Jason: Okay, we are gathered here today in holy unity, brothers and sisters, to convene and discuss on this most holy day, the day the All-In podcast drops many topics. AI data centers, China, justice, human dignity, Dario unwinding these SPVS hasn't been good for the Vatican. We got in at 20 billion. That was a 50 bagger for us. So, let's get started.

Sacks: Jason, I'm pretty sure you believed you were the vicer of God before the encyclical. So, this is nothing new for you.

Chamath: Let your winners ride.

Jason: We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. I'm going all in. The smoke has risen from Tratad's pool house and from the poker room. He's staying in my pool house. He's been there for the last 3 days.

Chamath: It's been magnificent. He didn't know. You know what? I understand where OJ was coming from. You know, you put Ko Kalin in your house for long enough, you just lose your [ __ ] At some at some point, somebody's getting whacked. All right, enough with the shenanigans. Uh, but it's been great staying at the house because there's actually Chimant is not aware of this. There's an iPad in the kitchen and that's logged in to Uber Eats, Door Dash, Instacart, Amazon...

Jason: Laura Piana. Come on, stop.

Chamath: No, there is. It's literally every single service. And I told the house manager like, listen, any packages that come in the next 72 hours, right to the pool house, if it says JCAL, right to the pool house. So, all these packages have been coming. Then I relabeled them, gave them back, sent them to the ranch, and now the house manager is sending that stuff to the ranch.

Jason: Laura Piana wants to know why my inseam went from 36 to 12.

Chamath: Your waist size went from 32 to 36. All right, welcome to the program, everybody. David Saxs is here. How you doing, David?

Sacks: I'm good.

Jason: Chimoth Poly Hopetia is back at the 8090 office. I was at the 8090 office the last couple days and it's a vibe. It's a vibe. There's like a great culture going on. If you're a bestie and you show up at that office though, everybody there is a huge fan of the pod. So I was like it was like being royalty. It's stopped by everybody. Hey, I'm a developer here. I'm a big fan of the show. Thank you for giving it to Chimath. We can't give it to him because he pays our mortgage and everything, but every time you stick it to Chimath, we love it. We're cheering for you in the secret slack room.

Chamath: there's a secret slack room.

Jason: There is. There is definitely a secret slack room going on. No, but it was great. The vibes were awesome. You're building a lot of software. A lot of young talent. I don't want to say that where your secret source is, but there's a secret source of talent you have. And uh, man, those were some smart kids.

Chamath: I'm happy to say it. Look, when I was at Facebook, we became the most aggressive recruiter of Waterlue co-ops. And so, I went back to the well. Yeah. We recruit more interns every quarter than we have full-time engineers, which we do on purpose because it puts a ton of pressure on the product actually being good. We had 400 people apply this quarter for internships.

Jason: Wow. It's very interesting. Uh with us sitting in for Freedberg, who's busy with some potatoes seed this week doing great stuff at Ohio, the one, the only Bill Gurley is here. He's been running down a dream. If you haven't bought the book, get the book. It's incredible. And you're off book tour, so now you have time for us. Yeah.

Bill Gurley: Yes. And I, you know, I had told you if you ever talk about the Pope, I'd love to hop on. And so

Jason: well, you know, he Bill's an evangelical. I'm a Catholic. So, we do have some common ground here. Do you you when's the last time you were at church, Bill?

Bill Gurley: when Jal gets sacriiggious? I got to come on there and make sure JCL doesn't get out of line with the Pope.

Jason: Listen, the Pope is God's messenger on earth. We should give him a base level of respect. By the way, that's us imitating Bill Gurley. This not actually Bill Gurley. But hey, everybody knows you were uh you know, you uh handed the baton over at uh Benchmark after a very successful couple of decades in venture capital. You wrote the book. You've now got a nonprofit. You're doing your own spin, I think, on uh maybe what Peter Teal does with his fellowship. You started your own running down a dream fellowship, I understand.

