The Information's TITV
00:25:48 · Ben Pouladian
[00:25:48] S3: challenge is with, like, the TPU, because it was closed source for Google's own consumption, they need to basically build a developer community from scratch from the outside and open it up to everyone and kind of open source it. So there's a mismatch in timing and history of these two different types of technologies, which will take time to ramp. And at the same time, obviously, with NVIDIA and CUDA, you're getting... The whole team there is basically working to squeeze out more improvements from the stack all the way from the walls of the building, from the electrons coming in to the tokens coming out of Dynamo and all these other different projects that they have, which is pretty it's interesting because they basically designed the whole data center from soup to nuts, optimized on their stack with the DSX program or anything. So Google has some catching up to do if they really want other people to embrace their technology and their chips. It's a good step in the first direction, but you really need to open up the kimono and embrace developer communities to show what you have. And I agree with Umesh on the Neo Clouds. I've... There's a clip where I referenced Bane from Batman. You know, one of one of them is gonna die. It it has to be found in the wreckage. I mean, that's part of it. There'll be consolidation. It comes down to what is your your cost of electricity and your operating costs and your financing costs and what are you producing tokens at. And some people will be backwards. And you have other neo clouds like SpaceX, which now have a full stack and a use case to basically use that token demand for inference on their prod... Products like Grok or X or even the Optimus robots that are coming out. We really need to have a
00:27:39 · Akash Pasricha, Ben Pouladian, Umesh Padval
[00:27:39] S0: When demand they be... You know, when they become a a single company, they'll have they'll have lots of more engineers. [00:27:45] S3: Yeah. That's coming. [00:27:46] S0: That's coming. Power problem. [00:27:47] S2: What... Okay. Akash, one point I'll make to Ben, I agree with Ben on the CUDA ecosystem. What is changing, and it's a relatively one year change, is Claude. Claude is so good at creating emulation of the CUDA that a lot of my startup companies can use Claude to try and emulate and get to the CUDA compatibility faster. So that's something to really watch out. Claude can help on that. [00:28:16] S0: Great. Okay. Well, I want to thank you both for coming on. That is Umesh Padval from Seligman Ventures and Ben Pouladian from BEP Research here on TITV. [00:28:25] S2: Thank you, Akash. [00:28:27] S0: Amazon has been experimenting with a pretty shocking new way to list products on its website. The company has been listing two fifty million products that direct to rival retailer and brand websites, though merchants have largely been left in the dark on how any of this is actually working. My colleague, Catherine Perloff, who covers Amazon, wrote about that in a story out this week. I want to bring her on to share more of her reporting. Catherine, welcome back to the show. It is great to have you here. Tell me about these outside listings that Amazon is experimenting with.
00:28:27 · Akash Pasricha, Catherine Perloff
[00:28:27] S0: Amazon has been experimenting with a pretty shocking new way to list products on its website. The company has been listing two fifty million products that direct to rival retailer and brand websites, though merchants have largely been left in the dark on how any of this is actually working. My colleague, Catherine Perloff, who covers Amazon, wrote about that in a story out this week. I want to bring her on to share more of her reporting. Catherine, welcome back to the show. It is great to have you here. Tell me about these outside listings that Amazon is experimenting with. [00:28:59] S5: Yeah. Hello, Akash. Basically, on Amazon right now, you can shop, browse for products Amazon does not sell, which is kind of surprising. And the way that works is there will be listings that pop up that will say shop direct. So when you see that, you can click to another retailer's website and buy the product. Some of the prominent brands displayed are Alo Yoga, Warby Parker. Both of these companies don't sell on Amazon, but you can find their products on Amazon and then go to this site and buy them. Amazon also has an option for some products, a more limited selection to actually buy the product on Amazon, even if Amazon doesn't sell it, but they use an agent to go out to that retailer site and buy it for you.
00:28:59 · Catherine Perloff, Akash Pasricha
[00:28:59] S5: Yeah. Hello, Akash. Basically, on Amazon right now, you can shop, browse for products Amazon does not sell, which is kind of surprising. And the way that works is there will be listings that pop up that will say shop direct. So when you see that, you can click to another retailer's website and buy the product. Some of the prominent brands displayed are Alo Yoga, Warby Parker. Both of these companies don't sell on Amazon, but you can find their products on Amazon and then go to this site and buy them. Amazon also has an option for some products, a more limited selection to actually buy the product on Amazon, even if Amazon doesn't sell it, but they use an agent to go out to that retailer site and buy it for you. [00:29:51] S0: Okay. So this is like... This is pretty shocking. I'm not going to lie. I mean, like the idea that Amazon is going to let people buy things without the whole infrastructure, the delivery, I mean, like, did you see this coming when you started reporting this?
00:29:51 · Akash Pasricha, Catherine Perloff
[00:29:51] S0: Okay. So this is like... This is pretty shocking. I'm not going to lie. I mean, like the idea that Amazon is going to let people buy things without the whole infrastructure, the delivery, I mean, like, did you see this coming when you started reporting this? [00:30:07] S5: I mean, well, it's surprising because... Yeah. Right. Like, Amazon has been trying to sort of be the dominant retailer. This is supporting rival retailers. On the other hand, Amazon has actually had this... So this program, this Shop Direct Buy For Me program, they actually started experimenting within February of last year. It's almost been two years. And I mean, that's part of what our story gets into is that it's been kind of under the radar despite existing. But I think the real play is that, you know, as chatbots become more popular, as agents become more popular, there's a risk that websites get disintermediated, including websites as important as Amazon because if you can just buy something using a chatbot, you don't have to visit Amazon's website. So this is sort of a move for Amazon to fight back against that and say, You you can buy everything you need from amazon.com even if we don't sell it. And you know, that can lessen people's reliance on using, you know, newly popular consumer AI agents like, you know, maybe Muse, Meta's Muse that has gotten a bit of traction, Instinct, products from Google and OpenAI, etcetera, and still sort of have some skin in the game and maintain their position as the dominant place to find e commerce listings.
00:30:07 · Catherine Perloff, Akash Pasricha
[00:30:07] S5: I mean, well, it's surprising because... Yeah. Right. Like, Amazon has been trying to sort of be the dominant retailer. This is supporting rival retailers. On the other hand, Amazon has actually had this... So this program, this Shop Direct Buy For Me program, they actually started experimenting within February of last year. It's almost been two years. And I mean, that's part of what our story gets into is that it's been kind of under the radar despite existing. But I think the real play is that, you know, as chatbots become more popular, as agents become more popular, there's a risk that websites get disintermediated, including websites as important as Amazon because if you can just buy something using a chatbot, you don't have to visit Amazon's website. So this is sort of a move for Amazon to fight back against that and say, You you can buy everything you need from amazon.com even if we don't sell it. And you know, that can lessen people's reliance on using, you know, newly popular consumer AI agents like, you know, maybe Muse, Meta's Muse that has gotten a bit of traction, Instinct, products from Google and OpenAI, etcetera, and still sort of have some skin in the game and maintain their position as the dominant place to find e commerce listings. [00:31:26] S0: And remind me, I think they had blocked access to Muse. Is that still in effect for Amazon?