Meta's scorched earth approach to AI, Tesla's future, TikTok bill, FTC bans noncompetes, wealth tax

let's make a prediction here, that Meta is going to get ten points of the search market ... We might be sitting here in three or four years watching Meta have, I don't know, 10 points of search.

It's just that Google can't afford to lose anything. Everybody takes a point here and a point there, and all of a sudden Google could be in the high 70s of search, and that would be economically disastrous for their stock.

that's going to create a buying opportunity because we think it's roughly mispriced. And we think it's mispriced because going back to this plan from 2016, this is all the things that we've been underwriting from $40 billion of market cap to $750, and now we're getting a 40% discount to buy back in.

But I would say that I think both of those things are ultimately cyclical. And what matters is Tesla's products. I would say the only issue they have that's a real long-term issue is just the Chinese competition.

the biggest investment I've made is in a company called Palmetto. They are close to now the largest residential solar business in the United States ... So I've always thought a ginormous directional bet to make would be to go along the disruptor. The person that helps arm the rebels in this case would be the person that arms 100 million homes. And then eventually at some point just short the debt of these utilities because they won't be able to service them.

All the regulations are going to get opened up to put batteries and solar everywhere.

This is ridiculous. These things will never pass.

if the Democrats have the trifecta, if Biden wins reelection and holds on to the Senate and House, but without Manchin and Sinema, I think you have to price in the strong possibility that this passes.

I think it's inevitable that we're going to raise federal revenue through some form of taxation that's going to feel deeply uncomfortable and inappropriate, and it's going to have negative economic consequences.

this divestiture thing is a total fig leaf because it's not clear that China is going to allow TikTok to divest ... So I don't think they're going to be able to divest. I think they're just going to get shut down.

if I'm bite dance, I'm very likely going to hire a bunch of bankers, run an auction process, and sell this thing, and I have a year to do it.

I don't think the product is much of anything. It's probably no better or no worse than shorts or reels or some of these other alternatives.

I want to see this thing banned immediately, or divest. I would prefer it be divested, because I think people love it.

it's a really important sign that founder led companies with these voting rights, you know, have the ability to make these sorts of hard decisions that it might be very difficult for a management by committee group to make.

Sundar being a hired gun, not having founder authority to your point, Friedberg

what we've authorized here is not a TikTok ban. It is a sweeping new federal power to ban foreign adversary controlled applications. ... And I guarantee you, I think here's where this goes next. I think Telegram is next on the hit list.

You actually think they'll take this to American companies?

And I think that if they go after it, I think it's because this underlying encryption model is something that we can't get access to. And so they'd rather just eliminate it to Sacks' point.

We're seeing the economic value getting disintegrated. There is no value in foundational models economically. So then the question is who can build on top of them the fastest?

by open sourcing these models, they limit competition because VCs are no longer going to plow half a billion dollars into a foundational model development company. So you limit the commercial interest and the commercial value of foundational models.

which they had spent billions of dollars creating in a completely open source way. And the testing on Llama 3 is that it's comparable to GPT-4. And I think this is what Chamath means by scorched earth, is that we now have a free model that's as good as GPT-4.

I agree with all you've said here in terms of the open source and the dramatic effect it's going to have on pricing

The core money-making market for them is monetizing their family of apps, and so they're scorching the earth for these new markets so that the economics are not viable

In the long-term, in terms of option value, I am the most intrigued by the robot play

I think the Optimus has the highest alpha, but the highest beta. So, you know, more upside than anything else. Just unclear how you get there, what the path is and the capital requirements.

I suspect instead of having a generalized robot, you have very specific use case robots that look differently ... there will be people that become experts in these vertical use cases, and that will limit the TAM for a generalized approach.

I think every human on planet Earth eventually will have a robot. So I know that's crazy, but I think Optimus will dwarf the entire entirety of Tesla's other businesses.

So if Tesla enters in as the third player in that field and just guts pricing, which I think would make sense for them to do, I think this thing is just gang busters nuclear.

I think that vision is five, six, seven years out from having low single digit percentages. ... I think Uber is ultimately going to be the place people go to call up one of 20 different self-driving. I think a lot of people are going to get there at the same time.

the advantage Tesla has is they actually have real cars on the road. They have real cars on the road with real driver minutes with drivers using the previous version of FSD and making interventions. So they're constantly getting better. ... I think it's going to be somewhere between one and three companies figure this out.

AI is really two markets, training and inference. And inference is going to be 100 times bigger than training. ... the sharps know that NVIDIA cannot do inference

people like this see the $160 trillion of private wealth as being on the balance sheet of the federal government and being used to offset the $175 trillion of liabilities. In other words, all it takes is all you got. That's the trajectory we're on.