00:00:00 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[00:00:00] S0: You're watching TBPN. Today is Friday, 09/04/2026. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. [00:00:11] S1: That's right. Let's get that Christmas countdown. [00:00:14] S0: First, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. How many days? [00:00:25] S1: There we go. A hundred and eleven days until Christmas. [00:00:28] S0: A hundred and eleven days until Christmas. [00:00:30] S1: The Christmas countdown is helpful because Yeah. One, gives you something to look forward to. Indeed. But, also is a subtle reminder that you only have a hundred and eleven days left in this year. Yeah. It's game time. [00:00:42] S0: It is. It is. [00:00:43] S1: It's game time. [00:00:44] S0: Well, we're we're excited for it. Big news in the AI world, obviously. Astra GPT six launched yesterday. We went through the blog post briefly. It went up mid show. Bunch of impressive benchmarks. We talked about Arc AGI. We moved the goalposts because Arc AGI v three is now saturated, which is particularly crazy because of how detailed those games are when you play them. The thing that stuck out to me though was watching the demos of people build three d scenes in Blender using Astra. Clearly, a bunch of people got access to the model before and were able to fire off one prompt, maybe a few prompts. It it feels like it's very, very capable to just fire a blender and do a full task and model a whole
00:00:44 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[00:00:44] S0: Well, we're we're excited for it. Big news in the AI world, obviously. Astra GPT six launched yesterday. We went through the blog post briefly. It went up mid show. Bunch of impressive benchmarks. We talked about Arc AGI. We moved the goalposts because Arc AGI v three is now saturated, which is particularly crazy because of how detailed those games are when you play them. The thing that stuck out to me though was watching the demos of people build three d scenes in Blender using Astra. Clearly, a bunch of people got access to the model before and were able to fire off one prompt, maybe a few prompts. It it feels like it's very, very capable to just fire a blender and do a full task and model a whole [00:01:38] S1: world, basically. That said, Matt Schumer, who had a couple of the most impressive examples Yeah. He has been talking about how the art of prompting is back. Oh, interesting. He He had a very specific process where you have like [00:01:54] S0: A loop manager agent Okay. [00:01:56] S1: And sub agents. Yeah. It's and it's Still not as simple as just like, you can get a good output [00:02:02] S0: Yeah. [00:02:03] S1: Doing, you know, in one shot. But to get some of these really incredible outputs does take a little bit of refinement.
00:02:09 · John Coogan
[00:02:09] S0: Yeah. And I'm sure a lot of that information will propagate across the Internet as it already has. I'd love to pull up some of the images from or the videos from the launch from folks who are actually test driving GPT six Astra. First, Sharif Sharif said, GPT six Astra recreated the Palace Of Fine Arts in Blender. This is my favorite building in San Francisco because it was built for the World's Fair in 1914. I didn't know that. Where the steam locomotive and telephone were showed off. Wow. It was a time when technology gave us all a deep sense of optimism for the future. I feel like I feel like some of that sense has been lost since, certainly. But I hope models like Astra can help restore it and push us towards a more hopeful future. So if we can play that actual video, you can see. So I I imagine that it pulls images from the from the Internet. There's a whole bunch of, obviously, reference diagrams. There's a whole bunch of different ways that you could ground a three d modeling exercise. You could even pull the blueprints. There might be free architectural plans. And, yeah, it it is this odd thing where you could use an AI image generator because the AI image generators are knowledgeable about what the Palace of Fine Arts is. It could generate a bunch of images there. So there's all these different ways to triangulate it. And then you can also just go on I think Sketchfab is one of the big free three d model purveyors online. And so you could potentially go grab an actual three d model, build off of that for your scene. So there's all these different ways to solve a problem and Astra seems to be good at actually going and doing it. There's a few more that we should look through. There's one comparison since this is the new Pelican bench apparently. Same same same prompt, same goal of creating this fly through video for real estate scene. And this feels like something that could be useful. I've already seen on Zillow there is the ability to restyle images. So if you're looking at a house on Zillow, you can see the interior photos, and then you can say, I'd like to redecorate this in a modern style or in a contemporary style or in a colonial style. And it will go and use AI image generation on the back end to do that. It's only available on a fraction of Zillow listings. It's clearly some sort of feature that they need to turn on.
