AI Safety Timeline Takeover, Bending Spoons Acquires Miro, iPhone Duo Reactions | Diet TBPN

105 days.

105 days till Christmas. Get ready. Should we do a little bit of a news roundup? We have Y Combinator Demo Day going on today. We got Garry Tan coming on the show, 11:25. Then we're going back to back with 5 different startups that are in this YC batch, doing everything from humanoid robots to satellites to AI agents and credit cards, fintech. We're going all over the place, giving you a tour of what's going on in the startup world, which I Which I personally enjoy because it's a good way to sort of ground yourself in what's happening in the— at the early stage. There's so much discussion about what's going on among the big labs and Apple, obviously, in the news yesterday. It can be all-encompassing. But the big story—

It's time to talk to the future.

Talk to the future of the next decade?

No, that's really what it gives you a little bit of insight into what things are going to look like in a decade.

Yeah.

don't think we're gonna be here in a decade.

They don't. But that's okay. That's one of them.

Never black pill. I saw a good post this morning. Josha Box said, if you think AI will lead to human extinction by 2030, I will take that bet. If we are still alive by December 31st, 2030, you pay me $1 million USD. If not, I will pay you $10 million USD.

That's a good, good, good joke.

Take it.

Yeah.

There's a lot of people out there that should take the bet, I think.

Why? There's no— I mean, that's the whole joke.

No, I know.

But yeah, I mean, with a lot of these, the arguments break down, a lot of things break down. It's also just so difficult to put a P-doom over time because you have to time-bound it because, you know, general scientists will say humanity will go extinct eventually. The default number is 10 to the 100 years. That's a googol years from now. It's heat death of the universe. The stars collapse.

Yeah.

Billion years, we're going to be in trouble because the sun will be larger than the Earth, will have expanded to become encompassing the Earth. So you got to get off Earth in the next billion years. We're working on that with SpaceX. Elon occasionally delayed. I think he's going to make it before the next billion years. The AI thing, obviously much more pressing, all sorts of hacks and agentic capabilities, lots of debate going on and a wall-to-wall press tour from a lot of the safety community. Daniel from AI 2027 was on Joe Rogan. It was an interesting listen. He makes a lot of good points. He breaks things down for a broader audience. And then Rogan will take him in these very funny directions, just being like, yeah, these AI agents are crazy. Let's talk about UFOs. It's actually like the meme.

Yeah.

They're like, oh yeah, like, like, have you heard about remote viewing? And, uh, and he breaks down remote viewing for him. And Daniel has to be like, well, I'm more skeptical of that, but I'm a real believer in x-risk. And So I think the net effect is going to be more awareness about the topic, more discussion about the topic. It might just wind up muddling it because people now put x-risk in the aliens, UFOs, remote viewing camp as like, oh, it's like a fun thing that Joe Rogan talks about. It's like becomes more abstract as opposed to being more concrete. But I don't really know. We'll see. What did AI 2027 predict for September of 2026? They said this is the stage where AI becomes economically disruptive and starts accelerating AI research itself. We got the second part. The labs are all saying we have an automated AI research intern.

Just an intern.

Intern?

Just an intern.

Yeah, but that's accelerating and the models seem to be getting better at a faster clip. The economically disruptive is the capability. Jobs, junior software engineering faces major disruption. People managing and checking AI teams prosper. So junior software engineering, major disruption. We'll see. We'll see if that plays out this month. The job market has been pretty strong. We mapped that there's something like 17,000 monthly AI-related job losses, but that's less than 1% of the 1.7 million jobs that are lost every month. But then of course there are more than 1.7 million new jobs and new hires because people change jobs a lot. And so that's often, what's going on, markets and politics. The scenario forecasts a 30% stock market rise during 2026 and a 10,000-person anti-AI protest and growing defense contracts.

That seems fine. Yeah, it feels notable that we haven't had a protest that big.

There's been a protest. There was a protest in San Francisco, a safety-led protest.

It was not nearly 10,000 people.

I think it was like more like under 100, but dozens. But yeah, I mean, it seems like the Joe Rogan experience, the national news tour, if you're gonna get 10,000 people in the streets, This is this is a key step in the in the chain.

