Kling AI reaches 12M MAU, China's aging tech worker crisis, drama at ThinkingMachine, TBPN x CAA | Diet TBPN

Cling AI. Cling AI, the video generation video model has been on a tear. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal showing some pretty staggering Numbers. They hit 12 million monthly active users and they generated more than 20 million in revenue just last year. I wanted to dig in and understand where this came from. The history of Kuaishou, the Chinese company behind it. There's a new farmer filling up the trough for everyone. Cling has hit 12 million MAUs, 20 million revenue in the last month. Now they seem to be on the up and to the right curve. It's a pretty massive ramp. The product launched 18 months ago, but Cling is not its own startup. It is a new project from Kuaishou Technology. This is a Chinese company and the founders. I couldn't find a single product.

John, I'm going to blow your mind right now, please. Guess who worked at Kuaishow? He's been on the show.

Okay.

I share a name with him.

Wait, Connor Hayes.

No, no. Jordan Schneider.

Jordan Schneider worked at Kuaishou?

Yes.

No way.

Yes. Yes. He just responded to the daily newsletter.

Does he want to?

And said, lol. I worked at Kai show. What a comeback. Jordan, tell all. Jordan, come get on the show.

You're welcome. Come hang out if you want to.

I'll send him a note.

It'd be great to hear more of more of the story from him. He might be the only person we can get to go on the record about Kwai show because the founders, I don't think they've ever done a podcast appearance. They haven' been certainly on the victory lap podcast American circuit. Like many founders that get a company to this scale, Kuaishow is pretty old, especially for the AI boom. It launched in 2011 as a mobile app for creating and sharing GIFs. This was before vine and before Musical Ly. They were sort of like a precursor to all those, just by a year or two.

So you could almost say that Jordan Schneider made his money in GIFs.

I think so. I think he created TikTok basically. So there's some similar threads. So Dom Hoffman, the founder of vine, he worked at Yahoo before founding vine. And Alex Zhu at Musical Ly, worked at ebay and Microsoft and I think SAP as well. And so both of those companies, they had like big tech experience. Then they went and founded these companies. And the founders of Kuaishow, Suhua and Cheng Yi Xiao also did the same. One of them worked at Google, one of them worked at Hewlett Packard, and then they jumped into the social media Boom that was going on in the early aughts, like in or the late, I guess the late aughts, early 2000 and tens. Is there a word for the period between 2010, the teens, the 2010s. The tens. I don't know. But that era, like post, Facebook, there was Foursquare, Twitter, Pinterest, Snap, there were just like a new one every year was popping up. And so they jump in on this. And the mobile Internet was expanding really rapidly in China at that time. There was a big boom. There were a bunch of big winners that came out of that era. Kuaishou hit 100 million DAU by 2013. So basically 18 months, months after they launch. And they actually pivoted in that 18 month timeline from GIFs to videos. And so once they had the new product dialed, they ramped pretty quickly. Now there was a little bit of a slowdown between 2013 and 2019 because they didn't hit 200 million DAU until 2019. So they were sort of saturating then. But they were on a fundraising tear the whole time. They raised $350 million from Tencent in 2017. They integrated with WeChat to accelerate distribution. And the company was worth around $18 billion by 2018. Just seven years to the journey. So not bad. The Quiet Show IPO was a particularly crazy moment for the company. So they raised $5.4 billion at the IPO. They were massively oversubscribed for that. So they say, hey, we want to raise 5 billion. And 165 billion of demand shows up from the market. So retail investors just went insane. 165 billion of demand, only 5 billion for sale. And so the stock trades up 192% at the open and all of a sudden the company is worth $180 billion. And both of the founders are DECA billionaires. Pretty sick. That didn't last though. There was a massive sell off. And there were a couple, there were a couple like speed bumps that Kuaishou seemingly hit shortly after going public. So China had a big crackdown on in regulation on local tech companies. ByteDance became much more dominant as a competitor and was, you know, had Kuaishou in their sights. And then the Kuai show user growth just sort of slowed down. And so there were a couple misses on Dau MAU growth. The metrics weren't looking as good. And so the investors said, hey, we're rotating to other things. They were pulling out. And so the Stock traded down 80% within six months. So not great. But today the market cap's around $40 billion. Like it's still a very real business. 20 this is all USD. I converted everything so 40 billion market cap 20 billion revenue 11 billion gross profit, net profit 2.6 billion. So that's like a lot of cash flow, a lot of net income to work with, certainly enough to do some training runs, start a NEO lab or a the video lab or you know, take some new bets. That's exactly what they did. 2024 they launched the first version of cling. And they did this just three months after OpenAI demoed Sora. So it was kind of like the Chinese answer to Sora. Since then they've updated Clang 30 times and carved out a nice little place in the grid of trade offs around model performance and cost. For cinematic footage, people often recommend VO3 still, but for cling, it has some really strong characteristics in motion control and in physics simulations. Like there's a number of places where cling's been outperforming there and then there's a number of other sort of niche applications where cling's really great. And at $0.10 per second pricing has been very attractive relative to some of the other options in the market. They've certainly come out as a frontier quality model at a very affordable price. Interestingly, Kuaishou claims that KLING is gross profit margin positive and so now it's unclear. That doesn't include training and we don't really, I mean it's gross profit so it doesn't include the hundred or so R and D people on the team. My, my question is like what happens if they try and scale another order of magnitude? Will they be paying more for inference? Will they be able to get those chips? Because there's still this big debate over how many Nvidia GPUs should be able to be sent over to China. It honestly gets me excited about MSL dropping a video model because a lot of the same sort of like precursor elements in terms of like the training data in the ecosystem. When you think about just the raw data in reels, it could wind up being a model that's a little bit more opinionated. Maybe it has some mid journey sprinkled in there. Like I think that the msl, the pressure on MSL has been intense and the initial Vibes launch was not loved. But they certainly have the compute, they have the team now they, they have the data. Like they have all the key ingredients to a really successful video generation model launch.