Bill Gurley: Yeah, it's uh it's targeted at a different demographic. It's called uh rdad.org runningdownadream.org. We're going to do $5,000 grants to people who want to chase their dreams but need some help. And so there is an application process like Teal Fellows and other programs and we've been out talking to those people. Um but we're we're we're actually live. We went live last week for the application. So if you know people who have read the book and are inspired and need some help, have them apply.

Jason: What's your take on all of this dumerism? Like if you're a young person and you're in college or you're in high school, is this is this much to do about nothing or how do you run down a dream in the face of something like that?

Bill Gurley: I fear that the a lot of people are in jobs they actually don't care about that much. And um there's a Gallup poll that backs this up. They came up put that word quiet quitters. They're like 59% of the people they surveyed are kind of ambivalent about their job. And when you're ambivalent about your job, you're not high agency. And so you don't lean in.

Bill Gurley: you hear that enthusiasm and that high agency and then you want to go try these things. And I think the best way to protect yourself from AI is to be the most AI enabled version of yourself you can be. But if you're ambivalent about your job, you're probably not doing that and you could be, you know, a sitting duck. So I think it's the mindset that's the problem.

Jason: I created an associate in training program for my firm cuz we want to like help people get into venture capital and we gave them a choice of assignments. One of them was to write coverage of one of our portfolio companies that's breaking out. and then we gave them another option to vibe code a very specific project I've wanted to have for our venture firm for a long time on competitive intelligence and I would say I think like maybe 80% of the students applying and we had four or 500 people apply for six positions 80% of them did the vibe coding and I was shocked I thought it would be the exact opposite.

Jason: Anybody can write, anybody can throw in JBT and get some output. But they they actually built software and th that's the scary thing. The students who graduated, at least this is my perception, the students who graduated like 5 10 years ago before AI, they're not AI first. They feel lost in a drift. They don't have agency. But the group coming out of college right now that cheated their way through school using Chad GBT, I'm joking, cheating, but I mean hacking. I I agree with that. So they were totally like, I know how to use these tools to get through my finals.

Chamath: Girly, I think you're saying something super important. I said this last week, which is nobody asks the warehouse worker at Amazon whether they actually want that job. And so to your point, job satisfaction isn't some external person judging your job to be valid and saying you must be able to have it. I think it should be asking the person that does the job, do you like it and do you want to keep it? And now this whole lie is kind of getting undone. The Goldman Sachs CEO said it. And now the entire Frontier Labs are all like, "Wow, it's going to be a bonanza of jobs."

Bill Gurley: Mark Cuban had had a great quote. He said there are two types of people in the world. Those that use AI to learn faster than they ever could before and those that use AI to avoid learning altogether. And I I think it's this notion of high agency or not. Are you leaning in and using this stuff to be ever more powerful in what you try and accomplish or are you using it, you know, as a cheat code? And if you're in the latter, yeah, you're probably at risk.

Bill Gurley: I do think that a lot of kids get exhausted because we've made high school and college such a grind that they think the learning ends the day they they walk out with their diploma. And as we all know, the best and brightest in all of our fields are on a constant learning journey. And so I I think the real test is if you're not proactively self-learning, then you're probably not tilting against something that you really adore and are fascinated by.

Sacks: With respect to new college grads, I was going to say that I think the single most marketable skill in the economy right now has got to be proficiency in Claude. If you're going into a firm right now and you're the only one who knows Claude, it would be like you're the only one who knows how to work a spreadsheet, the advantage would be enormous. Now, I think that that's probably a short-term arbitrage... but as a young college graduate right now, you have such an advantage if you're an AI native just knowing how to use these tools.

Sacks: our producer Nick has been doing with using Claude for you know he's been creating this daily briefing document. But actually the thing that was really impressive about it was that it predicted topics that I would specifically be interested in based on my previous comments on the pod and also it went back and looked at previous transcripts and what I had said and then had updates to those topics based on specific things I had said. So again it was highly highly contextual. But then I asked Nick, how did you generate that? and he showed me the the custom prompt that he designed for Claude and then the skills document and they were very long and detailed documents. They weren't written in code but they were very technical and I just realized looking at that that the average person is not going to be able to generate this.

