Meta’s Muse Takes Center Stage - Week in Tech

0:12Speaker 1:Rita, Tasha, Taylor, I have to begin with an apology. I've never done this before, but we're going to open the show with a clip from the president.

0:19Speaker 2:The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, here and after officially called super intelligence, changing the name. and that the use of the word artificial makes intelligence fake. It makes it sound fake, and it is not fake.

0:43Speaker 3:It's actually amazing.

0:46Speaker 1:Is he going to catch on?

0:48Speaker 3:Well, Mark Zuckerberg certainly hopes so. I mean, he's the one writing all the superintelligence manifestos.

0:53Speaker 4:I agree with one part of what he said, which is like intelligence is not artificial and we should just call it intelligence. And also AI is a horrible term in general. Like it's automation. It's software automation. We should call it that. Like we should all stop using AI as a term.

1:09Speaker 3:Maybe let's go back to machine learning.

1:11Speaker 5:Yes, I love machine learning.

1:17Speaker 1:Welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm Oz Voloshin, and this is The Week in Tech, where I'm joined by the world's most plugged-in reporters to break down what's really happening in tech right now. Today, we're joined by Reid Arbogati, tech editor for Semaphore, Taylor Lorenz of UserMag, and Natasha Tiku, tech reporter at The Washington Post.

1:35Speaker 4:Welcome all.

1:35Speaker 3:Hey, guys. Thanks for having us.

1:37Speaker 4:Good to be here.

1:38Speaker 1:Great to see you all. You guys are on the West Coast. I'm in New York City. where it's United Nations General Assembly Week. So if you're in Midtown, it takes at least two hours to get anywhere. But I've got international politics. I really managed to avoid.

1:51Speaker 4:It this year.

1:51Speaker 1:I know you said you were going to come, but I guess you managed to skip it.

1:54Speaker 4:I'm normally there. I suggest getting around by bike, but that's when I lived there.

1:59Speaker 1:You can avoid all the traffic. I definitely don't have your courage for just like in New York. But anyway, international politics and diplomacy are, of course, top of mind with UN Week happening. And President Xi is in Washington for a state visit meeting Trump. Reid, let's start with those two. What's on their agenda when it comes to AI? And is the kind of concept of a race for supremacy, the correct lens to be looking at this meeting through?

2:26Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, partially, I think there's this sort of game of chicken being played between, you know, people say the US and China, I would say maybe it's California and China. Who's you know, who's actually like, you know, cares about safety, would the Chinese go along with agreement, etc, etc. I think personally, the the likelihood of some sort of agreement between the US and China to, to slow the, you know, slow down or pace the frontier of AI development is, is super unlikely. I just think it's, it's also just so difficult to, you know, stop the the advance in software, right? This is not like, chips that you can't have export controls on software. It's just a thing you can send over the internet. So I think it's super unlikely. Of course, AI lab chiefs presented in front of the UN, and they not surprisingly called for some sort of vague regulation, an agreement between all the nations to you know, to make sure that AI is safe.

3:32Speaker 4:And it's like, okay, we've heard this now, like, you know, it's literally like every year, okay, like, do something about this technology we're building. And I think, again, like the message is just always wrong. The message should be, this technology is coming, there will be effects on the world because of this technology, you should go fix those things. Like, you're not going to fix the underlying technology, like no one's going to You know, no government is going to be able to, you know, sort of like control the release of AI models. They're only going to be able to solve the problems that, you know, that come from this technology, in my opinion.

4:13Speaker 1:Natasha, you're nodding.

4:14Speaker 5:Yeah, I mean, you know, read for UN general council member.

4:19Speaker 4:I think that, yeah, it's just....

4:28Speaker 5:No, I just feel I'm just glad to hear you say that it's feels like a broken record because I cannot take like pacing the frontier seriously. It's just a different name for the same kind of vague gesturing at we want regulation. And I feel like recently it's become, you know, people have approached this very credulously Like the labs are begging for regulation. They're begging for regulation. I'm like, did we not all live through 2023? I mean, don't we already know how anthropic and open AI start lobbying behind the scenes, you know, once something happens. So it's just, um, I mean, pacing the frontier, it's like, you couldn't write it better to, to just like dial down the things that were less palatable.

5:19Speaker 4:We should predict what next year's slogan is going to be that says exactly the same thing.

5:23Speaker 1:Taylor, have you got any predictions?

5:26Speaker 3:Well, I just can't stop thinking of Mark Zuckerberg's t-shirt that said, my love language is building things. So maybe that's something that the AI companies can adopt.

5:38Speaker 1:On the Trump-Xi summit, obviously when Trump did his state visit to China, he brought all the tech overlords with him. And there was the famous incident of Jensen like intercepting the plane in Canada. Did, did she bring any, any Chinese tech overlords with him or is that.

