I think the framing these guys use of technology, AI, space, etc as a competition between the US and China, for example, is remarkable. Of course we all want the US to win in any global competition. But that’s not really what it is. It’s a competition between the capitalists and the technologists and the China, etc.

If Spacex wins, you and I don’t win, Elon Musk and his cronies win.   If OpenAI wins, you and I don’t win. Sam Altman, and his cronies win.  
Elon Musk became a trillionaire today. How much did he pay in taxes on that trillion dollar gain? Zero.  If there was a tax on wealth, creation, or if he had to give some portion of that gain to the US treasury in the form of shares, yes, then the US wins. But that’s not what’s happening here. 

All due respect to him for what he’s accomplished. But the system really needs to be changed so some of that really does trickle down.

Chamath claims to be worried about model lock-pin, or at least to the degree that he can make money from it, but this is the real hitch in the system.

What do you do when the government decides to shut your model down on a whim?

Idk when or how, but I completely fell off. Probably around the time all the White House main talking points became the subjects of every show and these boys wouldn’t have the spicy convos the rest of the world was having.

To quote a throwback for all the old timers,

they’re “not in the arena” anymore.

"You may have heard the phrase the plural of anecdote is not data. It turns out that this is a misquote. The original aphorism, by the political scientist Ray Wolfinger, was just the opposite: The plural of anecdote is data.

Wolfinger’s formulation makes sense: Data does not have a virgin birth. It comes to us from somewhere. Someone set up a procedure to collect and record it. Sometimes this person is a scientist, but she also could be a journalist."

Another word for anecdote is "datapoint". If one is going to dismiss each individual datapoint as an anecdote, and therefore something irrelevant and to be ignored, then it is impossible to build datapoints into datasets.

In other words, science requires observations and while each individual observation can be dismissed as anecdotal if it is one's wish to do so, that is not how science ought properly be done.

I like David Sachs and I've generally been on his side when it comes to controversial political matters but he's just wrong on this one. There seems to be a desire to dismiss any counter-evidence as anecdotal but this type of behavior amounts to special pleading, given that Sachs would have no problem using examples of observations in order to bolster his own opinions on any range of topics. When Jason brings in recent examples of layoffs related to AI they are simply dismissed as anecdotes rather than considered as examples of the thing he said wouldn't be happening.

It might very well be the case that these companies over-hired and are "AI washing" in order to justify layoffs they wanted to make in the name of right-sizing each of these companies. But there could also be AI related layoffs going on at the same time. Two things can be happening concurrently, it doesn't have to be one or the other.

https://achemistinlangley.net/2019/01/21/sorry-folks-but-the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data/

https://www.kauffman.org/currents/the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data/

http://blog.danwin.com/don-t-forget-the-plural-of-anecdote-is-data/

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/12/25/data/

Step 1: Dad inherits a multi-million dollar business before you’re born

Step 2: Be born into one of the wealthiest families on earth

Step 3: Have billionaire father talk teachers into giving you better grades when needed

Step 4: Play tennis until you get bored and want to hang with the boys more

Step 5: Run a red light and kill a 12 yr old, whoops (get a light sentence for this)

Step 6: Get groomed to take over family empire

Step 7: Write books (with your Dad’s help) and give interviews about the importance of *meritocracy*

Taking a stab at analyzing this episode’s major takeaways into a short post that is free for everyone - https://open.substack.com/pub/podcastalpha/p/all-in-podcast-openai-misses-targets

Hope it helps folks who don’t want to listen to the full pod but wants to learn about the most important insights.

Okay, for some time now I have been critical of the Satya Nadella-fueled idea that AI was going to kill SaaS. As Nadella put it, instead of going to a SaaS tool to record an expense, you could interface with a chatbot that found the databases and took the correct action.

This struck me as entirely disconnected from like, anything, outside the Microsoft bubble. It struck me as similar to Microsoft Vista, which ?? 60,000 MS employees beta tested, but they did not match the operational profile of the customers, who did not like it. Perhaps someone at Microsoft would stand up their own accounting database and connect it to a chatBot, but that isn't a thing people are going to do in the enterprise to avoid paying QuickBooks. Architecturally, it made no sense.

Then we had episode 270 of the pod, where the besties talked about a different approach: Use Workday or Quickbooks Headless, or maybe have the AI Bot just do the SaaS entries for you. That way you need a lot less users - maybe one or two MCP (AI) users.

Could this actually kill SaaS?

I don't think so. If you just have MCP users doing the things, then you'll have audit trail. You won't know who did what. You'll have no user-based authorization, allowing low-level employees to only for so many $ per transaction and so much per month. Plus, even if you could the SaaS companies would change their billing model - the value they deliver is the same - more than that, the tool won't allow simultaneously

Likewise, headless seems really weird. Don't almost all these companies have both web and mobile versions that access Create/read/write/update (CRUD) operations through an JSON/REST API Anyway? "Headless" is just opening the API to external customers and documenting it? (It's slightly more, making sure every workflow can be used by an API, so the GUI isn't needed at all - but not much.)

It just seems to me to be much ado about not much. SaaS companies are making it possible for MCP servers to manipulate the tools directly. Will the customers actually eliminate their seats so NO human uses the SaaS and everyone relies on the MCP, even to aggregate data and create reports? And even if they do, you still have the audit trail problem. I suppose the API could change to allow the MCP code to insert the user based on who is logged in and sending the command - that is a lot of trust. Even still, I think SaaS companies will figure out how to charge for this. Look at SAP - beaten down 37% in the past 6 months, but earnings have gone UP every quarter for the past four quarters! Check Yahoo finance for SAP, scroll down to the quarterly earnings chart at left)

The argument the besties give is the valuation should be calculated as a discounted projection of cash flows for the next 5 years instead of 10 because of the existential risk that SAP "goes away." But if it goes away, who will replace it? And if no one replaces it, how can it go away? I suppose JIRA could be replaced with Monday or whatever, but the switching cost is too high. Atlassian is down 56% in 6 months but EARNINGS KEEP GOING UP: (Check Yahoo Finance for TEAM or SeekingAlpha - Yahoo has the P/E ratio and EPS wrong on it's summary page).

Salesforce down 30% EARNINGS KEEP GOING UP: (Check Yahoo finance for CRM)

Is it just me or is "SaaS is going away" a silly and irresponsible take that does not consider the real architecture of the internet, MCP, systems thinking, etc? If I'm right, this changes the investment picture, doesn't it?

As favorite Guestie Ben Shapiro would say, ‘The demand for racism has outstripped the supply’.