Scarlett Johansson vs OpenAI, Nvidia's trillion-dollar problem, a vibecession, plastic in our balls

And go ahead to head with AWS instead of selling to them.

It's not a far stretch, especially because Nvidia actually has the software interface that everybody uses, which is CUDA. So I think it's likely that Nvidia goes on a full frontal assault against GCP and Amazon and Microsoft. That's going to really complicate the relationship that those folks have with each other. But I think it's inevitable, because you're going to... How do you defend... It's kind of the Apple problem. How do you defend an enormously large market cap? You're forced to go into businesses that are equally lucrative.

And then their average growth rate from 1998 to today was negative 1.4% a year. So it went from about 200 billion to about 130 odd billion. And why? It's not that Intel was a worse company, but it's that everything else caught up. And the economic value went to things that sat above them in the stack. Then it went to Cisco for a while, right? Then after Cisco, it went to the browser companies for a little bit. Then it went to the app companies. Then it went to the device companies. Then it went to the mobile companies. So you see this natural tendency for value to push up the stack over time. And in AI, we've done step one, which is now you've given all this value to Nvidia, and now we're going to see it being reallocated.

So I think that they're going to have less maneuvering capability than Cisco had in the future. And obviously, there's this deep concentration risk, which is going to be deeply challenging.

I think what we will see over time is that rather than have the ability to sue for their likeness, a lot of AI that is like a celebrity, the value of it will arise from the celebrity's endorsement, not actually using the celebrity's features.

Using a computer to probabilistically copy something is still copying something.

And by the way, I mean, because it is such an industry-leading company, I think we could end up with some very bad fair use precedents or laws because Scarlett Johansson is so sympathetic as a plaintiff compared to OpenAI. And unless they show us some discovery that proves that they really did hire the voice actor and all the rest of it, I mean, this could lead to some very bad precedents for the industry around fair use.

What happens in these content cases is they get settled almost every single time. So, the case law doesn't get codified, they just get settled out of court. If you go look at all the Fair Use cases, they almost never go to the mat. And so, this one will just be settled. It'll just be a question at what price.

More than half of Americans think we're in a recession. I think we're in a vibe session right now because we're not in a recession, but people are feeling really bad.

But the average individual American isn't feeling that. They're actually feeling that they have less money. So I would actually go with them and actually say, if we don't revisit this thing from first principles, we're going to get this dynamic where we think one thing is happening, but the actual exact opposite is happening. In this case, I do think we're in a quasi-synthetic recession.

So people's wages have not kept up with the rate of inflation. This is why they feel worse off. When you actually look at purchasing power, people are worse off in terms of their actual ability to buy things. Their purchasing power has gone down. Wages may have gone up a little bit, but they have not gone up as much as inflation, so people feel worse off.

So a lot of people will say, oh, they're price gouging, they're ripping off consumers to make profits for shareholders, but the truth is the biggest component of running those restaurants is labor, and labor has gotten more expensive because the employees that work there have to earn enough to pay their bills and to afford their food. And this is the circular effect of inflation. It finds its way all through the economy, it filters down and it eventually hits everyone.

And then the second is the sheer quantum of value capture that the employees have seen through secondaries before a fully functional business has been really created.

Yeah, exactly. So my point is just this didn't happen as an accident. Somebody made a strategic business decision to do this because they thought it would be in the company's interest.

Well, and here we go. I think that Microsoft will pay the speeding ticket and we'll just all move on.

I think it's a very rational organization. They're technically ahead of everybody else. A lot of people want to put in money at crazy prices.

This is what I was going to say. I think our food supply, I think we should just say it out loud, is totally corrupted. And I think there's all of these other factors we look at, the rise in the use of SSRIs, the lack of sexual function in young men, the lack of sex, the low birth rate. I think these are all related and part of it is the food supply and part of the food supply problem is the fact that it is corrupted by these materials that should never be in our body.

But I think that this is going to trigger and is the beginning of a wave. I'm noticing that a lot of folks are going to start to pay attention in the food industry and start to figure out ways to represent low plastic, low phthalate food products as a way to kind of sell a more premium solution. I think that's been the trend historically with the food industry, Chamath, is to respond to your ask right now and to then show up with solutions.

Like, just as a newsflash, a banana already has a wrapper. It's called the peel. And then people are wrapping plastics on this stuff. Like, I think consumers need to demand that, like, we have low packaging.

I think this stuff is unavoidable. I really do.

This is obvious. And the press can gaslight us all day long about how wonderful things are under Biden, but the average American, I think, understands differently based on their own experience.

But at the same time, what you find now is like every other day when you wake up and read the trades in Techland, you find that there's a company that's gotten seeded with five to 50 million bucks to create a new chip, right? You're also starting to see folks that are working a little bit above the stack and build better compilers, right? Things that will allow you to actually build once, run in many different compute environments. So all of this stuff is starting to happen. At some point, the spread trait will be that Nvidia loses share, even though revenues keep compounding, to these upstarts.

So it's a much more complicated product to copy. And then on top of that, they're already in the R&D cycle for the next chip, right? Whatever is going to be the H200 or whatever it is. And so as people try to catch up with H100, they're going to be on to H200. So I think you can make the case that Nvidia has a much better moat than Cisco.

But the truth is, we're funding that growth with leverage at the national level, the federal level and at the household and domestic level. We are borrowing money to inflate the revenue numbers. And so the GDP goes up, but the debt is going up higher. And so the ability for folks to support themselves and buy things that they want to buy and continue to improve their condition in life has declined. Things are getting worse.