5:55Speaker 4:One way traffic? Well, I think it's, I think it's actually the opposite. I think China's actually trying to keep their, their, uh, their tech people from leaving the country. If you, if you've been following them, I mean, they are, they're literally under house arrest in a lot of cases. Like you remember Manus AI where, you know, Meta acquired this company and then China said, no, actually, they sort of got these people to come back to China and now won't let them leave.

6:23Speaker 1:So, yeah, I don't think it's... They thought they were safe in Singapore, right? In the Meta space.

6:26Speaker 4:They thought, right. Everyone was like moving their companies to Singapore to try to not be Chinese companies. Well, it turns out, you know, China had something to say about that. And yeah, it's not quite the same. And, you know, to be honest, it still amazes me. Honestly, this is a bit of a tangent, but that that China is able to do so much innovation under these circumstances. Could you imagine if... I just can't see innovation happening in the US if people were worried that if their company was too successful, they were going to disappear, be put on house arrest, and not be able to leave the country.

7:03Speaker 4:It's just unbelievable.

7:05Speaker 1:I agree with you, but it's also a different economic model. I was reading a piece in The Times about exactly this, and they wrote, China's playbook for AI mirrors the one it used to dominate electric vehicles and solar panels, subsidies, tax breaks, and research money. Obviously, in the US, it's all about private capital and capital markets. How do you all think that influences the actual development of the technology itself, that difference in source of funding?

7:29Speaker 4:Well, historically, China's been, you know, it's been copycat, right? You can certainly do this through, you know, sort of getting IP and then sort of trying to copy what the, what the U S is doing. But I think what's surprising to me is it's not just copycat anymore. It's like, there is, there is actual innovation happening. So, you know, I suppose it's a, it's a good, I mean, and not just in AI, right. I mean, we're like, China's now surpassed the U S in clinical trials, for instance.

7:57Speaker 4:So there, so in biotech, you could argue like they're pulling ahead. I mean, obviously that's, that would be a controversial opinion, but you know, they're putting more money into quantum computing, et cetera. So, you know, it's, um, Yeah. It's just interesting. In the US, it's a different way. In the US, I think one thing you left out of the equation is academic research. The US has had this system of government funds, blue sky academic research, discoveries happen.

8:25Speaker 4:And then we have a good system for spinning out technology into the private sector and then funding that. And of course, we're experimenting with shaking that snow globe and just seeing what happens. But You know, it got us here. Yeah.

8:42Speaker 5:I mean, not the house arrest part, but in terms of like knowing how the industry is functioned, having a better sense of where capital is coming from, you know, not having to be on the podcast circuit like constantly. I mean, think about the amount of time that Sam Altman spends on a stage. They could just be heads down.

9:01Speaker 4:Maybe that's it. They do work, supposedly work longer hours, right? What is it, the 996. 996, yeah.

9:08Speaker 3:I'm skeptical of that. I think it's a LARP. Here it's a LARP. Yeah, I meant here it's a LARP, here in the U.S., not in China.

9:17Speaker 4:I think they really are working the 996 in China.

9:19Speaker 1:Does anyone know, does the safety discourse have any purchase in China, like this Pacing the Frontier, AI Might Kill Us All existential risk conversation? Is that a peculiarly American phenomenon, or is there an equivalent sort of movement in China?

9:34Speaker 4:Actually, it is actually pretty American. to be honest. We had a story about this yesterday. It's time before, from JD, who I work with, on the fact that the US is really... You talk to all these other countries and people are pretty excited about AI, not super worried about you know, everybody dying or being put out of work. They're kind of like, oh, this is great. Like this is going to create economic growth. It's going to help us in education and healthcare in the US. It's like a lot of fear. I think China certainly has some concerns about AI though, because it's like, you know, But they're.

10:13Speaker 1:More about how might AI destabilize the Communist Party control of the information ecosystem rather than how might AI kill us, I think.

10:21Speaker 4:Yes, I think that's totally right.

10:23Speaker 5:I can imagine that it would be hard to port over the AI safety discourse because so much of the AI safety discourse is anti-China and extremely hawkish about, you know, and justifies its existence in the U.S. by painting China as the enemy and totalitarian and, you know, authoritarian. But I do think there have been efforts, I mean, from the effective altruist community, at least to like branch out to other countries. I did find what I thought was an AI safety org the other day. But yeah, I would love to see more reporting on it. But yeah, it would be quite challenging as a person living in China.

11:04Speaker 1:There was that Kurt Anderson book, How America Lost Its Mind and kind of tracing the you know, the history of the Protestant millennial cults basically who arrived and stuff. And I mean, it is interesting whether it's just like, whether the whole like AI doom thing is like a kind of political power slash fundraising thing, whether there's something more fundamental about how it interacts with like the depths of the American psyche as a non-American I'm curious about.

