that. Other things you can do with an IRA is you can use part of the money on a down payment for the first home purchase or if you get into a health emergency, you can use money for that.
So, there's all these things. You're
allowed to distribute money out of an IRA without incurring a penalty. But
generally speaking, the point of an IRA is to save for retirement. And this is where I think it gets really amazing is because if you start with $200 to
$300,000 at age 18, you'll be at $10 million plus by age 60 if you just let it compound. I mean, there there's
it compound. I mean, there there's ranges.
Nepo babies we're creating here. We're
going to have a lot of rich kids with trust funds.
Yeah. So this is like this is all you have to do to make sure that your kid is protected for retirement is if you and your family and your friends and your employer can just contribute to their
Trump accounts.
Like that that's like that's way better than social security.
Brad, I have an idea. I have to go sell some enterprise software so I have to leave. But I'm I'm really proud of you.
leave. But I'm I'm really proud of you.
I think this is incredible. You should
convince OpenAI and Anthropic to give the equity of those companies if this is going to be as big as you say 100 billion, 300 billion, zillion, trillion,
put it into the uh accounts of every kid.
Can you just explain how that works against the $5,000 limit?
I got to go. Love you guys. See you
later. All right. Good luck on the sales call.
Yeah. Always be closing. Chimath. Always
be Chimath closing. APC.
Chamath always be closing. You know,
again, David and Jamant, as we build out the platform at scale, so imagine now you have 50 million accounts that are opened, we do we I I've said on CNBC, you know,
I've obviously talked with Daario and Sam and Elon and others about making those donations. I I don't like this
those donations. I I don't like this idea of shaking down our companies, taking their shares, and then putting them in some government slush fund that perhaps Bernie or AOC or somebody's going to control in the future. I've
said I it's got to be voluntary and number two it should go into citizen accounts right privately held in citizen accounts at Capound for their life and so you asked the question David how does
it happen given the limits that you have you know the $5,000 per child that's why you have to have so you know 50 million accounts opened right because then you
can take uh dollars in at scale but we can also set up a poolled account David where it can be distributed over time so you distribute it to all the kids subject to the limits that you have
today and then any remainder you can distribute to the 3 and a half million kids that are going to be born next year or the 3 and a half million kids born the year after that or the three and a half million kids born after that. We
are on a trajectory now that we're going to have over a 100red million of these counts set up over the next decade.
Okay? So we could have 70 million today and then you're going to add 3.7 million a year. So you're going to be at a 100
a year. So you're going to be at a 100 million private individual accounts that are compounding for people's lives that anybody can donate money into that the
people themselves. I think one of the
people themselves. I think one of the things that gets lost is moms and dads or somebody working their summer job put in 10 bucks, put in a hundred bucks, put it, you know, into these accounts. They
get to see it on their phone. You know,
this is when we started this, my sons and I designed this app and it's basically what we ended up with. It's a,
you know, Joe and shout out to Vlad at Robin Hood helped you with it. Yeah,
Vlad and and Joe have implemented a more elegant version of this, but every kid owns a little bit of Nvidia, a little bit of Microsoft, a little bit of Apple.
Imagining opening up that account, David, in middle school or high school to the money page, and now you're getting excited that you're seeing, oh man, I'm in the game. I have ownership.
And while you reference what it could be for families who can contribute $5,000, obviously Michael Dell and I and Gwen and everybody else, we're focused on the 50% of Americans who feel left out and
left behind who would otherwise have zero. If you do the math on this over
zero. If you do the math on this over the course of the next 15 years, you could have somewhere between two and four trillion dollars added to the
accounts of families and kids who would have otherwise had zero.
We talk a lot. Go ahead.
We we we talk a lot.
See, the philanthropy piece is it it basically the way the the philanthropic aspect works is that other people philanthropists can contribute towards that $5,000 per kid, right? Is that
So, you know, when Gwen Shotwell contributes 2 million shares of SpaceX to 2 million kids, each kid's getting a share of stock 150 bucks. So now
150 bucks. So now that's counting against their $5,000 limit.
So that's what makes it compelling is okay look every every family that can afford to do the 5,000 should because it's just like so compelling from a tax
and saving standpoint but then even for families who can't there are going to be beneficiaries of philanthropists who just want to give this type of direct giving and it seems to me this is so much more efficient and
so much better than the whole NGO industrial complex where absolutely where they take% for their offices than their salaries.
