E169: Elon sues OpenAI, Apple's decline, TikTok ban, Bitcoin $100K?, Science corner: Microplastics

Look, if it's true that TikTok is sharing data with the CCP, then I think the United States is well within its rights to either ban it or to cause it to be divested. And I personally like the divestiture option.

I think you have to deal with TikTok as a business issue. And I agree with Palmer Luckey, which is, they should not be able to sell to us what we cannot sell to them. And I think that that's a fair principle that we can live on.

I think we saw this during, after October 7th, that there was a significant surge in pro-Hamas videos relative to Israel support videos. That's the sort of thing where you could kind of see something that sets an opinion that may be disruptive to the social fabric, to the election cycle

This thing is far too powerful for the CCP to have any kind of access to it, for the Chinese government to have any kind of access to it. It has to be divested.

the reality is he's identified a loophole and that loophole needs to get fixed ... So the point is that the government really cares about these kinds of things because so much money is on the line. And if OpenAI turns out to be this multi-hundred billion dollar behemoth, this will get figured out in court because there's just too much money at stake.

And I think this is where OpenAI is going to get super tripped up. And I think the IRS is going to have a field day here.

Well, it's important to remember the majority of the IP that exists at OpenAI today was generated after the for-profit was set up. The real question was, was there a fair transfer at the time when it was set up of value into this for-profit entity?

I think OpenAI is in a little bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation ... they've changed that nonprofit board, they've booted off the nonprofit people, and that may have been the right thing for the for-profit entity, but now it might get them in trouble because it lends credence to Elon's lawsuit that they've completely changed the original mission of this organization.

But Apple is a company now that grows as the economy of the world grows. So that is not super great for its future prospects, unless it can expand the surface area of where they operate ... So all of these things, I think, mean to me that it is effectively becoming a cyclical rate sensitive stock.

I think, to your point, Chamath, the challenge Apple is facing is that the pool of options, the portfolio of call options that you would get a new product coming out of Apple is shrinking. Very limited.

They need some new products. I mean, maybe Apple Vision Pro someday becomes the platform of the future, but they've squeezed as much revenue as they can out of the iPhone.

People are now speculating that there's going to be an Ethereum ETF that gets approved as well, because if you approve one, there's probably legitimate cause to approve a few others. So these things are becoming part of the financial fabric, and I think that that should not be underestimated.

I mean, whatever dispute you have with Epic, you don't boot them out of your app store because you don't like their criticism of you. I mean, this is basically proving exactly what everyone's been saying about Apple.

Services seems like the best place for them to make money, but as we see, the app store is under assault.

And in this AI shift, they can still do that, where now people are chipping away at the 30%, right? People are saying, well, I can just build around you. They need to do something.

I think this is really just about peak iPhone. If you look at the majority of their revenue, it's obviously from the iPhone, which has become massively profitable over time, but the iPhone revenue has been flat for a couple of years now.

I don't even know what number I'm on, you know?

I don't even know either. It all looks the same to me.

the carbon footprint, the environmental cost, the cash cost is much higher with all these alternatives to plastic. So there are big challenges with respect to having some big, massive response to plastics used in our supply.

Honestly, all you have to do is have glass bottles or carry a water bottle with you.

It's been a disaster in the poker game in some ways. We got rid of it, and there's been way more broken glass. People knock over the, you know, the side tables. I get it. It's been a huge pain, but I will not go back.

Okay, well, if Chamath is endorsing this, I guess I'm gonna take it seriously.

But they seem to think that this thing is on a death march to 100K. I'm not sure whether that price is realistic or not in the year, but I will say that we're going to get to a tipping point where everybody really talks about this. I still don't think we're there yet. I think we're just at the beginning. But when you see the inflows into these ETFs, Jay Cal, it's like a very big deal because it just allows every mom and pop individual to buy some

if they could just make Siri work like the way it was supposed to using an LLM and have it be like snappy, that would be a major upgrade to the iPhone

I think that's where they're going with their silicon. And they just announced the M3 on the MacBook Airs. Like, they're making their own silicon. And I think it's going to power LLMs locally on the devices. And that's so powerful.

This is the first investment, I think, where we're all on the cap table, right? So we can all, we're all rooting in the same direction.

It is a real community that's come together building around Groq. And what I will say is, you know, sort of the same jump that developers saw when we went from dial-up internet to broadband.

We're going to ship 20 million into your safe note. I know you closed it, but we're going to pry it open and get some allocation.

So I think it's been a very big year, and I think that psychologically, it's proven a lot of folks wrong, and it's a setup for something really constructive.

I think the real question is, in the last couple of years, have we really seen a change in Bitcoin being used for transactions or for commerce in any meaningful way? I think the answer is still likely not.

That one individual starts to have an entire cohort of knowledge workers available at their disposal to do things that we can't even imagine today.

But this isn't hard, right? I mean, all they got to do is just take the latest open source models and figure out how to customize them for their own products.