11:28Speaker 4:We are obsessed with like apocalypse stories and stuff, right?

11:33Speaker 3:Yes. And this is like, yeah, this is an apocalyptic, Doomer cult. It's a doomsday cult. And I actually think like America has a lot of doomsday cults and I'm not sure China has many.

11:47Speaker 4:That's true. But we haven't seen like a David Koresh of AI, you know, like when is that going to happen?

11:53Speaker 3:Oh, we've got Yudkowsky.

11:57Speaker 1:On a slightly more practical matter, China has poured $ 150 billion over the last decade into trying to cultivate its domestic chip manufacturing capabilities. And even the head of DeepSeek recently said that the export controls on chips are actually holding China's AI development back. Does anyone know, like, how are the, how's it going? Like, are they getting any closer to having competitive domestic chip manufacturing?

12:22Speaker 4:I think if you listen to, you know, certain chip company lobbyists, they are. But I think, I think it's, I'm somewhat skeptical. Like, you know, they've, again, like, been very innovative, actually, like this is this is one of the things like the scarcity creates innovation. That's deep seek is a great example of that. But it's happening on the chip side as well. Like Huawei is building these, you know, these data centers, and they're, you know, doing really cool stuff with memory to try to get around, like, you know, the these bands to get gains on memory, if for lack of the, you know, the actual chip technology, but like, then you talk to people and you know, who work on this stuff in China, they're like, I mean, we would absolutely use NVIDIA if we could. Like, there's just no comparison. So it's like, when is it actually, you know, when are they going to catch up? Will they catch up? Like, I, you know, it seems like they're just perpetually a little behind, essentially.

13:22Speaker 3:For now.

13:23Speaker 1:For now. And the UN, I mean, you know, one of the, you know, outside the US and China, you have the Europeans always. And some of the discourse was around, okay, we need to, We need to get, you know, tech sovereignty in Europe. And several UN agencies talked about looking to diversify away from US AI products. Is this just like throat clearing and kind of gestural noises? Or is there anything like that they could actually do?

13:48Speaker 5:I think that there has been an effort to talk about the middle powers and how the middle powers need to get in the game. But I thought the only advice given to them was like, say yes to data centers. So... Yeah, so I don't really know, but I do think that there has been more drumbeat of, hey, you can't just sit around while other world powers are preparing to divvy up the world economy into two.

14:21Speaker 4:On that sovereignty, I think I thought it was interesting. There was a story out of the UAE that when Iran bombed those AWS data centers, they couldn't recover some of the data because, you know, it was like in one location because they didn't want it to be, you know, they wanted data sovereignty, right? So they didn't want it to leave the country. Well, it turns out like, well, not, not models. This was like sort of not AI related. It was just data really, you know, like data centers in the traditional sense of data centers. But like, Yeah, they didn't. I was like, oh, that's interesting. Like, if you're like a little country and you're like, I want all my data in my country, it's actually like more susceptible to, you know, you don't have as much data redundancy, which I thought was kind of an interesting one on that point.

15:19Speaker 1:When we come back, Meta's release of Muse. and their stock price up 40% in the last month. Did we count them out too early?

15:28Speaker 4:Stay with us.

15:38Speaker 1:So it's been a minute since we talked about consumer tech on The Week in Tech. In fact, we just talked about AI and AI extinction basically nonstop since Hugging Face. So a little bit of a breather before maybe a brief one. Has Meta finally made a useful AI product, Natasha?

15:59Speaker 5:I mean, I looked at the App Store this morning and Muse is at the top of the charts. I know that's very easily gamed, but it does seem like people have gravitated towards using it and embracing it. And then Mark Zuckerberg released a little or demoed on stage this little Tamagotchi. Did you guys see this?

16:22Speaker 3:Yeah, it's basically like a little pendant that the Muse kind of like lives inside the AI agent. It's very similar, I thought, to that pendant friend, which people were boycotting and trashing the billboards of. But I guess if you put like a little creature as the face of this AI agent, people aren't as bad.

16:43Speaker 1:Just back up a second there. What is Muse?

16:45Speaker 5:Muse is just, it's a consumer AI agent that, Meta has set it up to be more accessible to the masses. You go in, you're already connected to your Instagram and your Facebook, and you can ask it to do stuff for you. But every useful thing requires turning over so much data to Meta. They have like a little YouTube short commercial for it. And the second or third thing the guy suggested was his bank account. Like, I just, they have a lot of safeguards in place, you know, where they can't charge your credit card for a certain reason, but it's just, I don't know. I find these so frustrating because A, it feels like a problem of the tech industry's own making, the lack of interoperability, like the fact that these can't, like, do you need generative AI in order for somebody to get access to your Spotify interface? No, I don't think so. I mean, the conversational requests for sure.