I can't wait to see Meta's next real launch here. They have so many advantages. They have the talent. Now the pressure is immense, but they should be able to come out with something that's super competitive.

Yeah, year to date, Kuaishow's up 23%, so they've been on a run and there's a lot of investor optimism about Kuaishou's potential to monetize AI. The company's AI powered video and graphics generation capabilities will likely drive earnings over the next few years, S and P Global Ratings analysts wrote in a recent note. That could lower content creation and advertising costs and boost content creation on Kuaishou Short Form Video Platform the company has the second largest independent short form video platform after ByteDance's Douyin, which is basically the Chinese version of TikTok. And so is this going to be super important to the AI race in America? Probably not. Like we're still living in a world where you have OpenAI, anthropic Google really battling it out and then Xai is doing interesting stuff, MSL has interesting stuff and then there's a couple NEO labs that are maybe doing interesting stuff. The Chinese labs haven't been putting a ton of pressure, but I think this is interesting because we're actually getting firm data on how these products are monetizing. Of course there is another interesting, just sort of like nuanced narrative that I hadn't really noticed while I was digging into Kuaishou. One is this China's aging tech workers issue the curse of 35 they're firing unks over there. That's what's happening. They're firing.

You can't even be an unk.

You truly can't. You truly can't. Discrimination against older employees particularly apparent in sector where executives openly state a preference for youth and so different approach. We've had back and forth in VC Twitter about oh, should your team be really young and cracked? Should you get the experts in there? What's you know, obviously in America that you cannot discriminate based on age. But that hasn't stopped plenty of people from opining about what the correct mix is, whether or not you should follow those rules. But there's an article in the in the Financial Times that sort of has some charts here about how big tech groups in China have been downsizing in the past few years. We can go through that. But let's read through a little bit of this China's aging tech workforce first.

