00:08:16 · Amanda Silberling, Kirsten Korosec
[00:08:16] S2: That that is the thing though, is that it's like dating is really inefficient. Like, it sucks that you have to go on a bunch of dates with different people. You might waste an evening and be like, well, that was a bust. And so you can see why people are like, well, what if you didn't have to go on dates? What if your AI could go on dates for you? But, like, there's just something not human there. And then also, you are outsourcing the decision of who you are going to date to a computer that you are trusting knows you better than yourself, which I don't think is true. [00:08:53] S1: So one thing that I think is, like, worth sort of going back to, and I sort of hinted about this earlier, which is, like, who are they talking to? Who who is their who is their audience, like, for all these, like, optimizations? You know, in your view, Amanda, it's... It sounds like I might know what they answered this. But is this, you know, a product problem? Right? It's like, you know... Or is it a messaging problem? Like, are they just talking about it in the wrong way? And, actually, there's, like, this really great value in here, and it just seems out of touch with reality and humanity. But but if they just talked about it differently, it would be better. Or is it, you know, like, actually a product problem, and to your point, that we're focusing on optimizing sort of the wrong things with AI tools? I think it's a
00:08:53 · Kirsten Korosec, Amanda Silberling
[00:08:53] S1: So one thing that I think is, like, worth sort of going back to, and I sort of hinted about this earlier, which is, like, who are they talking to? Who who is their who is their audience, like, for all these, like, optimizations? You know, in your view, Amanda, it's... It sounds like I might know what they answered this. But is this, you know, a product problem? Right? It's like, you know... Or is it a messaging problem? Like, are they just talking about it in the wrong way? And, actually, there's, like, this really great value in here, and it just seems out of touch with reality and humanity. But but if they just talked about it differently, it would be better. Or is it, you know, like, actually a product problem, and to your point, that we're focusing on optimizing sort of the wrong things with AI tools? I think it's a [00:09:39] S2: little bit of both, but I think that the marketing problem comes from when you have these high up people at these massively valuable companies in a room together, talking about the pain points in their lives. And it's like making dinner reservations, booking flights. And like, everybody does those things, but like, I'm not booking flights once a week. Like, I'm not making dinner reservations all the time. Like, yeah. I mean, obviously, people find value from things like ChatGPT and Claude. But I think the value that the average person is finding isn't necessarily, like, booking a flight for me.
00:10:17 · Anthony Ha
[00:10:17] S0: Yeah. I totally agree that, like, that, you know, it just seems like so much of their experience is, you know, maybe a little different from the average person. And, of course, like, all these things are sort of abstractions. Like, what is the average person? Mean, there... There's millions of different average people. Right? One of the things I've also been thinking about is, like, when I was... You know, because I'm incredibly old. Like, you know, there are companies like Uber that when it first launched, it was sort of targeting this kind of tech early adopter set in San Francisco. And I remember being very confident, like, this will never catch on more broadly. This is just... Like, it's for a very narrow audience of young, urban, like, millennials who have money to spare on cars, and it works specifically well in San Francisco. And so, like, for a lot of things, the tech industry has succeeded by betting that, you know, hey. Like, people have not kind of caught up with us, but we are sort of the leading edge, and then we reflect kind of what the consumer of the future looks like, the family of the future looks like. And in this case, it just seems like that bet is sort of not borne out yet. I mean, for a variety of reasons, partly because I think the society that this technology is being promoted into is very different when people are starting to say, like, I don't love the influence that this technology is having in my life. I don't love that you're pitching this as something where all... Like, every experience is my life that I should be optimized out of, but, actually, I want to live my own life. I actually want to parent my own children.
00:11:39 · Amanda Silberling, Kirsten Korosec
[00:11:39] S2: Yeah. I think that it's not a coincidence that at the same time, we see this over optimization happening among people in tech, that there's also a movement of people that are reverting back to wanting to use flip phones, which I've talked about on Equity before. Or people who are buying CDs because they're tired of an algorithm telling them what they want to listen to. And it is just an interesting cultural tension that's happening where we haven't found the balance of what optimization actually helps us and what optimization just makes us feel like we aren't as human as we wanna be. [00:12:20] S1: Well, Amanda, you'll be happy to know that I have a massive, massive CD and even tape collection. Wow. So if you're ever looking to, you know, go really analog, just, you know, give me give me a ring, and I'll I'll happily share them with you. We do have to say goodbye to Amanda for now. Thanks so much for coming on. I hope you come on a lot more often. [00:12:42] S2: Thanks for having me. I hope to be back more often as well, and I hope that people know things about their kids is what I'll say.
00:12:42 · Amanda Silberling, Anthony Ha
[00:12:42] S2: Thanks for having me. I hope to be back more often as well, and I hope that people know things about their kids is what I'll say. [00:12:52] S0: So I think one of the reasons we're talking about this question of do tech CEOs, do AI CEOs know what people actually want, is because we're now at the point where some of these companies are actually going public. Public, and the Anthropic S1, which we've talked about in pretty much every episode of this show, is now officially available to the public. We've written about it a bunch at TechCrunch. Sean, I know, like, you know, on on a weekly basis, you will talk about your excitement about seeing the s one. So what jumped out to you?
00:13:21 · Sean O’Kane
[00:13:21] S3: Yeah. I mean, I think the big thing is that we have pretty much what looks like a... An actual business here. This is a company that we've talked about before. Has been kind of remarkably focused from day one. It hasn't gone on all these, you know, quote unquote side quests that OpenAI has gone on. You know, to some extent, it needs to do that because it's not a company like Google where it can generate a whole bunch of revenue from a search and ads business or or Waymo, you know, like it does not have the luxury of buffering against this incredibly expensive play. It doesn't own its own compute. So it's paying kinda through the nose for that. But it... That focus has paid off. We have a company that, you know, is is really growing its revenue like crazy. It was up to sort of more than $16,000,000,000 in the first half of this year, which is an enormous jump from last year where there were basically just about 1,000,000,000. And they have... I think the... One of the things that really stuck out to me was they have a ton of customers, like an enormous number of customers who are paying sort of more than a $100,000 a month. And, you know, they've just really laser focused in on enterprise work and all of this stuff, and it seems to really be paying off. I think there are still very big questions about the amount of money they have committed to companies like SpaceX to pay for compute down the road. They have, I think if you total it all up, it's kind of not a 100% clear in the document, but it's... I mean, we're we're talking about, like, approaching a trillion dollars that they've committed to pay out over the next, like, decade or couple decades. There's a lot of money. And and so there are questions about how they're gonna be able to to hit all that. But, you know, there were no, like, giant bombs hiding in here, and I think they properly addressed the existential risks that they face to. They seem to have addressed pretty much every risk. Their risk factor section is, like, nearly a 100 pages long. So, yeah, there's there's a lot here to dig into.