17:48Speaker 5:But I mean, yeah. So I have seen accounts where people turned over their Gmail, their bank account, various other things.

17:57Speaker 3:Their bank account.

17:59Speaker 2:Useful.

17:59Speaker 5:Yeah. The New York Times, Eli in the Times, like just gave it everything and said he loved it.

18:05Speaker 4:I loved it.

18:06Speaker 1:He said it's the most useful.

18:08Speaker 4:Have you used it, Taylor?

18:09Speaker 3:I'm a muser.

18:10Speaker 6:Yeah.

18:13Speaker 3:I would not give it access to my bank account.

18:16Speaker 5:But what about your Gmail? Did you do Gmail?

18:19Speaker 3:Girl, I've given instinct test access to my Gmail. I know. The thing is, you know what the thing is. So I wrote a piece in 2019 for the Atlantic called Inbox Infinity. And I talked about effectively how like. Email is just this like flood. It's like a feed that I check sometimes, but I get like thousands of emails a day, especially since I've gone independent. I've only ever used my Gmail, even when I worked in mainstream media. So like I just, my inbox is unusable. I get, it's like, I would say 70% PR spam. And what I have found to be helpful is sort of like these AI agents are letting me treat my email as like a database almost where I can just say like, hey, go in and find me something. I actually was trying to find people that do PR for data centers this week for a freelance thing. And I said, can you just go in my, I'm sure these people have pitched me and it found the contact number. So I think it's useful for that part. Yeah, I would not let it like let make purchases. I don't trust meta, you know, in a lot of ways, I don't trust meta with my data, but also meta has so much data on me.

19:26Speaker 3:And that also has been revealing using Muse. Like you can have it do all this stuff with your Instagram account. It does have like, you know, if you've been a long time user of meta products, probably like all of us since college, like meta already has a lot of useful data that the agent can kind of pull from. So, you know, as opposed to something like instinct where it doesn't have that long sort of, you know, knowledge about you.

19:49Speaker 4:I do.

19:50Speaker 5:Did try to get it to unfollow brands on my Instagram, and it can't do that.

19:55Speaker 3:Oh, I didn't ask it to do that.

19:56Speaker 1:Computer says no.

19:58Speaker 4:I think the more useful these things are, the more risk you have to take. I think that's just like the general rule. And It's basically OpenClaw. It's essentially what Muse is, right? It's OpenClaw, but it's like running in the cloud and Meta's done some stuff to try to keep the guardrails on, which effectively does mean.

20:18Speaker 1:Did they buy OpenClaw or did OpenAI buy OpenClaw?

20:20Speaker 4:They didn't buy it, but they hired Peter Steinberger, who created it, because it's open source. It's an open source protocol. But everybody kind of stopped using OpenClaw and... I would predict that that will happen with Muse. I think Muse, it's a great idea and people are downloading it. That's why it's high up in the app store. Are they actually going to continue using it? I actually, I downloaded it. I connected it to email. Interestingly, it wouldn't connect to this Outlist personal Outlook account because it's on an enterprise thing that I'd set up. So it's like, it's funny.

20:59Speaker 4:It's like so consumer. But it was like, it suggested like this workaround which then I ran through chat GPT and I was like, is this a good idea? And it was like, yeah, that's like the old way of doing it. I'm like, okay. So, you know, I, I think eventually I think most people will, will not, I, this is the thing because it's like not there yet. The technology is just not there yet to like get everything done for you. I think a lot of people will like, they'll try it out. It'll be interesting, but ultimately they'll, they'll, the usage will wane on this one.

21:30Speaker 4:It's like, it's kind of like a gen one. But someone eventually will figure out consumer.

21:36Speaker 1:Are you sure it's not this one? I mean, Eli Tan is saying in the Times, this is the best AI app he's ever used.

21:41Speaker 3:It's not the best AI.

21:42Speaker 4:I'm not sure, but I just don't think like my spidey sense is a tech reporter says this isn't it. I personally, I mean, I have like, you know, codecs set up and it's like much more useful. But like maybe if I really worked on Muse, I could get it to be at that level.

22:02Speaker 3:But I think none of them are at that level. And I use Grokbot too. I feel like I try every single one of these things. None of them are at that level. I think the question, and Reid kind of alluded to this, but I think the question is like, do people need these agents? Like there's been a lot of discourse this week. Ben Thompson was saying that like, you know, people don't really want to be productive in their personal life. Like, These agent systems are much more valuable for work. And I saw another really good tweet.