Yeah, they're just drifting.
Yeah.
One of the numbers I saw was kind of amazing is again, it just goes back to the power of compounding is that if a Trump account had been maxed out and you have the standard market rate of return
that we've had for say the past 30 years, then by age 28, that kid will be a millionaire.
Incredible.
That's right. That's right. All the
numbers you hear me quote, the $50,000 and the $200,000, it doesn't assume maxing, you know. That just assumes people are adding $50 a month because I've been focused as Michael and others
have really on the families who who don't have the capacity to save today.
We're getting all of them into the game.
And the president directed us. He said,
"Listen, we have 529 accounts that already help the top 10%." That's not who we're focused on. This is about the main street agenda. This is about all the families that he ran for that feel
left out and left behind and we're reconnecting them to the American dream through uh universal ownership. They all
have their own account. They all have a private account on their phone. Um it's
a gamecher for the country. It's the
largest change to our social contract since 1935 and social security. And
importantly, I think it couldn't come at a better time. You know, we have this we have this fight for just every employer should be signed up to be, you know, employer that can contribute because again you could take
that $2,500 and hopefully look it's additive and that it's not just a substitute but even if it's just a substitute and JCAL your employer takes $2500 bucks out of your
salary and puts it in your kids Trump account then you it's reducing your taxable income so it's a no-brainer if you're a profitable company your employees are going to love you yeah
yeah but I think every employee is going to want to and every employer should do it because it's the tax savings for both, right? So,
both, right? So, the tax savings here is huge.
Yeah. So, just off of the mechanics of it, I just want to maybe level up here for a second.
Yeah. I have been often critical. I call balls and strikes
often critical. I call balls and strikes and I can tell you in detail the things that I have a problem with this administration and their actions they've done and I have done it here on the pod.
I want to address the people who are negging this and specifically negging it because it has the name Trump accounts on it which I told you at the poker game call them Trump accounts. I don't know if that was like an obvious thing or I was the person who told you to do it.
I'm not taking any credit here but I remember that conversation where I was like just call him Trump accounts. Like
if whatever criticism you have of Trump, however valid you may feel it is. This
has nothing to do with Donald Trump and how you feel about him. Put your TDS on the side. Put your valid criticisms on
the side. Put your valid criticisms on the side. In this country, we have a
the side. In this country, we have a K-shaped recovery going on. We have
immense tension between the halves and the have nots. We to the point at which people actually believe that socialism and communism is a better operating system than the best operating system
humanity has ever created, which is called democracy plus capitalism, right?
And kids love love capitalism. They love
building businesses. But we are in an existential moment right now. If these
kids believe, young kids, and there's a couple of generations of them right now who do not believe in America anymore, while we're sitting here on the 250 50th anniversary of this amazing experiment
known as America, this is the most American thing you can do. So, put aside your TDS, put aside your valid criticisms and embrace this and give the
flowers to Brad, to the people donating like Michael and Susan Dell and Gwen.
This is beautiful. This is the most beautiful gift I've ever seen to a country and this could be something that's a
unifying principle that brings us back together as a country that everybody gets to participate in capitalism and this is the number one way to do it
which is to let kids on their smartphone instead of saying you know what mandami is right I should get a free bus ride I should get a free I should get free pizza and we should take Ken Griffin's
and and sees his, you know, penthouse and pay out of ter. all that, you know, and we have we have CEOs getting shot and and their homes firebombed.
Well, you know what? If you're one of those CEOs, you've done incredibly well.