Well, Cheryl Crow was over on Instagram highlighting AI risk, and someone was saying Sherry Oteri. Is that is that a celebrity? Something says take to the streets like they did in Albania. All of us, so we can't be ignored. So there's I guess calls for protests.

Yeah, and there was another there was another risk incident reported by the New York Times today. Anthropic says it blocked possible efforts to build biological weapons in a new report. The AI startup. The startup added that it could not determine if the research was legitimate or nefarious, leading the company to shut down the work. So some scientists were using an Anthropic model to work on biological research, and the Anthropic team flagged it as, hey, this could be in the, in the line of a bioweapon. We don't know that that's what this person was trying to do, but we're going to shut it down because, of course, a lot of the research that goes into building a nuclear power plant is the same that goes into a nuclear bomb. And same thing. These are a lot of dual-use technologies. Anyway, anything else to say about Jacob Coxon, who I think will have much more news? He went on Fox and Anderson Cooper, CNN, and I'm sure there will be a much deeper dive at some point. It feels like there's going to be a— it is interesting that with the launch of the Post and the Wall Street Journal article, there was not a 1-hour, 3-hour podcast. Like, we didn't get our situational awareness. Like, I want the 5-hour sit-down with somebody.

Based on the interviews, It doesn't really feel like he's got an hour of content.

Okay.

Maybe he does.

But it's the best because you can just tell the story of the Terminator for an hour and take someone on that journey. And that can actually be in service of updating people about x-risk. You can tell the full story of how you think things might play out. There's so many different scenarios that are the bad ending worth avoiding. You can illustrate that. I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I thought it was I think it's coming.

I think it's coming. Refresh your podcast player in a week.

Let's pull up this clip. This is from Fox News last night. That industry needs to be regulated as soon as possible.

Did you work with any third parties as far as this whistleblowing and coming out?

Not at all. This is entirely my own personal concerns about safety and things that I've seen personally and conversations I've had. He's serious that they think that industry—

A lot of people are keying on to the background here. They're like, wait, this guy just He quit yesterday. And he already has a podcast studio. People are like, is that someone else's podcast studio? And so I looked at the image, tried to figure out whose podcast studio he's in. It's Call Her Daddy.

Boom. Yeah, this goes way deeper. Welcome to Call Her Daddy. I have been so excited to meet— I can't believe we've never really met. Surprise. There's a chance we could all die like that. That is coming soon. Thank you for spending the time with me. I do expect it at some point as they dig in here based on how much.

Yeah.

Sort of, it seems like there's very much a significant push from the overarching AI safety community to make this week all about the safety risk.

Yeah, he clarified this a little bit on Anderson Cooper saying that he worked with a bunch of friends and where's the line between friends and professional, like, we're all a big family here, we're all friends. So the answer could be muddled. I don't know. I'm sure we'll find out more. more soon. Anyway, uh, you think he's gonna launch a Neo Lab? Think he's gonna drop a coin, book, movie? There's gonna be something. You know, the story's not over. Story's not over. There's gonna be something. Maybe he launches a software as a service company.

It's crazy.

And then his spoon gets back. Yeah. Um, trying to transition here.

No, it's, uh, somebody just said, uh, Sebastian says he's a decel with a crazy P doom. That's a quote from Mountain Head. Oh yeah. Remember? Which is now out maybe a year.

Yeah, I remember you watched it.

Which is, um, yeah, yeah, maybe.

But that was a sort of a niche film. It didn't, it didn't go as big as—

Yeah, I didn't think it was a good film, but it had some funny moments.

And it was about like an AI apocalypse, right? They go to like a—

Yeah, yeah, but it was around all about deepfakes.

They go to a bunkie.

Yeah.

Is there a bunkie?

There's a bunkie.

Okay. Yeah, maybe I gotta watch Mountainhead now.

It's all about the, the doom scenario was around deepfakes.

Oh yeah.

Humanity thinking that there was like Something crazy going on. More conflicts happening, which would create actual wars.