Hint Lao Bai, 34, received that his position at short video app Kwai show might be at risk was when a 35 year old colleague was sacked. I was both shocked and anxious. I realized that our situations were very similar and the same thing could soon happen to me, said Liebi Lao Bai, using his nickname to avoid repercussions from his former employer. Just months from his 35th birthday, the developer was dismissed, another victim of the group's reorganization, known internally as Limestone. Wow, they're giving code names to age discrimination. That's insane. Brutal. Kuaishou is pushing out junior workers in their mid-30s. Lao Bai was told his termination was part of the company's overall redundancy program. The so called curse of 35 has long plagued workers across white collar professions, with older staff widely perceived as being less willing to put up with long working hours because of responsibilities home as China's tech sector reels from Beijing's crackdown, this this article is from 2024, by the way, and economic slowdown. Tens of thousands of jobs have been cut over the past several months and older workers have are seen as particularly vulnerable. Technology companies have made no secret of favoring young and unmarried workers. Ageism in the tech sector is a big problem. There's a perception that older workers don't keep up with the latest technological developments, they don't have the energy to keep up the hard work, and that they're too expensive. Thankfully, our very own John Coogan, who is you're very much keeping up with the latest technological developments. Otherwise we wouldn't be talking about this. Because you didn't just read about Kling, you studied and you wrote about it. While China's labor law prohibits employers from discriminating on the grounds of attributes such as ethnicity, gender and religion, it does not explicitly refer to age race. Whoa.

Between 20 and 30, most people are full of energy. You're more willing to march forward and sacrifice yourself for the company. But once you become a parent, your body starts aging. How are you going to keep up with the 996 schedule? ByteDance, which owns the video app TikTok, and e commerce giant Pinduoduo have some of the youngest recruits among Chinese tech companies. Data suggests the average age of their workers is just 27. According to the latest figures, the average age of the worker in China is 80 is according to the All China Federation of Trade Unions. This trend has become only more entrenched with progressive waves of layoffs. And this is the chart that I wanted to show you. So big tech groups in China have been downsizing in the past few years. So this is 2021, 2022 and 2023 for Alibaba, Baidu, Kuaishou and Tencent and they're all downsizing across those three years.

It's worth noting I pulled up Mag 7 employee counts and every single company in the increase headcount over that same period that we just showed.

Yeah, yeah, there have been like periods of layoffs, but even when Mark Zuckerberg comes out and says hey, we're laying off a thousand people in the Metaverse team and the Reality Labs team, it's like well he's adding tons of people to the AI teams and tons of people to the Instagram teams and threads teams and Facebook core and marketing and salespeople and events people. Like the whole organization is just growing so fast that one niche like layoff is not really going to cause a multi year trend. Back to timeline the messy drama that dealt a blow to one of AI's hottest startups. This is an exclusive in the Wall Street Journal After a relationship with a colleague, a Thinking Machines co founder, had his role changed. Months later, he was fired after a contentious meeting Mira Moradi's meeting with her co founders going off the rails Marathi, the chief executive of AI startup Thinking Machines Lab, had shown up for work on Monday last week expecting to have a one on one with Barrett Zoef, her chief technology officer, according to people familiar with the matter. Last summer she had learned that Zof was in relationship with a colleague in the months since she had expressed repeated concerns about his lack of productivity, according to the people. She was invited instead to an impromptu meeting with Zof, another co founder and a third employee. The three told her they agreed they disagreed with the direction of the company and that they were considering leaving. They asked Zof to be given charge of all technical decision making, according to the people. Murati responded Zof was already CTO and asked why he hadn't been doing his job for months. So they're clearly beefing. That's a very funny, it's a funny request. Like what was he doing as CTO if he didn't have full control? But I mean obviously CEO can override all sorts of stuff and there's other people around the table and you know, titles only mean so much. There's soft power all over the place. So two days later, Zof was fired. Within hours, all three had signed offers to rejoin OpenAI, the AI lab that they ditched a year ago to join Marathi's fledgling startup. The departures are a sign of how the heated AI race that is consuming hundreds of billions of dollars and transforming the economy is as much a battle for talent as technology. For all the high tech advancements AI startups are sprinting to develop, they are ultimately at the mercy of the humans power.

Do you think this was a three hour talent acquisition process? Do you think OpenAI just looked at, checked the timeline and said, hey, we got three people that are on the market, maybe we should hire them?

It seemed like they were talking before.

They entered the portal and they immediately entered the portal.

The trade portal for sure. That's exactly what happened.

No, I think very obvious that the conversation had been ongoing. It's very likely. I would assume they had already agreed to terms.