There was something called the giving pledge where they pushed, you know, affluent people at the TED conference for decades, Bill Gates and everybody, Warren Buffett, everybody was pushing
for this. This is like the perfect
for this. This is like the perfect version of the giving pledge because you're not just saying, "I'm giving away my wealth by the time I die." You're
very strategically saying every single person in America gets to be part of the best part of America which is entrepreneurship and everybody will be part of the equity nation. And my final
point is one of the happiest countries in the world is Australia. If you've
ever gone to Australia, everybody feels safe. And we have a a large number of
safe. And we have a a large number of people in this country who do not feel safe. And the reason they don't feel
safe. And the reason they don't feel safe is because they don't think their kids are safe. to the point at which people do not want to have kids in this country because they feel the system is
just too hard. This could change that if people feel, hey, kids have a shot and I don't have to worry about my kids. I I
worry about my kids and I'm affluent. I
can't imagine being a single parent and what anxiety you must have as a single mother or father and you're and you're making minimum wage and you're behind, you know, the eightball for your entire
life and now your kids are set. That's
all people want. That's the only thing a parent wants is to make sure their kids have a better future. That was the promise of this country and somehow it went off the rails for the last two generations. This puts it back on the
generations. This puts it back on the rails. This is super annuation funds in
rails. This is super annuation funds in Australia. In Australia, people are
Australia. In Australia, people are extremely happy. The reason they're
extremely happy. The reason they're happy is they're forced to put 14K a year or whatever it is 12 or 14% I think of their income into essentially a 401k that they get to direct to a certain
extent. It's forced savings. This does
extent. It's forced savings. This does
the same thing at at a a very basic level. This could
replace social security. This replaces
the giving pledge. And I just want to say Brad, you know, a lot of my friends got involved in politics. Some of them on this very program, a lot of people.
It's very divisive. You threaded the needle here. It was a master class in
needle here. It was a master class in balancing these two crazy parties and and the divisiveness in this country. I just want to give you
as your friend your flowers. This is
just absolutely outstanding what you did and and you have been incredibly humble in your approach to this. This would not have happened without you, Brad. This is
this is your legacy of everything you've done in your life. Lots of success and I've seen it up close and personal. This
is a million times x everything you've done in your whole life. You'll be
remembered for this. This is
architecture.
Should be as big as social security. I
mean, it's a new platform. It's like an entire new It's not because it's philanthropy, but it's also retirement savings. I mean, right? And
retirement savings. I mean, right? And
everything in between and this is not static. We This is dynamic.
We can add to this. There could be other features.
I'm seeing a lot of people in the comments say, "Why stop at age 18? Why
can't you I mean, you have the Trump account roll over into a IRA or Roth IRA after age 18, but why can't you keep it going and then people can keep that
$5,000 contribution going? And you know, it doesn't mean we take away exactly retirement benefits that are owed to current social security recipients, but sunset it. But at a certain point,
you could just say that, hey, the next generation is going to be on this platform rather than the old one, and it would be a lot better.
A lot more efficient than government not running it, right, Sax?
Yeah.
We don't want the government running this.
Let me ask you a question about this, Brad, because I I do see one thing that people say, which is what if your kid turns 18 and then they just want to blow the money, you know? How do you trust? How do you
you know? How do you trust? How do you trust that they're going to put it to good use, you know, as opposed to I don't know, you know, yolo yolo and whatever.
As you know, these things are always political trade-offs and balances. And I
wanted them to have to compound until they were 30, right? Because I figured by 30, you were a little bit more, you know, uh uh mentally uh developed on on financial issues. But, you know, the
financial issues. But, you know, the argument ultimately came, you're old enough to vote, you're old enough to fight a war. if I if by 18 we don't allow you to have control of your own money. So that's where a political, you
money. So that's where a political, you know, uh consensus was built, David. But
the other thing, remember, is they can only take up to 25% out to buy a home, start a business, go to college. The
rest rolls into an IRA, and there are built-in penalties for early withdrawal in an IRA. So they're disincentives for people to pull out. But let's be clear, we have to do a much better job in our
education, our public education system, leveraging this as the platform. You
know, if a kid doesn't have any money, it's hard to get excited about learning about money. But if a kid's in the game
about money. But if a kid's in the game and has 12,000 bucks in the seventh grade, now you got my attention. I own a little bit of Nike. I own a little bit of Apple. I own a little bit of Nvidia.
of Apple. I own a little bit of Nvidia.
Let's talk about that. How did it get there? How did it compound? If I added
there? How did it compound? If I added 50 bucks a month, what does it turn into? All of these things will now be
into? All of these things will now be present on every child's phone in America. 37 states require financial
America. 37 states require financial literacy. Every state should build this
literacy. Every state should build this into the curriculum. We're working with a lot of states on that. You know, we haven't talked about that. We have about 25 states who are going to add money
into the accounts of the kids in their states. So, you got
states. So, you got states are going to do it.