22:29Speaker 3:I can't remember who posted it about sort of travel planning and how so much of travel planning, which is one of the primary use cases that these companies continue to use in their marketing, is enjoyable. And people like thinking, yeah, the hotel.

22:41Speaker 1:It's pleasurable, yeah, yeah.

22:43Speaker 4:It's funny, those demos.

22:44Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like, I just, I'm actually not convinced that there is a strong consumer use case in general outside of like, help me make sense of this horrible inbox that I have, you know?

22:55Speaker 4:I saw you retweet Ben Thompson on this and I've heard him say this several times. I totally disagree with that though. Like, I don't know what planet Ben Thompson is living on, but like, I mean, are like, my family like stuff is like such a mess with like two kids. I mean, maybe if you're like a young single person, like, which I don't think Ben Thompson is, but like the.

23:17Speaker 3:Family stuff is real. The family stuff is real. Cause moms are embracing it.

23:21Speaker 4:We are like drowning. I mean, our family is drowning. Like I build, I like to build like web apps for like specific purposes and stuff. So that like, I have multiple times like gone to the grocery store and then just like left the groceries sitting in my car. Cause it's just like, I can't even handle that crap. Like, It's, it's, it's, I may have dementia. I might've been hit too many times.

23:46Speaker 5:I was just going to say Katie Nantopoulos did a good version of this and she tried to like turn over all of her stuff. And she said specifically, it was the parenting apps, like the school apps. Like one was parent square, which I also have to use. Now my kid's new teacher uses class dojo. I would love to be able to automate that. And those still don't work.

24:08Speaker 4:I've automated it. They don't have an API, but I've automated it by using the email. I take the emails because you can get them to send you an email for everything. But parent square is totally automated for me at this point. Like I have a voice. I have a voice chat like that basically is like parent square and like team snap and like all these things like it just puts it all together.

24:30Speaker 5:Well, my solution has been that, um, is, um, learned helplessness. I am like a bad dad and I just like, don't get the notifications. Um, so I don't know if I want it to be so, um, accessible, but it would be nice to have one place to look.

24:47Speaker 2:Okay.

24:47Speaker 5:So I'll get read to come over, read for press, read for UN general counsel and it support at my house.

24:55Speaker 4:Every parent should be using this stuff. Every parent should.

24:58Speaker 1:Like, I had something worse than forgetting my groceries in the car yesterday. I managed to lose my key at some point during the day, and the doorbell is also broken in my house, so I couldn't wake my wife up, so I had to go and stay in a hotel, which was very depressing.

25:14Speaker 4:Oh, my God. Wow.

25:15Speaker 1:I don't think AI could have helped me with that, unfortunately. But coming back to Meta, I mean, who is Alexander Wang, and is he vital to Meta's kind of perceived resurgence?

25:27Speaker 3:Yeah.

25:28Speaker 4:Well, he, he's definitely worked on the logo. Like he met, he was tweeting about how all the other AI logos look like buttholes and there's doesn't, it's just a squiggly line. So that doesn't answer your question though.

25:41Speaker 6:Maybe he's the former CEO or, and co-founder of scale AI, the company that, you know, works with contractors to help do like data labeling, um, reinforcement learning training environments, that kind of like.

25:59Speaker 5:Quasi sweatshop, new content moderator type stuff. And he was- Natasha.

26:06Speaker 4:They're paying PhDs now to do this. I'm sorry.

26:08Speaker 5:Yeah, sorry. Well, are they? I think like Merkur and the others.

26:12Speaker 4:Yeah, they are.

26:12Speaker 5:But in any case, how do you even put it? He was acquired for 14 billion. He's basically the figurehead of meta superintelligence. And he was taking a really big victory lap after Muse yesterday. And I think it might have been a little too early. But Meta has been so behind the ball. And I think he's helped Mark feel like a little swagged out as well.

26:41Speaker 3:I was going to say, I feel like so much of him is branding. This guy, I don't think he is a genius in the AI world. I don't think he's a brilliant, like... you know, sort of forward-thinking mind necessarily. And he's brilliant. I'm not saying Alexander's not smart, but I'm just saying, like, I think a lot of what he brings to Meta is this, like, Gen Z energy. And, like, he was tweeting about, like, you know, the Crocs and the hunting shirt that he wore on stage. And, like, he's posting memes all day. And I think like for meta, which has this horrible image and Zuckerberg, which has this horrible image, like that nobody trusts, like for them to have this sort of like Gen Z relatable hyper online face, I think is, is it's valuable for, for potential muse adoption.