Yeah, it seemed like it.

Prior to the news going out, 20.

People from OpenAI left during the Thinking Machines Foundation. Addressing Zof's departure to Thinking Machines employees, Marathi said there had been multiple issues with his performance, trust and conduct, According to an internal message viewed by the Wall Street Journal. Zof said she fired him after he exposed an intent to take a job elsewhere. Thinking Machines terminated my employment only after it learned I would be leaving the company, full stop. At no time did Thinking Machines Lab cite me on any performance reasons or.

Unethical John, I'm breaking up with you. You're like, no, you're fired.

I'm breaking up with you. It does feel like a little bit of that going on. But yeah, there's a war for narrative here between, between Barrett and Mira. Clearly they didn't. So he says Thinking Machines didn't cite any performance reasons or unethical conduct as part of the reason for the termination. And any suggestion otherwise is false and defamatory, Zof said in a statement to the Journal. The exits, coupled with fellow co founder Andrew Tullock's decampment to Meta last fall, leave Thinking Machines with just three of its original six founders. Mirati's issues with Zof started over the summer when she began to suspect he was having a relationship with a colleague who with whom he had lobbied to bring over from OpenAI, according to people familiar with the situation. In responses to questions from the Journal, Zov said that many people at Thinking Machines wanted to hire the woman, including Marathi. At the time, Murati was in the process of raising one of the largest seed rounds in Silicon Valley history. The company ultimately raised? 2 billion at a $12 billion valuation. When she confronted Zof about the possibility of an undisclosed relationship with a female employee who was junior to him at the company but did not report to him, he initially denied it, according to to people familiar with the situation. By June, however, both Zof and the woman had told Moratti about the relationship, which had begun when they were colleagues at OpenAI. The woman then left the company and returned to OpenAI, which is sort of a wrinkle in this. Zof told his boss that he had been manipulated by the woman into a relationship, according to people familiar with the matter. Shortly after that conversation, he took a break from work.

Okay, I gotta. I generally think that the Mira.

She told me it was cuffing season. I didn't know what it meant, so I just said, okay, I got cuffed. Is that what happened?

Yeah, I mean, I think. Just saying, like, I was manipulated into becoming the significant other. You know, you gotta take a little responsibility.

You know, everyone is assuming that this is a romantic relationship. They never reported that this is a romantic relationship. They just said that he had a relationship with someone else, and it was undisclosed. And I think that more companies need to be clear about the rules around disclosures of relationships. If you and Tyler start an esports team, for example, like, you would have a relationship. You would be teammates on playing Call of Duty, and if you didn't disclose that to me, I would feel left out. I'd be like, why don't I. Why am I not on the team? If I find out that Tyler and Scott are going off and drinking a bunch of athletic brews every night without me, That's a relationship that bros. And it wasn't disclosed.

It wasn't disclosed, and you might be very angry. I might be angry they didn't disclose.

So I think relationship disclosures need to go beyond romantic relationship disclosures. If you're just broing down with people.

That actually is kind of a real thing sometimes. Catching up Monday after the weekend. So somebody's like, oh, yeah, I was hanging with so and so on Saturday.

Like, wait, where was my invite?

You guys hang out on Saturday?

What, you didn't disclose that relationship?

Korean barbecue.

Yeah. Oh, so you have a relationship where you go to Korean barbecue together. Okay. And you just didn't think to tell the rest of the company?

Kbbq.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I think there's. You know, I like to imagine there's some kind of, like, Shakespearean tragedy here, right? Where it's like the Montagues and the Capulets. That's OpenAI and thinking machines.

Oh, yes.

And it's these forbidden lovers who can't.

Be together, but now they are. They're united because everyone is an OpenAI. Even though. I mean, if you go to the Journal and you Say I've been manipulated by that woman who's now my colleague, because they both work at OpenAI now. Right. So that's odd. So the woman left the company Thinking Machines and returned to OpenAI. But they were both at OpenAI. They both went to Thinking Machines and then they both went back to OpenAI.