00:04:32 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
But you could imagine this being something especially for spec homes that are selling that maybe haven't been that that they don't have the budget to actually go do proper rendering just be bring lowering the cost you get sort of a Jevin's Paradox moment. There's another one from Thomas. He says Astra is very good at three d modeling and the lighting is way better than this one. This is this is what this actually looks properly ray traced, properly lit, really thoughtfully designed. Maybe that's in the prompt. Maybe that's just the way this one turned out based on the photos from a Blender scene to then an Unreal Engine five walkable experience. So everything becomes translatable. You'll be able to take your tweets, turn them into blog posts, turn them into videos, turn them into three d games on [00:05:21] S1: video video games. Games. [00:05:22] S0: Basically. Basically. And so there's a little bit of a prompt and Thomas reveals a little bit about his process here. [00:05:29] S1: I would like to see VCs, if you're gonna put out an AI blog post. You know, a [00:05:36] S0: blog post. Like a market map. [00:05:38] S1: An essay. No. If you're gonna put out an essay that was clearly written by AI Oh. You should be required to put out a video game that accompanies it. Yeah. That's sort of playable that gets the
00:05:38 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:05:38] S1: An essay. No. If you're gonna put out an essay that was clearly written by AI Oh. You should be required to put out a video game that accompanies it. Yeah. That's sort of playable that gets the [00:05:47] S0: instead of a instead of a market map, make it a Fortnite map. I want to be able to play in the different, you know, town is a popular AI startup. Might land on a market map, should land on the virtual Fortnite map. I like as well. Who else said this? Yufan Yee. I think this was interesting. There there's another there there's some debate over this last one whether there was like a different harness involved. But same thing, give it a Zillow listing, can three d model the house. So this it's it's always with these new releases, it's interesting what makes you feel the AGI or not. Realistically, Frontier Math, tier four, I think they scored 99% on that. Terminal Bench Science 0.1. They're just numbers to me. Like, they they they don't do anything for me emotionally because I don't have any grounding in how hard those particular things are. And also, I sort of I sort of assume the computers are good at math. [00:06:47] S1: And you didn't get past algebra and like, look how successful you are. [00:06:50] S0: Right? Exactly. Exactly. So so those accomplished [00:06:56] S1: all of this off of algebra one. Yeah. Yeah. Freshman level math Olympiad.
00:07:01 · John Coogan
[00:07:01] S0: Yeah. Exactly. So those are never really feel the AGI moments for me. But this but I I've actually spent hundreds if not thousands of hours in three d modeling software, mostly in Cinema four d and Houdini. And it was really fun. I really enjoy making three d renders and motion graphics. And it was also useful when I was making YouTube videos. But every step in building a scene requires you gotta watch a YouTube tutorial, then you gotta look up how all the different functions work. And then ultimately, you're tweaking settings in literally four dimensions because it's a three d scene, but then over time you have to map where the camera goes, where the different objects are moving, how things progress over time. And it can also be very compute intensive. So there's there's a whole bunch of times where just to preview the scene in low res, you might have to cache and load and and pre bake certain animations so that you can just see what it looks like and then you're like, bah, it's not there. I got to go back and change some setting for some sort of smoke simulation or some sort of fracturing that's going on. And so it's fun, but it is extremely cumbersome. And ultimately, you're doing this on a two dimensional screen and it can be very time consuming and frustrating. And so by the time I stopped spending time on motion graphics, is around 2021, I'd been building the YouTube channel and hired a few a few editors. Some of them were good at After Effects. Some of them learned Blender. Blender was ascendant at that time. So Blender is the open source community led effort. Cinema four d is a closed source piece of software, very expensive, was very expensive. Was like over a thousand dollars to get a license that would be good for like a year. Then they eventually went subscription. And so there were pieces of software that were used by Hollywood but were very expensive, very high barrier to entry, so you didn't have as much of a flourishing ecosystem. Blender at in 2021 was clearly on this trajectory where it was going to build this ecosystem and become very, very popular. And it and it did. But by 2021, I was able to hire video editors who were able to go do scenes in Blender. But still, it was a huge ask if I was like, for this YouTube video, I was posting every single week. I'd like a motion graphic to illustrate something.