See, that's a great— I don't know that I'm super, like, worried about that particular scenario, but you could take me on that journey for 20 minutes in a long-winded answer on a podcast, and I would be entertained. I think that there is material there. And I did see genuinely a lot of, like, sort of AI safety sceptics just asking for more storytelling around how things go bad. It's so easy to condense a PDoM down to a single number, but I think people like stories. They want something that actually illustrates the chain of events that lead to the bad scenario, as opposed to these vague things where it's like, I have a lot of authority, I have a lot of insight, and 5% or 20%. That obviously— I mean, it does go viral, but clearly there were people that had demand for more of a story that they could track and they could— And they could falsify individual. Keith Rabois yesterday was was was struggling with this, where it was like it's hard to falsify someone saying 10% in the next 10 years, but it's it's easier to falsify about like well the the nuclear weapons will be fired at this time, and this is what's going to happen, and this is how they get also the the job loss stuff. Totally, totally. Anyway, we'll do a quick roundup of the rest of the news. Should we talk about Nvidia? Should we talk about Bending Spoons? What's interesting to you, Jordi?

Let's start with Bending Spoons. Bending Spoons acquires Miro for $1.79 billion.

Yes.

Paul Bonnet, a GP over at 20VC, says, but who gets the money? My usual breakdown. So this is 89% below the last round and at less than 3 times revenue.

Whoa, Miro was valued at $17.5 billion?

Yeah.

That's really high. Wow.

Yeah. So anyways, I, you know, we actually don't need to dive through all this stuff a lot. You know, investors are getting—

Yes, but I am interested in the Benning Spoon strategy because Airtable, Miro— Miro felt like modern collaborative slides and like mood boards. And then Airtable felt like the modern Excel sheet. And it feels like they're trying to maybe piece together a bundle, but I don't know if that's actually how Benning Spoon thinks about this. It feels like in the past they've been very interested interested in just— it's a known brand with a strong business that they can run efficiently and it stands alone. But for the first time, I'm seeing glimpses of something that could be like a portfolio or a roll-up where if you have Airtable, you get Miro for free or vice versa. And there's cross-selling options because if you like these more modern tools, like a Miro, like an Airtable, I've seen both of these deployed in the same startup. And the startup, there's always this tension between, wait, we're paying $20 a seat for this, $20 a seat for that, or we could just do $15 for Google and we get all of them. So you actually wind up with a portfolio and I don't know, maybe the sum is greater than its parts. What do you think?

Potentially. But yeah, it was very— it's just insane to me that this was a $17 billion company just a little bit ago. And ultimately, this is why I have a lot of fear around like some of these like later stage or even like later stage rounds that are happening right now because There are clearly— there's certain teams that are fantastic, great categories, great— on the path to being great businesses. And yet many of them feel so far from being on that path to being priced at $100 or $1 trillion or whatever the number is. And we're going to see this exact same thing play out right now where there's companies that are around this valuation now that, that 3 years from now will sell at a 90% discount.

Yeah, I'd be interested to see if Like, have the metrics at Miro changed in the age of AI? Because you could imagine that people, if they need a collaborative mood board or slide deck, they can vibe code their own tool, but it's still a little bit of a hassle to deploy that and maintain it, even if you can clone it. So the SaaS apocalypse was fully averted by the Salesforces of the world, and the revenue decline never showed up. in the SaaS companies. And so the SaaS apocalypse was canceled. But was there a micro SaaS apocalypse that did show up at this level, and that's why we're seeing these deals? I don't know. Do you think this is all just like a promotion for David Sennra's new episode with Luca Ferrari? Because David Sennra says, perfect timing. I have an episode with Luca Ferrari coming out this Sunday. Isn't that great? He's just like, thank you.

Thank you for lining up this deal with you coming on my podcast. No, Jason says 3x, paying 3x ARR at $600 million of ARR, over 750 customers paying over $100,000 a year, cash flow positive, man. But Jamie Quint says multiple years of 5% ARR growth will do that.

Yeah, if you're not accelerating. I mean, the entire multiple is based on growth, so there's not going to be a significant acceleration.

You got to be Growing.

Yeah, it's true.

So another acquisition news. Oh yeah, we got a card out, but Tailwind got acquired by Shopify. That's very cool. Remember, if you remember, I think Tailwind was accelerating AI software development but wasn't directly a beneficiary.

And didn't they get like sort of a bunch of people in the industry? I think maybe Google, right? Wasn't Logan?