I still think this is a company that would have a pretty meaningful valuation in an Aqua Hire context. Right. Like if Amazon were to come and buy them, how much would Amazon pay to get John Schulman and Mira Morati, like, at Amazon should be able to.

Clear the pref stack for sure.

Yeah. By like a long shot, you would imagine. So.

I wanted to look at this photo of Davos. It's AI generated, but it captures a good vibe. A whole bunch of private planes parked there. That's not real, but I like that Kevin Kwok contextualize it anyway, saying, this looks like Hoth Echo Base. The Demis and Dario are apparently just brought in Davos. I love it. Demis Hassabas is CEO of Google DeepMind at Davos. Quote. When told that Dario Amadei was here earlier today, his face lit up. Two minutes later, he was talking about a CERN like collaboration for AI. Once the labs are close to AGI, they're just stoked on each other. I'm on pretty good terms with pretty much all of the other leaders at the leading labs. I love Ilya and we're good friends. You love it. Just some positivity hanging out at Davos. Demis said he thinks entry level jobs and internships might fall away due to AI sees consistency as the biggest problem with current agents. Advice for college graduates get incredibly proficient with these new tools. AI agents. Yeah, we were debating this earlier, like, the role of a junior engineer is. Is going away, but is it possible that it just changes what makes a senior engineer that much better with an AI tool that they don't need anyone else who can potentially use AI tools as well. How much of this is something where, I mean, to go back to the Chinese young hiring boom, there's an element where, I'm sure there's companies where you have older software engineers who are more resistant to adopt AI technology and you actually be better off with a young.

Here's a tough question for you, Tyler. What. What are you fantastic at? That AI is bad at.

Walking around, being physical, physically embodied.

That's the last.

So maybe that's like, for China, it's like, maybe the, you know, Silicon Valley has kind of found like pederasty from first principles, maybe. You know, it's just a similar thing over there.

Right.

There's actually a lot of value, I think, like, so generally, like, I'm kind of, I've always gone between like, is our jobs actually going to go away?

Yeah, yeah.

Or are they just going to get like, more fake? Are there just going to be no junior jobs in like five years or are they just going to be like, you know, you're in the office because, like, it's like people like having other people in the office and stuff like this. I think I'm probably more in the camp of like, you just don't need to hire new people.

Yeah.

So first of all, it's a, it's a pleasure to be on the gloom and doom panel.

Yeah, we're not.

1920S were an extraordinary period. As I said at the beginning. It's not preordained that it has the.

End note of the 1920s, which was, of course, the Great Depression.

Andrew.

So let's, let's take a step back and talk about where we are right here, right now. The, the area of recklessness is the, is the spending of governments around the world who are all, with little exception, all spending well beyond their means. That's the recklessness of this moment in history. This is not a parallel to the 1920s in terms of the recklessness of the, of the private capital markets. It's a story of the recklessness of government spending within the private sector. There's a huge question as to where I will take us. And I was carefully taking notes and listening to what Larry has to say or to what Madame Lagarde has to say, because this is one of the big issues of our moment. Will I create the productivity acceleration that is honestly this hoped for in Washington and in the halls of government around the world as a ways to overcome the profit spending that we're currently engaged in. The world, the world needs a savior. And the hope is that AI is the savior that we need for productivity. And the challenge with this is it is. It may or may not be. We just don't know yet. Now there's a tremendous amount of hype around AI and in some sense the large AI companies need to create that hype to raise the tens or actually hundreds of billions of dollars.

Hear that, Tyler?

That are going to the field. You wouldn't be able to raise hundreds of billions of dollars. We'll spend, and Larry can help correct me on this, but roughly $600 billion this year in capex for data centers the United States.

I Think it's a be larger.

But does that mean that it's getting hyped up too much or it's just the hype is required as a, as a sales mechanism. Go ahead.

Larry's backing you up, Tyler. All right, let's play the next video which was the one I was originally talking about, which is talking about job loss.

What AI has done is it has re empowered the head of technology in every business in the United States States and it has pushed budgetary resources into the hands of, of the chief Technology officer. So what you're seeing across American business is actually the impact of American businesses spending more on digitization writ large of which AI is just one component.

