OpenAI's $150B conversion, Meta's AR glasses, Blue-collar boom, Risk of nuclear war

If you can go and get a trade degree and live an economically productive life where you can get married and have kids and take care of your family and do all the things you want to do, that's going to put an enormous amount of pressure on higher ed.

Some of the work will be more in the blue-collar space, and I agree with Chamath that this is a good thing.

There's going to be an incredible blossoming, I think, in human service jobs, and they don't need to have a degree in polysci to be performed.

But now you don't even need the analyst because the analyst is the chain of thought. It's the prompting from the model. And it's completely going to change how knowledge work is done. Everyone that owns a function no longer needs an analyst.

the atomic size of companies changes because each company will get much more leverage from using software and few people versus lots of people with a few pieces of software.

those agents are going to do a lot of the work, so we're going to see the number of people working at companies become fixed. And I think the static team size that we're seeing at a lot of large companies is only going to continue.

This whole thing about job loss is so overdone. There's going to be a lot of job disruption. But in the case of coders, just as an example, I think we can say that coders, depending on who you talk to, are 10, 20, 30 percent more productive.

I think the point is that there's a lot of people that are going to watch this closely, and if it's legal and it's allowed, I just don't understand why everybody wouldn't do this.

I don't know how they're converting a non-profit to a for-profit. None of us have the details on this. There may be significant tax implications, payments they need to make.

You're making it into a for-profit. You're giving everyone shares, but the guy who puts in the original seed capital doesn't get anything. That's ridiculous. And what they're basically saying to Elon is, if you don't like it, just sue us.

But with ambient computing, you can more kind of cleanly state your objective without this kind of directive process. You can say, hey, I want to say I want to have dinner in New York next Thursday at the Michelin star restaurant at 530 Book me something and it's done.

when you tell an AI agent, get me the cheapest car right now to go to XYZ place. It will go and look at Lyft and Uber and whatever. It'll provision the car and then it'll just tell you when it's coming.

So I think the voice control is there. I don't know if you guys have used Apple Vision Pro, but gesture control is here today. You can do single finger movements with Apple Vision Pro. It triggers actions and eye control is incredible.

The other subtle thing that's happening, which I don't think we should sleep on, is that the AirPods are probably going to become much more socially acceptable to wear on a 24 by 7 basis because of this feature that allows it to become a useful hearing aid.

I think there's going to be a big war. I think by the time the show airs, Israel's incursion into Lebanon is going to get bigger. It's going to escalate. And by next week, we could be in a full blown multinational war in the Middle East.

And I really do agree with you, Friedberg, there is a non-trivially high probability, the highest it's ever been, that we are just bumbling and sleepwalking into a really bad situation we can't walk back from.

And if Hezbollah and Israel are in a full scale war with ground forces, it could be very easy for Iran to get pulled into it on Hezbollah's side. And if that happens, I think it's just inevitable that the United States will be pulled into this war.

For example, the most highly valued public software company right now in terms of ARR multiple is Palantir. I think that's largely because the market perceives Palantir is having a big AI opportunity.

I suspect palatiers go to market. When they start to really scale, they'll be able to underprice a bunch of these other alternatives.

But we are fighting a potential nuclear threat on three fronts. How have we allowed this to happen? Russia, Iran, China.

Chamath, you're right. I mean, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, all of America was huddled around their TV sets worried about what would happen. There is no similar concern in this day and age about the escalatory wars that are happening.

And it's very clear, I think that Ukraine, within, it could be in the next month, it could be the next two months, it could be the next six months, I think they're eventually going to collapse.

They made huge advancements in AI. I don't think they were initially on the cutting edge of that, but they've caught up. And now they're leading the open source movement with Lama 3.2. And now, it seems to me that they're ahead on augmented reality.

I think the second part of the bear case would be that specifically Meta becomes much more aggressive in inserting Meta AI into all of the critical apps that they control because those apps really are the front door to billions of people on a daily basis.

I think that when you look at the impacts and pricing that all of these open-source and closed-source model companies have now introduced in terms of the price per token, what we've seen is just a massive step function lower. It is incredibly deflationary.

The third piece is that all of these models basically run out of viable data to differentiate themselves, and it basically becomes a race around synthetic information and synthetic data, which is a cost problem.

But you could imagine that once system integrators or enterprise SaaS apps go into these places, go into these companies, they integrate the data and then they map out the workflow, you could replace a lot of these steps in the workflow with agents.

The radical idea that I would put out there is I think that systems of record no longer exist because they don't need to.

The AI-first ones, I think, are going to come to it with a totally different cost structure. The idea of paying for seats, and some of these seats are 5,000 per person per year.

So, look, I think that on the whole, I agree with Benioff here that there's more net new opportunity for AI companies, whether they be startups or existing big companies like Salesforce that are trying to do AI, then there is disruption.

I think there's no question that OpenAI is the leader of the pack. It has the most advanced AI models. It's got the best developer ecosystem, the best APIs, it keeps rolling out new products.

I have not in my time in Silicon Valley ever seen a company that's supposedly on such a straight line to a rocket ship have so much high-level churn.

It's pretty clear with this new one that you're going to be able to talk to Siri as an LLM like you do in ChatGPT mode, which I think means they will not make themself dependent on ChatGPT, and they will siphon off half the searches that would have gone to ChatGPT.

Siri is not very good, Jay Cal.