27:28Speaker 4:Yeah. Like he's not the AI researcher type, like the Ilya or someone like that. He's like, you know, the genius, but it, But now that they're coming out with these products, it makes a lot more sense that they acquired him because they're not, it's ultimately not like cutting edge technology so much. I mean, they're, of course, all these models are, but you know, it's not like on the frontier. But what they're doing is they're trying to build this like consumer ecosystem that ties hardware together with LLMs and makes these useful consumer products. it remains to be seen whether that will ultimately be successful. I kind of wonder why Google's not really making a push to try to do this, but you know, I like that idea. Like I, I, I, again, disagree with Ben Thompson that there's like no consumer application here.

28:13Speaker 4:Like I think this is, this stuff could be great, but it's, it's going to take, I think a lot more time.

28:19Speaker 5:I mean, I think they've done a terrible job, like trying to relate to normal people and articulating in use case for them, or even just like going out and seeing how they're, users are doing it. And they're so, I mean, they do pay a lot of women influencers, but you know, for, for content, but they're so behind. I mean, the other interesting thing that was like theorized around the time of the scale AI acquisition, Aqua hire was that, um, as, as a company that was helping Google, um, open AI, anthropic, like everybody do post-training and other parts of the development process, possibly, that he would have had a lot of ideas about like, who's good, how are, you know, what's consensus in, on the frontier, which Meta is not, but I wouldn't put out, I wouldn't say Meta's giving up on, on having like a frontier model.

29:13Speaker 5:I can just see this being like such a personal thing for Zach. Like my best years are still ahead of me. You know, I don't think he's just going to like lean into only Tamagotchi.

29:24Speaker 4:Yeah. But also like, what's the point of really trying to have a frontier model at this point? I mean, I'm sure they're using like a bunch of Chinese open source models. It's like, yeah, ultimately I think even open AI and anthropic, like they might not even need to be on the frontier. Like it's, you know, it's about the product it's not the underlying model is kind of neither here nor there it's really just about compute honestly like it's like who has the most compute and you're just selling units of of compute.

29:51Speaker 1:Hence uh hence jensen's intervention to say that the fears of a ai apocalypse are overblown.

29:57Speaker 4:Well, this is the other thing you didn't mention. On Jensen's point, we need to actually speed up the, not pace, but speed up the frontier. I don't know if you saw this story about Muse, but one of the features is I guess you can have it make phone calls, like call a restaurant and make a dinner reservation. And they've apparently been hiring people in call centers, like people to make those calls for you. It's like, these things can solve complex math theorems now but like they can't call a restaurant to make a reservation. Like there's, you know, I think there's, there's a disconnect there. Like a killer AI that's going to take over humanity could probably do that. So, you know, I think, I, I think we, I think this, this frontier is a little, it's not as, not, not as advanced as some people might say.

30:48Speaker 1:And just to close on, on this segment, do you know what, like what is driving your resurgence in meta stock price? Is it, is it muse and charm or is it, a broader kind of tech rally. I just Googled it this morning. I was kind of stunned to see that it's up 40% in the last month.

31:01Speaker 4:Hey, they've got a buzzy product, right? I mean, if you're on Wall Street, that's, you know.

31:06Speaker 5:And the glasses.

31:07Speaker 4:Yeah, the glasses are doing well. They came out with these VR. They're still trying for VR, which I'm like, that's another one where the technology is.

31:18Speaker 3:Just not there. It's not there. We're not even close to it. But they're still going to keep making these clunky things.

31:24Speaker 5:But in the glasses, they're alone right now. I mean, in terms of like visibility of a consumer product.

31:28Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely. And they also made a version of the glasses without the camera, I think, to beat the creepy allegations that just have voice. So, yeah.

31:38Speaker 1:And what does the charm pendant do? Is it like the glasses without the lens? And what's the difference? Do you see any possibility of it being adopted?

31:47Speaker 5:He said you can talk to it anytime all day. And then pretty much as soon as he held it up, he was like, but this but it's not really in production and we're not sure if we put all the features in it. Like I was just like, okay, what are you holding up? Why are you, why are you doing this?

32:00Speaker 4:It's basically a speaker, right? Like a speaker and a microphone essentially that connects to the cloud.

32:06Speaker 5:I don't see how communicate if, unless you're just using it for audio in between like desktop and app, I don't see how you could like get a lot of agentic things done with a screen that's this.

32:22Speaker 2:Big, but.

32:22Speaker 4:But you just talk to it. I mean, that's, that's the new, that's the new thing. Like, which is actually a great use case. Like I've talked to, you know, some of these apps, like actually I do this, like when I mentioned the parent square thing, like I can talk to that, like while I'm driving. Right. I don't have to say, I can be like, what's coming, what's on, on the agenda. Okay. Add that to the family calendar. And it will do that stuff for me through voice.