Jason: the interesting thing uh Sachs is you can you just have to ask your AI you ask claude or chatgpt or whatever you're using hey I want you to make me a mega prompt... and it will actually suggest a prompt and then you can refine the prompt so you actually have a dialogue about a prompt as opposed writing the prompt yourself.

Sacks: by the way David what you said I think is true of almost every single job type like it's not just tech or programming if you're in marketing if you're in legal if you're in accounting... if you're the most AI savvy person of all your peers, you are golden. 10x more valuable than the next person who's not basically.

Jason: Producer Nick, explain the process.

Producer Nick: Yeah, once we got access to Claude Co-work and it had that like further expanded memory access. I thought it would be interesting to just start feeding every transcript into it and seeing if it could actually contextualize new stories that were coming out based on past things that you guys have said. And I gave it like a general prompt of what I wanted and I said, "How would you write a skills file or some training rules for this?" And it wrote all of it for me.

Chamath: The recursiveness of this is incredible. This is why people think, oh, it's just going to wipe out all the jobs. No, someone still has to supervise, iterate, validate, you know, all those kinds of things.

Jason: I encourage you to pop up Claude... and say, "What can I do to be better at my job?" and just start talking and literally if the more you talk and you can use voice uh you know text to voice I use whisperflow is a really cool program for this... it will build the structure around the two or three paragraphs that you give it as instructions... It is unbelievable what the blatheron prompt can get in terms of output.

Jason: We're going to start with the Pope. The Pope Leo, he's the 14th, released his first encyclical encyclical on AI. And it was long. 235 pages. In it, he warns business leaders to safeguard humanity from AI. His core argument is AI is not inherently evil, but technology is never neutral and that technology takes on the characteristics, wait for it, of those who build, finance, and control it. The Pope called for regulation of AI companies.

Jason: His central question, Saxs, is will AI be used to concentrate power in the hands of a few or will it serve everyone? What's your take on the Pope and his interest and his missives on AI and promoting a bit of AI regulation?

Sacks: Well, I very much agree with the Pope that the biggest risk of AI is a centralization of power and then its misuse against us um in some Orwellian way. I think it's government that's going to do that. I very much agree with him. The maybe where we end up in different places is he thinks that government regulation is the way to prevent this. And I would just say that we have to be careful not to empower government too much.

Sacks: This is a problem of political philosophy that goes all the way back to Socrates. It's called quis custodos custodes which is who will guard the guardians. The genius of the American founding... is that it was a second order solution to this question. Separation of powers. And that that is kind of my view on AI is that ultimately we have to have a solution of checks and balances. Right now we have a very competitive market. As long as the market is competitive, I would use that because I think competition generates the best outcomes.

Bill Gurley: So so this pope said that this encyclical was mirrored after one done by Leo I 13th in 1891. Leo the 13th encyclical warned that the industrial revolution was going to be bad for people. So let me tell you what happened from 1891 till today. Real wages went up 8 to 10x... global poverty went from 75% of humanity to under 10%. All those things happened because of technology, innovation, and capitalism, which is exactly what Leo the 13th was warning against. So he got it dead wrong.

Jason: I have to tell you that that Anthropic is a mystery to me. I've never ever seen a company that is both leading their field and the most negatively outspoken commenter on what they do. I I've just never seen it.

Bill Gurley: I've come up with a new theory. This I call it the Dr. Frankenstein theory. I've met people who I who I dare say think it's their responsibility and they're excited about building a species that's that's superior to humans. And then Daario wrote this blog post called Machines of Loving Grace... he's talking about in the future what are humans going to do because he believes in the massive abundance and UBI and that we won't have to work. it could be a capitalist economy of AI systems which then give out resources to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans.

Bill Gurley: So, I don't think they think they're writing software. I think they're midwifing a deity here.

Chamath: these are delusions of grandeur. They believe that they are so powerful, these individuals, that they can create God and that by creating God, they are like this Prometheus kind of species. It literally is the ultimate level of narcissism and delusion of grandeur to think you can create God.

Sacks: Well, I guess the question then is why are they pushing for the let's call it red capture agenda.

