Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:25:31 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:25:31] S0: On this trip, I've been asking a lot of people what percent of software coding tasks are already saturated and the typical answer is very very high percentage. That's been the biggest market and yet it still seems like people are spending like crazy on Frontier tokens to do coding which it seemed a little at odds. Like if I could do it with a six month old model or something that's vastly cheaper...
00:25:52 · Martin Casado
[00:25:52] S1: Well, are two different statements. This is a great thing to dig in on but we need to be very careful. So statement number one is, I am not using more tokens. I have enough tokens. I've automated 95% already so I can't automate anymore. And I think that we're getting pretty close to that. Comment number two is therefore I can use a cheaper model does not follow from comment number one. So if you and I are competing startups, we've got Martin startup, we've Patrick startup, right? So we've got competing startups and because we're in competitive equilibria, are you gonna choose a dumber model to compete with me? In competitive equilibria, you wouldn't, You would always pay 10 times more for the smartest Yeah. Yeah. Always. Always. Always. And so there's this very open question of will you saturate tasks so that you don't need a smarter model? And I think it's very hard to do that in a Darwinistic economic equilibrium when you're actually competing. And some of them may, but I think at the end of the day, it's about can you get software out faster? Can you make it better? And can you compete in the marketplace? And that will necessarily push you to the more intelligent thing. Now that said, clearly, things will slow down because you're actually not spending more tokens. And so either you have to increase prices or you're gonna have to go broad. But in my experience, the pricing is maintained for sure. And because of the competitive equilibrium, like, you'll always want the smartest thing. And then we're just seeing a broadening use of these outside of code. General knowledge work. I'm a huge Grok user. It's like my favorite thing ever. And so I think we're starting to see, yeah, take over more and more
00:27:23 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Martin Casado
[00:27:23] S0: of these. Say more about your personal experience with that. What you're doing with it, what you're learning from that experience. [00:27:28] S1: My new Grok, this is so funny. [00:27:30] S0: I mean, [00:27:30] S1: I've got a [00:27:31] S0: whole automation thing going on. [00:27:32] S1: Oh, I know it's so good. Like, I just feel like I've waited my entire life for power. This technology to show up. Right? Like, I want Star Trek. I want to go home and I want my house to greet me and I want to talk to it and I want to have the face show up on the monitor and I the whole thing. We've never been able to do it and now it's kind of trivial. So I use GrokBot for a lot of stuff. Use it for personal finances. My big hobby is modular synthesis. I like synthesizers like making music. Oh, girl. But with like the nineteen seventies like patching, tweaking type stuff, it helps me with a lot of that stuff. So I use it for a lot of like standard things but my new passion project is I want Grok Bot to embody itself. I say, I want you to be the living AI in my house. That's what I want and I want it to be just like Star Trek. Help me make this happen and it's literally Buy stuff. It's literally buying stuff so I was like, oh, let's try this. Yesterday I bought a few $100 worth of gear that's coming to the house and like, I'm gonna have it embody itself so [00:28:25] S0: that what gear is it buying? I don't even know.
00:28:25 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Martin Casado
[00:28:25] S0: that what gear is it buying? I don't even know. [00:28:30] S1: It's like these weird like these weird open source projects and like I mean it's like this really obscure... Like I know some home automation stuff like I know like Zigbee Life. I know some home but it's like really obscure stuff that it's decided to buy but like I just have in my head this vision of that kind of vintage view of what the future looked like, like the seventies view like you walked out of the house. Like I just want that. I've basically just been feeding it pictures and descriptions and I want it create that by itself. And so I'll let you know how that goes. [00:28:59] S0: What is this and other experiences using this technology since you're probably in the point 0001% of creativity using it? What does it tell you about what's coming?
00:28:59 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Martin Casado
[00:28:59] S0: What is this and other experiences using this technology since you're probably in the point 0001% of creativity using it? What does it tell you about what's coming? [00:29:09] S1: Yeah. This is it. I just feel people keep thinking of these things as software and it's not. And I think we just keep mapping it to things like search and it's not. And we really have created general flexible technology that can bring us many of these future things that we've always dreamed about, we just didn't have the technology to implement. And I just feel like we're so constrained from our presuppositions of what software can do that people aren't doing as many of these things. I'll give you another example. You know, worked with Fei Fei and World Labs, great company. And one thing I realized as part of that, what they did is they created a model that would generate three d scenes. They released a model called Atlas a few months ago, and that would, like, generate basically any scene, but also supported dynamics that would move. And I realized we're this close to being able to step into a movie. Imagine like Miyazaki probably wouldn't be happy with it but imagine like having Spirited Away running and you throw on your VR glasses and you walk in. You're there and like, did you ever see Sleep No More? [00:30:05] S0: Like the Of course. Yeah. Went to it. [00:30:07] S1: Why isn't there a Sleep No More in VR [00:30:10] S0: Oh, yeah.
00:30:10 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Martin Casado
[00:30:10] S0: Oh, yeah. [00:30:10] S1: That you're walking in like the whole thing is going on and like... Just for those that are listening, Sleep No More is an immersive play which is three hours. It was in this three story hotel or something like that building in New York and you're like running around trying to figure out and like Hamlet is being played out or whatever. We're starting to realize how powerful this stuff is. A lot of these tropes and visions of the future from the fifties and sixties we can actually make and I just think that the biggest constraint is no longer the tech. It's literally our creativity and it's just because we've been beaten down by thirty years of software being shit. I mean, let's be honest, software has sucked, technology has been hard to use, old people hate it, it's most often broken and now we're actually in a point where this stuff could actually start working. And so for me, it's like, I'm so excited for what this brings. [00:30:55] S0: It's tempting to say you could just freeze the models and their current capability and still get all of what you described. So there's like a diffusion question I'd like to explore. Before we do that, what if anything do you think is missing from the models? Like how do you hope or wish or dream that the models themselves can