32:46Speaker 4:And it's great. But it's also like I'm using my phone. I think with all these hardware devices, like including the one OpenAI is making, like you could just use your phone. But all these companies, they really want to break outside of Apple's ecosystem because they know Apple's going to try to block what they're doing. Whether they can is another question.

33:04Speaker 5:I have to say I did really like the shape of it. Something about like the shape of it really made me want one in a way that.

33:11Speaker 1:Like those speaks.

33:12Speaker 4:Why?

33:13Speaker 5:I think it was just the rounded edge. It just was like the perfect amount of fatness and roundness. And it looked sleek and it had a little cutie avatar on it.

33:24Speaker 2:I don't know.

33:24Speaker 5:I mean, like, I'm just being honest.

33:26Speaker 4:It's working.

33:26Speaker 5:It's susceptible to it.

33:27Speaker 3:Yeah.

33:33Speaker 1:When we come back, Silicon Valley continues its attempts to disrupt the education system. Stay with us. Welcome back. Taylor, Silicon Valley, as so often, has its own ideas about the future of education. The VC firm Andreessen Horowitz is accepting applications for its first class of the Horowitz Andreessen Academy. What do we know about the program and why did they flip the names?

34:04Speaker 3:Who knows why they flipped the names? It's very strange. But yeah, this is a completely unaccredited program where basically young people just sort of hear lectures from famous tech people and Andreessen Horowitz partners, including, you know, Daniel Penny, who killed that man, the unhoused man on the subway in New York. It's very strange. They also have sort of like mentors, which just seems to be like broader people in their orbit. I, you know, it, All of it is just hilarious because they're not reinventing education. This is purely a play to get in front of younger founders, right?

34:43Speaker 3:And sort of build this Andreessen Horowitz network so that they have access to those funding rounds if one of these kids ends up building something. But it just made me laugh because I'm a huge... I'm actually a supporter of gap years and kids getting out into the workforce and doing internships or whatever. But I can't imagine that it's incredibly valuable to participate in this, especially when the Teal Fellowship exists. And there's Z Fellows. There's so many programs out there that are aimed at capturing this specific market.

35:18Speaker 3:And I also don't know why these kids wouldn't just join YC if they're that founder-minded. I don't know. Yeah, it's very silly.

35:26Speaker 1:Talk about this versus the Teal Fellowship versus YC.

35:30Speaker 3:The Teal Fellowship, you actually get money and here you're paying money. I think it's like $ 50, 000. They said it's the same. It's the cost of like a college year, I think.

35:43Speaker 5:Really?

35:43Speaker 1:I think the first cohort gets to go for free for a year and then it's going to ramp up to being the same price as college for the second cohort is what they're saying.

35:50Speaker 3:Okay. So again, you're paying. You're paying to get marketing lectures from random, you know, from CEOs? Like, I guess I just, I really don't understand the point of it. I understand the value for Andreessen Horowitz. I understand why Andreessen Horowitz wants to do this. If I am a 17-year-old tech prodigy, why on earth am I paying somebody tens of thousands of dollars? This is maybe for like rich kids, you know, for for their parents to kind of put them through that they want to LARP as a startup founder. But again, why wouldn't you just go to Stanford? Like, I'm really struggling to see.

36:30Speaker 4:It's expensive too.

36:31Speaker 5:What if you wanted to be a conservative influencer?

36:34Speaker 3:Well, now we're talking. Yeah, I think like, right. I think the career paths for this are much closer to conservative influencer or podcast host versus startup founder.

36:46Speaker 5:Like Little Barry Weiss, not like... little Alexander Wang or.

36:51Speaker 2:Exactly.

36:52Speaker 3:If you want to be a mini Barry Weiss, go to this. Although again, Barry Weiss has her own fake anti-woke, you know, university thing.

36:59Speaker 5:Which Andreessen Orwoods, or at least Mark Andreessen is an investor in, so.

37:02Speaker 4:Right. But that didn't do well, right? University of Austin hasn't.

37:06Speaker 3:No, none of this does well because there's no actual market for it. And it's like, again, you're making these people pay. You're getting just like total rubes. Like you've got to be an idiot to pay for this stuff. And so I just think like, If it's something where it's like the fellowship, like the Teal Fellowship has been successful because it's prestigious, because you get money, because you get to explore this thing, you get access. So it's like this elite thing. If it was an elite fellowship, I actually think that could maybe work. But you're asking people to pay you when you're the one getting the value.

37:38Speaker 1:And they raised $ 48 million as a for-profit venture.

37:42Speaker 5:I haven't even heard a number that small in a while. And I mean, there's so many other alternatives too. Like if you want, a grant. There's the Emergent Ventures grant from Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison and that will look really good on your resume because these people are curated. I hope people save their money.

