The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:17:16 · Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin
[00:17:16] S1: It's a zero. [00:17:17] S0: Yeah. Because there's no API. We can't even use it. It's only for internal use by Meta. So who? This is the most performative eval I've seen to date of a, of a never ending spiral of performative evals. I'm not saying they're not nominally true. I'm not saying that you don't want to celebrate the team, congratulate the team. You do want to do it. Clearly the team has done good work at some level, right? For the show, I'm like, okay, look, I'll hook it up. You know? Oh, you can't use it. You can use it in Muse. So what's the point of a model that allegedly has parity for the same price? It's not even cheaper and you can't use. This is the height of performative evals. [00:17:55] S1: It's available in use code. It's set on an API as well. I didn't check the API. Are you saying it's not up yet? [00:18:00] S0: You can't put it into your own app.
00:18:00 · Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:18:00] S0: You can't put it into your own app. [00:18:01] S1: No. Okay, got it. That's a fair comment from a business impact, but nonetheless, you have to give them credit for getting, know, at the risk of sounding like someone we all know back in the arena, they were competitive early on with open weight, then they kind of faded back way to the back of the pack. And now they're upfront again, notably with closed source models. So we've decided that if we're going to spend $100,000,000,000 we at least be able to charge for the damn thing as the takeaway. And, you know, it'd be interesting to see if anything comes in the enterprise business, but at the very least, the Muse instinct war will now be powered by a super modern model. But, yeah, that's the takeaway. And, dollars 12,000,000,000 got you more than you thought a year ago. [00:18:39] S0: Yeah. And to the body language thing, got him a right hand man. [00:18:42] S1: Yeah. And great tweets.
00:18:43 · Jason Lemkin
[00:18:43] S0: That's what I saw on the cheeky pike thing. I think Zuck's had a lonely stretch. Think it's been a tough job. No. It's hard being a bound CEO. It's been lonely. And I think it's been lonely since the beginning. It's been lonely before the IPO. I think he had Sheryl Sandberg back in the day. He's had others, but clearly he, you know, having it's not easy to pay someone $10,000,000,000 and have them stick around and work that hard. Like, it's easier said than done. And it's even harder to find someone you can truly trust in that body language. It's key to making this work. Right? I know he's got all the other folks, the Nat Freemans and the the Daniel Grosses and all these guys, but hard to get a right hand person. It's it's hard. So I think that's that's the untold story to Roy's point. This may be a been a great deal for scale. It may turn out. We kind of almost laughed at it when it happened. Not literally. They turn out to be the next WhatsApp or Instagram. But I, you know, the more interesting thing, I wasn't that impressed with the model. I can't use hard, hard for me to get too excited. Right. The fact that, you know, it just going to make the Muse app better though, is super interesting. The world changes so fast, but I think there's a material chance Meta has a, just a monster AI product on its hands. The amount of investment into it is so high. The capabilities are so high. The autonomy is so high. I mean, now you're going to make it 10 or 50 times more powerful. I mean, this could do better than the ARVR goggle stuff.
00:20:01 · Harry Stebbings
[00:20:01] S2: The amount of muse and instant competitors right now is pretty astonishing. Okay. Big tech go shopping, baby. We have two rumors that are circulating. Obviously, we don't deal in rumors, so I'd love to start with the first one. Reflection, which for those that don't know, is a fantastic team building open source models in The US backed by Sequoia. I think the last round was at $25,000,000,000 or so, and the rumor is that NVIDIA is buying them at a $30,000,000,000 price. This is on the back of them buying Poolside for $12,000,000,000, which is in the open model game as well. Guys, how do we analyze Janssen further going into the open model space?
00:20:39 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[00:20:39] S1: Yeah. And by further, just to be clear, you're you're reminding us that they already bought poolside, they already have their Neematron existing model. And I think the answer is, as we've discussed several times, if you're in the chip business and all you know, and you've got some of your biggest customers are close source model companies zooming out. You've got a pile of money that's going to go into that collective pool, it's in your interest that more of it stay with you and the chips and less of it stay with the model companies, right? So by definition, you love open source model and only one chip provider, just like on the other side of the table, the model companies love closed source models and everyone having their own chip provider. So it's, you know, we're friends, we're the best of friends, we lend each other $100,000,000,000 or so, but we're watching you closely and we want to be able to fight back if you get margin greedy. So it just all makes sense. [00:21:30] S2: Do you think it'll go through, Roy? [00:21:32] S1: When you got $5,000,000,000,000, if you wanna buy something for $30,000,000,000, you can buy something for $30,000,000,000 Whether or not there'll be that whole pushback after the GROC thing, will the structure of an AQUA hire work now, or will there be pushback? Who knows? The world is pretty busy right now. It's not like these next two months are going to be idle time for the US government, so who knows? I think [00:21:53] S2: if you're on the board, would you say sell or would you say reject?
00:21:53 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:21:53] S2: if you're on the board, would you say sell or would you say reject? [00:21:57] S1: Oh, I'd hit the bid because they're amazing companies, but the standalone business, you know, if you have an open weight model, you know, you're relying a lot on the monetization is inference, are you in that? I've always thought open weight is really exciting. But how does it work monetarily? You know, if you're getting these kind of excess prices, the value to the acquirer is very high. And the market cap of the acquirer is very high. This might be a moment in time that doesn't come back.