Chamath: That is very reductive game theory. So, if you want to be unexploitable... have three or four entities in a room, close the door behind you, and then dominate those other three or four entities, and then you set the rules. because the referees don't understand the game. If the refs don't understand the game, you'll run over the game.

Sacks: Now I think the issue is just you can see how this can lead to red capture, right? Which is if you brand yourself as the safe AI company and then try to characterize everybody else as a reckless player. This way of viewing the world leads to more centralization and I think that's dangerous. I mean, if AI is this very powerful technology, I think it needs to be decentralized so that all of us can protect ourselves to some degree, right?

Jason: I've been talking about AI sovereignty here for a bit... This is why it's super important that open-source, open-source agents and local hardware be able to run these models... And this is so paradoxical, Bill, that our adversary, the Chinese of all people, the Communist Party is leading the open-source movement and the United States is centralizing.

Sacks: Look, I Jacob, I agree with you about the importance of open source because open source means software freedom. You don't have to give up your privacy to again to some monopolist who's going to be, you know, in bed with the government or the deep state, right? It is the backstop.

Chamath: This next wave of the market evolution I think is going to be extremely high stakes and messy. Opus 47, GPT55, Sonnet 46 appear almost indistinguishable... The results suggest convergence. these things are getting commoditized way too quickly. And then you'd say, well, what's the ROI on all this incremental spend, which is a very interesting economic and investment question.

Bill Gurley: some of the smarter people in the open source community have suggested to me that we need more open-source connectors of types... the founders and developers that are out there should work on more of these interfaces and throw them into the open source world just to make it more exchangeable, swappable. They want abstraction above it. They want to sit in a control plane.

Sacks: I think where it's all leading to is an effort to ban open source models or open weight models. with open source models, the guardrails can be removed and therefore they're dangerous. You see this rhetoric already in anthropics blog posts. I think it's just a matter of time before they feel like they're at a position where maybe they can push for that type of ban directly.

Jason: we're going to have to talk for the 16th time in the last 18 months about AI's impact on labor because again this chaotic schizophrenic interpretation of the data continues. Cloudfare as we talked about last week, shout out Matt Prince. Zuck then paired his 8,000 cuts at meta with the fact that he has put uh spywear on everybody's laptop to study every employee to make their training data better. But on the other side of the table, Goldman Sachs's CEO, David Solomon, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times. The AI job apocalypse is overblown.

Sacks: my most contrarian take back in January on our prediction show is that AI would lead to job gains, not job loss. You have the CEO of Goldman Sachs writing in the New York Times. You had Sam and even Daario now walking back their claims of massive job loss. Software developers are not being laid off on net. In fact, job postings for software developers are at a three-year high, growing 15% year-over-year.

Chamath: let's be honest. Over the last five or 10 years, a lot of companies overhired. They need a scapegoat. They point to this thing. It's very simple to say. It's AI. But underneath that is not AI because we know this. It hasn't done anything measurable yet at the end consumption of these tokens. That's what's happening today.

Jason: I think you're wrong. I believe Zuckerberg is putting that software on people's computers in order to to find more jobs to eliminate... Amazon themselves, these are the savviest people in the world said, "We are going to eliminate 600,000 future positions." Every cab driver is losing their job. Every truck driver is losing their job in the next 10 years.

Sacks: Explain to me why job postings for software engineers are up 15% year-over-year despite the fact that code has now been fully automated. make something easier, more people do it, right? We have basically a 14x year-over-year increase in code generation. That code has to be managed by somebody.

Jason: Did you guys see what just hit the wire? an AI consultant revealed that one of their clients accidentally spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to set employee limits on clock usage.

Sacks: Oh my god. there's no question that token efficiency is going to be a big theme over the next year because the spend has been ramping up way faster than enterprise customers thought.

Jason: All right, everybody. This has been another amazing episode of the AllIn podcast. Thanks for coming. Bill, we missed you.

Chamath: I just want to just give a huge shout out to Tulsy Gabbard and specifically her husband Abraham. Going through some really tough stuff with cancer. He is going to kick its ass.

Jason: Cheers everybody. Uh that's episode 275 in the can. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Love you Blues.