You know, as Dario Amadeus says, you know, half of all entry level white collar jobs will, you know, be gone in the next five years. Is it that kind of change or.

You know, put yourself in his shoes. How, how much money does the AI community need to raise over the next five years?

He's wrong about this, right? Demos doesn't spend the United States this year over half Google's doing this with.

Cash flow over $500 billion.

Like that's true for every other lab lead. Except for demons you would expect.

You're going to make a promise, you're going to profound.

Yeah, but the question was about Daria.

And the question is where will I land in productivity gains at the end of the day in certain areas we know it's going to be profound, whether it's call centers, whether it's helping to improve the productivity of software engineers. But in a number of white collar jobs. There was a, there was a recent Harvard paper on this. They called it a work slop, that it looks good, but if you sort of peel back the onion, the substance is there.

This is, I mean this was the. Probably the story that got reported on the least out of Davos over the last 24 hours, but is arguably the most important, the most expensive car in the world. Everyone wants to know, of course it is the car that Jensen bought his parents. So let's pull up this clip. I love it.

My only regret was at the ipo, after the ipo, I wanted to buy my parents something nice. And so I sold Nvidia stock at a valuation of $300 million. The company was at a valuation of $300 million. And I bought them a Mercedes S Class. It is the most expensive car in the world, maybe a billion dollar car. I don't know if I have the math right there, but it seems like.

Yeah, around 65k it seems like the.

Stock might be up 15,000x or something. I don't know. I mean, it's definitely up a thousand X, right? Because it's, yeah, 300 million. 300 billion and then you get another zero. So 10,000 X. I bought a TV with a Bitcoin. Terrible. Not even 4K things in the trash now. It was like $1,000 back then. OpenAI will reveal will unveil its first AI earbuds dubbed Sweet Pea, in September this year. And shipments are expected to reach 40 to 50 million units in 2027. Makes a ton of sense. You know, you're chatting with OpenAI, you're chatting with ChatGPT, you got Jony, I've on the team, former Apple, and you put something together that's your always on AI assistant that you're chatting with. But 40 to 50 million units, that's a lot. The Amazon echo in year two sold 11 million units. The Xbox Series X X, 16 million units in year two. The iPhone. The iPhone in year two, 17 million units. The Apple Watch did 20 million units in year two. The PS5, massive success. Hugely anticipated product. The PS5 shipped 30 million units in year two. AirPods Now AirPods did do 50 million. If the ChatGPT OpenAI earbuds, dubbed Sweetpea Perform as well as AirPods, you could see 50 million units. But it's a tall order from the go. Very, very tall order.

Consumer hardware.

We didn't even talk about CIA. We are officially signed with CIA. We went Hollywood Mode. That's very exciting.

I think everyone's, yeah, very, very excited.

We're pleased to be partnered with them. We put up a trading card.

We're very excited team. They're going to be helping us navigate the entertainment landscape. Yeah, very excited.

Yeah. We went down, we took some headshots at CA HQ also, you know, I like to.

I wish we had to make them a little goofy.

The Creative Artists Agency, sort of the anthropic of agencies. Creative Artists Agency was formed by five agents. They were at WME, they were at William Morris Agency in 1975. Who you got? There's a dinner. You got Michael Ovitz, Michael Rosenfeld, Ronald Meyer and Roland Perkins and William Haber. And they're at this dinner and they decide to create their own agency. What happens? They're like, okay, we need some financing. We're gonna start a rival agency. We're leaving wme, we're starting CIA. What happens before they can get financing? They all get fired. They all get fired. Seriously, this is real. This is on the Wikipedia.

It sounds like thinking machines. Dynamic.

Yeah. No, it really is like AI lab talent wars all over again. Of course, CIA was incorporated in Delaware and had a $35,000 line of credit and a $21,000 bank loan. They rented a small office in Century City and within a week they sold a game show called Rhyme and Reason, the Little Rich show, and the Jackson 5. An early plan was to form a medium sized full service agency, share proceeds equally and do without name plates on doors or formal titles or individual client lists with guidelines like be a team player and return phone calls promptly. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. Is that the bomb? The bomb has been planted. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow at 11am sharp.

Cheers.

Goodbye. It.