All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
00:42:11 · Jason Calacanis, David Sacks
[00:42:11] S0: Oh, really? [00:42:11] S1: And... Oh, yeah. This... And this is all public information. Yeah. But they are building a massive government affairs operation. And look, I think you can expect that as they power up through all of this capital, having a $2,000,000,000,000 market gap [00:42:24] S0: That's my point. [00:42:25] S1: They're gonna have even more influence in Washington or they're gonna be capable of buying a lot more influence. And I think that is concerning. One thing I will say though is that as they go from being a startup to being a public company that's one of the top handful of companies by market cap on earth, it's gonna be very obvious that they are a big tech company and therefore they should be treated like other big tech companies, which is to say with suspicion, as opposed to this being some poor little startup that, you know, has innocuous views or is not the 800 pound gorilla they actually are. So I do think it'll be clarifying on that level for them to be seen correctly as what I've been saying is that they are the most powerful monopoly or duopoly ever in human history, which is they're creating AGI, right? I've been saying that for a long time. So I do think that them going public will actually right size them in the public consciousness. [00:43:24] S0: Yeah. My And one
00:43:25 · David Sacks
[00:43:25] S1: thing you're you're seeing already actually is there's starting to be a doomer anthropic split. There's a very interesting article in Vox, which is this huge doomer publication over the past week, and it was quoting a bunch of these NGOs, kind of doomer NGOs, that were basically pointing out that, you know, like Anthropic actually, if you if you separate their rhetoric from what they actually do, they are the ones leading the charge on Recursive Self Improvement. There's no single company in the world that is doing more to race towards full RSI than Anthropic. They are hell bent for leather on getting to full recursive self improvement. In fact, a lot of the reason why they are becoming so efficient with their compute, the reason they're able to cut costs, offer the same capability at one tenth the price, is because they've increasingly been using their own models to generate these algorithmic improvements, to create these compute multipliers. If you go back to August, Anthropic published a very interesting blog talking about how they were using RSI and and 26, they had a chart showing that 26% of their tasks that are involved in basically trying to create the next generation of models, they were already were using RSI to do that. Now that was back in August, so who knows what they're at now being in October. So look, they are pursuing RSI very very quickly and you know, one way to think about that whole pacing letter that Dario published a few months ago is it's almost like they're creating an alibi for themselves where they are acknowledging that, hey, we are pursuing RSI as quickly as anyone and it's almost like they're saying to the world, well, we want it to stop. Right? Like, we want it to slow down. We tried to get you all to agree to pace, but you guys wouldn't agree to do that. So therefore, we kept going. You know? And it's almost like creating an alibi in advance for themselves if this RSI thing goes really bad.
00:45:29 · Jason Calacanis, David Sacks
[00:45:29] S0: Alright. [00:45:30] S1: But I think that they had to know when they published that pacing letter that they're not gonna get the whole world on board with pacing. So the whole thing was sort of an exercise in virtue signaling. But in any event, I think what it shows again is I do think that it's possible that an anthropic doom or split is coming because there's no way for them to maintain their lead as the number one superintelligence company without continuing to advance the frontier very rapidly and to continue to pursue recursive self improvement. And that is something that the doomers are most afraid of. Of all the of all the various risks, right, they are most worried about a breakaway superintelligence. So I do think that this is the beginning maybe of a divorce between Anthropic and the doomers, but we'll see. [00:46:22] S0: Okay. Let's get back to your breakdown, Chamath. You had the the greatest revenue, greatest business ever built, yada yada. They have a ton of cash. They have the cash for the build out. They're gonna raise some cash in the IPO, and they are... They... All of this bond activity is crowding out treasuries is where you left off, I believe. So let's continue.
00:46:41 · Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis
[00:46:41] S2: So I think I think you have to go to these risk factors now and think if you're gonna price the IPO or if you're gonna buy the IPO, how would I decide to buy the IPO? And I think at the $1.04, $1.05, $1.06, it's kind of priced fairly, so there's no deal. But they're giving you an entry price into the future. So then you have to sort of have a view on the future. And I think there are two risks. The first risk was what I showed you on their revenue composition, which is how long does it take for Ant to show those 10,000 customers the ROI math that they will need to move from less than a million to single digit millions to tens of millions, right? That's one very simple thing that you can check quarter after quarter after quarter. As those numbers swell, the reason they will swell is that they'll have defensible use cases and white papers and analyses that make it very straightforward for a corporate infrastructure to sign off, a multi person executive team to sign off on a multimillion dollar spend. So that's an ant risk, and I think that you can price that risk. The second though is what I teased here, which is the risk you cannot price, which is this market risk. The AI complex has gotten so big that it now competes with US treasuries. Why is that an important thing to note? And why does that create market risk? Nick, if you just go back to the last chart, please. So when you look at this, what does it mean for treasuries having to compete with Facebook and SpaceX and Anthropic and OpenAI for money. [00:48:26] S0: Dollars, yeah.
00:48:26 · Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya
[00:48:26] S0: Dollars, yeah. [00:48:27] S2: Well, it means that somebody is going to have to pay more. Now, let's play out one example. If it's the hyperscalers that have to pay more because people believe the flight to quality and the durational risk of the government is better, then all of the money that the hyperscalers and the AI complex and Anthropic and OpenAI have to raise will have to come in at a higher coupon. If that's true, then Friedberg's chart is also true which is that those rates cascade through the ecosystem. The neo clouds will have to pay more. All these other folks have to pay more. What that means is that you increase and you pull forward the risk of defaults, which we talked about last time. So you have this negative reflexive cycle there. Let's say the opposite is true. Let's say that, you know, the AI complex is able to raise money at reasonable rates, and it's the US Treasury that has to actually go through an auction and pay more. Now you have the broad based cost of borrowing goes up because every other part of The United States economy is levered to the twos through fives and ten year complex. That is a huge market risk that I don't understand because I've never seen before. [00:49:47] S0: What is the market risk? Explain it just crisply here as we as we wrap. What is the market risk? [00:49:53] S2: If interest rates go up because the US Treasuries have to pay more for people to buy their bonds [00:49:56] S0: Got it.
00:49:56 · Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya
[00:49:56] S0: Got it. [00:49:57] S2: Yes. Then everything else in the economy has a higher cost of borrowing. That has negative implications. If the opposite is true, the AI complex has to pay more, and then there's a bunch of negative repercussions narrowly to the complex. The problem is we're trying to buy an AI stock. So many roads lead to downside risk more than upside risk. Now there are versions in which this all works out and everything is off to the races. But I guess my structural takeaway maybe, Jason, is we're entering this very weird phase in The US economy where we've seen this before and we're seeing it now. This complex is too big to fail. And I think when you start to see these guys representing 40, 50% of all capital market equity and debt flows, which then in turn represents 30, 35, 40% of all treasury issuance as well that this competition happens, these guys are too big to fail, which means that there's a different problem at hand, which is a more systemic problem. So I'm not saying that there is. I'm just generally bullish.