States state action. Oklahoma, West
Virginia, you know, Indiana, etc. So that's also sweeping the country where the states are looking at programs they already have where they're spending
money for kids that are ineffective and they're saying instead of continuing to spend money on these things that aren't working, why not just block grant the money directly to the kids
because we give the kids the money more likely to graduate, more likely to, you know, to buy a home, start a business, etc. So, I
think that we're, as I said in in the oval, this is day one, and I am fully committed to the next decade, as is my partner in crime on this, Michael and
Susan Dell. I appreciate your guys's
Susan Dell. I appreciate your guys's comments on on on the legacy of this. It
has been the most profound work and kind of honor of my life. and standing in the Oval Office with my two sons who are really my two co-founders on this. We
draft, you know, we made the sketch of this at our kitchen table in at the in the fall of 2020. That's where the conversation started. Lincoln's been
conversation started. Lincoln's been with me in every single meeting with every congressman, senator, president, former president, etc. The president shouted him out uh you know, again when
we were there. That journey as a father with my kids has been like the payback has been really extraordinary. Other thing that's
really extraordinary. Other thing that's notable here and again like you got to call balls and strikes and give credit where credit is due. Joe Jebia joined this administration. A lot of people in
this administration. A lot of people in the tech industry are like oh you know oh you joined the Trump administration whatever you know. Okay there's some criticism. He's an incredible worldass
criticism. He's an incredible worldass designer. I was talking to producer Nick
designer. I was talking to producer Nick our producer here also happens to show the same last name as me. He signed up for this right? He's doing well but you know his his wife signed up for it. The
software is fantastic. Let's pause for a second.
The American government has made exceptional software and this all got done in Trump's first 18 months, immense credit for this. This is like of all the, you know, challenges this
presidency has had and the Iran war and other issues. We made great software.
other issues. We made great software.
The American government because of Joe Jebia makes kickass software. Like just
also major shout out to him and you know he could be doing whatever he wants.
He's, you know, he's done incredibly well as the co-founder of Airbnb and he's doing this like that. That's a real patriotic thing to do. I I I'm just over the moon with this. I think it's fantastic.
The dream team you had like Michael Dell, myself, Vlad Tennv, Joe Gabia, the Treasury Secretary, Luke Pettit at the Treasury talking basically every day
for the last year. And our objective was not we want to build the best thing that that the government's ever launched. We
wanted to build one of the best consumer products period that's ever been launched. Mission accomplished
launched. Mission accomplished and there's any Silicon Valley consumer company would be thrilled with the numbers that we're seeing, the ratings that we're seeing, the engagement that we're seeing. So,
we're seeing. So, you know, it's been fun doing it with that incredible team. And, you know, everybody's in this for the right mission as well. And so, I agree with you, Jason. It's rare that government
you, Jason. It's rare that government recruits or embraces uh you know, that that that mission. And I think the tent's getting a heck of a lot bigger.
It is bipartisan.
It's bipartisan in support. You know,
this is important. What Governor uh uh Moore from Maryland said yesterday. He
said, "Republicans and Democrats have been trying to do something that looks like this, feels like this for 40 years.
This guy got it done. Give him credit.
This is great for America, great for our kids, and especially on the 250th anniversary. You know, you're standing
anniversary. You know, you're standing in the Oval Office looking at the original Declaration of Independence and you realize what people laid down for this experiment and then I I read this
chatter in my feeds about Mandami and others literally wanting to set this great experiment on fire.
Yeah.
Right. Wanting to burn the place down because they they think they have a better formula. No, the answer is
better formula. No, the answer is evolving and doubling down on the formula that has worked for 250 years.
And rather than making all these kids socialists, we get them all into the game of capitalism, they become owners, owners and shareholders in America. So
that's what we got accomplished and uh appreciate the chance to talk about it.