38:03Speaker 1:Ruud, you compared one of the Peter Thiel branded off-sites that he doesn't actually go to is the Wayne Gretzky Hockey Camp of Tech. I have a feeling that's coming to mind on the Horowitz-Andreessen trade school.

38:18Speaker 5:Yeah.

38:18Speaker 4:Yeah. There was the whole thing. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I, I'm also not like long on this succeeding, you know, I do, but I do think the, the sort of, there's a, there's an interesting phenomenon happening here where I think, I think most people sort of realize the university system is not well, like the actual university system is not well. And I think maybe the whole education system, right. And, you know, there is kind of a, I think people sort of do see an opening here, like an opportunity to potentially privatize it, replace it, disrupt it, right? And that's what's interesting to me. It's like the individual efforts to do this, like University of Austin, and now this Andreessen Horowitz one. I mean, yeah, like they're not gonna succeed, but they kind of say something. And I do wonder what it's gonna look like. It does feel to me like the university system, which is now just like, grappling with AI and doing a very bad job of it, they're going to have to change. Something has to give.

39:24Speaker 4:And I think it's sad because they're great institutions. I think we should try to save these institutions. but they have to change. I don't know if you all agree with that.

39:34Speaker 5:I mean, I just think that Andreessen Horowitz has been, especially Mark Andreessen, one of the biggest critics of university systems. And so to rail against it for years, like for, you know, not only, you know, for radicalizing our youth, turning them into communists, making woke tech employees, favoring DEI, all of these things, and the cost of it. I think his critiques about the cost of it, I mean, you know, that makes sense. And, you know, utility for people in the real world. So for them to be so late to the game for a young person pipeline, but then come and be so ahead of the curve in terms of criticizing the university and then to come out with like, as we were talking, it reminded me of Singularity University, you know, like something an executive would get a certificate for. So I just, even just the $ 50, 000, like why have you been railing against the cost of college if you're now charging a 17 year old $ 50, 000.

40:39Speaker 5:Like it just.

40:40Speaker 3:Wait, can I also just say that like, they really put this feels so like sloppy. Like they don't have any sort of, it's not like they've acquired a campus. It's not like, you know, so much of college is about like socializing with the right people and sort of being like in this, you know, cocoon environment. But, They don't have a campus. They don't have any infrastructure. I guess this is just going to be held in conference rooms somewhere. And then when you go on the website and you click student life, it says you make the culture, start a club, host a salon, invent a tradition. Your classmates decide what happens in it. It's like, why am I paying you?

41:16Speaker 4:Yeah, definitely. Definitely not the archetype of a successful founder, right? Like founders are usually not like the rich kids with the silver spoon who, you know, are dropping all kinds of cash to move to San Francisco. Like they come, they usually have these sort of like interesting backgrounds with other interests outside of technology. And their minds are sort of like, you know, they just look at the world in an interesting way. And then somehow they find themselves in Silicon Valley. And, you know, because they have this like unique way of looking at things, they're able to, to find a lane that other people don't see anywhere.

41:51Speaker 4:And I mean, there's so many like Steve Jobs is a good example of that. But like, there's so many examples. And this seems to be like, it's almost like, I don't know, they're almost attracting like the opposite of that. Like, I would be surprised if we see like a successful pipeline of, I mean, unless you're just talking about sort of like base hit, like SaaS companies or whatever the AI, you know, the AI era equivalent of like the base hit SaaS startup is. Like that kind of founder, sure.

42:18Speaker 4:But like, this is not going to yield some amazing, you know, new company. I just don't see that happening. I mean, they're also, I mean, they're kind of, it's like a brand licensing play. They turn into like educational merch, the idea of Anderson Horowitz. I mean, it's a for-profit university. So, you know, we know, we know, we know what those are about.

42:36Speaker 5:And Tim Draper also already did this. Draper Academy. Have you ever met anybody in the tech sector there?

42:43Speaker 3:Proud graduate.

42:44Speaker 5:Yeah, exactly.

42:45Speaker 4:These are all Wayne Gretzky.

42:46Speaker 3:Yeah.

42:49Speaker 1:That's all we have time for today. Thank you all so much.

42:52Speaker 4:For joining us.

42:53Speaker 5:Great talking to you guys.

42:54Speaker 3:Thanks for having us.

42:55Speaker 4:Great to be on, as always.

43:04Speaker 1:For Tech Stuff, I'm Oz Veloshin. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis. It was executive produced by me and Julia Nutter for Kaleidoscope. and Katrina Norvell for iHeart Podcasts. Jack Inslee mixed this episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. A special thank you to Taylor Lorenz, Natasha Tiku, and Reid Albigotti. Please check out all the work they put out into the world. We're lucky to call them friends of the pod.