Listen, incredible Brad and um you know, just amazing to watch you do it. And if
you if you if you if you really think about it, the tech industry I needs to win and capitalists and creators and the makers, the people who build stuff. This
is our chance to say here's an example of something that helps the people at the bottom, right? And I talked a bunch about um the minimum wage here. We got a
$7 minimum wage. Like we we need to address that as well. These are the things that if we address what people are scared about, what people who are who don't have what we all have here, uh
if we have empathy for those people and we actually care about them and we give them a path to believe in the American dream, they will take that path we have to give them a better path than
these socialist lunatics. And this is so much of a better path. Let's do it again. Let's do another one of these
again. Let's do another one of these things. Let's keep growing this spirit
things. Let's keep growing this spirit of getting everybody in the country to have equity uh in these great companies.
That's that's why the entire world is trying to replicate what we do here.
Every single country I go to wants to recreate Silicon Valley.
We're not we're not stopping here. And
um David to your point where you know whether it's the AI companies uh or frankly whether it's the Intel shares or whether it's the Tik Tok fee I now have
a a place where all of those wins achieved by this administration can go they ought to go directly to all the citizens you know the country into their accounts and compound for a lifetime.
And then as far as people over the age of 18 there's certainly a lot of talk about that as well. um not again as social security is a sacred promise by both parties. Nobody's going to change
both parties. Nobody's going to change that. But there's a huge opportunity to
that. But there's a huge opportunity to have a supplement here. Why shouldn't
people, you know, between 20 and 30 or 20 and 40 also have a Trump account that they can begin on a supplemental basis adding dollars that they own and control? Remember the big difference
control? Remember the big difference between this and social security. Social
Security takes 12.4% 4% of my W2 income and puts it into something akin to the black hole of government. I don't own it. I don't control it. If I ask a room
it. I don't control it. If I ask a room of 3,000 people how much they've contributed, they have no idea. If I
die, I don't have title. It doesn't pass to my heirs, etc. So, it's really not mine. But if we created a supplemental
mine. But if we created a supplemental IRA, it doesn't even require new legislation, I don't think. It's just
expanding the age. These these are IAS after the age of 18, right? then people
could start building supplemental wealth and participate in these gains. And so
there's a lot of conversations going on about that as well. And and so we're not done, but uh it was a hell of a milestone on the 250th birthday of America to ring the bell in the oval and
to to watch all these kids get their accounts lit up. It was pretty special.
What I think is really cool about the Trump accounts, I'm I think it's an amazing philanthropic platform, but in addition to that, it's an amazing platform for middle class family
planning. That's the point I'm trying to
planning. That's the point I'm trying to make is all the CPAs that I'm seeing talking about this are saying this is like one of the greatest things ever.
And if I could only tell my clients to do one thing, this would be the one thing.
Finally, something for the middle class, right? This is what people have been
right? This is what people have been asking for. Hey, let's get something for
asking for. Hey, let's get something for the middle class. Let's get something for the, you know, Yeah. And I I think the market gap, bra,
Yeah. And I I think the market gap, bra, correct me if I'm wrong, but basically the the market gap that was created here is that you can't get an IRA, which is basically a tax advantage uh savings
account until you have your first job, right? And get earnings,
right? And get earnings, which would be for most people at age 22 plus. So for that first 22 years,
plus. So for that first 22 years, you're not your kids can't have an IRA, right?
Correct. And you're effectively giving every child at birth correct IRA.
You know, it's a Trump account has certain rules. It's actually it's better
certain rules. It's actually it's better than an IRA.
Better than an IRA.
It's better than an IRA because with an with an IRA, your employer can't contribute 2500 bucks taxfree, can they?
I mean, I don't think so. and philanthropists
can't contribute to it and moms and dads and but the most important thing you know like I I I say this you know Buffett's like the secret is to find a really small snowball on a really long
hill okay but the size of the hill in this country we've cut off the the first third of the hill forever nobody saves anything until they're 25
okay the easiest compounding in the world the the easiest compounding in the world is between zero and 5. All right.
Listen, this has been amazing.
Yeah. Because their dependence, frankly, they're still on mom and dad.
Exactly. So, you you you pick up the first third of life.
Incredible, right? In in compounding.
And so, it's a it's really remarkable. Let's go. Uh I
mean, amazing job. All right. We'll see
you all next time. Bye-bye.
We'll let your winners ride.
We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.
Love you. Queen of
your besties are gone.
That is my dog taking notice your driveways.
Oh man, myasher will meet me. We should
all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all useless.
It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release something else.
Your feet.
We need to get merch.
I'm going all in.
I'm going all in.
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