I think Logan was a big part of it.

I am going to provide a grant to keep these guys going. I thought that was awesome. That was like such a cool community moment. Um, and interesting that they now like found a proper landing spot, which is cool. Uh, yeah, very optimistic scenario.

Uh, we had a little bit of iPhone Duo coverage yesterday. Yeah, we didn't see the crease.

We had a key question in the chat from Sally Analysis. They asked, what do you guys think about the crease? I couldn't see it in any of those Apple renders. Apple seemed to get really good with the lighting placement to not show up the crease. True, my accurate take, I don't care about this. That is not enough of a crease to matter at all.

Yeah.

Especially if this is a mode where you're using 2 apps, you don't care about the middle at all. I have seen guys on football days have 4 TVs next to each other with full bezels. Like, you can see the line going down the center of the TV and they just don't care. So like, this is not a big deal. Now, the interesting thing is like, will it be an issue if you're like watching a movie on this thing on a plane? I think maybe, but I think the crease will probably completely disappear when you're actually locked in on a film. But I think the bigger thing is the aspect ratio is kind of weird for modern content because we have films which are widescreen and YouTube videos which are 16:9, and those will show black bars at the top and the bottom.

Yeah.

Or you could zoom in and then you're cropping the sides. not a great experience. Some of the demos, some of the demo video that Apple showed was super cool because it was shot in this like 4:3. So maybe you go back and you get some 4:3 content from like the '70s and '80s and that displays really well because you don't need to do the pan and scan thing anymore. But— and then the vertical content will also look like bars on the side like you're on an iPad. So I wonder if that will be annoying. It'll probably melt into the background. I think people will still like it. I'm very interested in the mix. Like, what percent— like, will this be as popular as the iPhone Pro has been relative to the iPhone? Will this be 10% of overall phone sales from this cycle? Will it be 1% or 30%? It's the fact that it's different, the fact that it's a way to stand out. It's their most foldable phone ever.

Yeah, this was a comment from—

Thank you to the listener.

Prolific. Spotify, the Spotify comedian Dave. He commented yesterday it's their most foldable iPhone yet. It is, and it really is. So really, it's like when they introduced the iPhone Duo 2, which will Quattro. I think they're going to have to multiply them and get the iPhone Quattro. Yeah, then they'll say it's our most foldable iPhone yet.

It has four until it's just a full accordion like a fan that just fans out.

Yeah, the fan, the iPhone fan.

Yeah.

It's just like this, you know.

Yeah, 20 different folds. What was funny is I'm going to put you on blast here a little bit as you come in and you're like, yeah, like this just makes me want an iPhone 18 Pro. And you were laying it out and you were like, it's their best iPhone yet. It's just a great phone. They made it thinner, lighter, faster, better battery life. And I was like, this is your joke. You fell for your own joke. But it is sort of like this It could be for some people like an anti-halo phone. For some people, it's gonna be the halo where they're like, I wanted something different. I want something bigger. I want the best thing. I got that. For other people, they're gonna be like, oh, thank God I don't have to deal with the foldable thing. Just give me the cheaper, you know, $2,000 iPhone Pro Max 18 Plus, you know, all these crazy things. Yeah.

Blake Scholl jumped in and said, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he went to great care to explain why such a product category should exist to begin with. Apple seems to have made a pretty great version of a foldable phone without saying why foldable phones deserve to exist. I think it would be somewhat uncomfortable for them to explain why exactly you need a bigger screen. It's like, hey, we know some of you guys are spending hours and hours and hours a day— This is such a bad idea.

Okay, continue. Just finish your argument so I can rebut it.

No, why don't you jump in, Jon?

I just think that there is There's cool stuff to do on your phone that is actually less brain-rotty when you're on a bigger screen.

Like games on your phone, which you would— from time to time.

I would never watch Lawrence of Arabia on this screen, but you give me a screen with twice as much real estate, I'm going Lawrence of Arabia. I'm going Citizen Kane. Yeah.

No, and I agree that that is the use case, but I think it's somewhat uncomfortable because of the overarching sort of discussion around phone addiction and screen time and all this stuff.

Yeah.

It's bad for kids. It's probably not great for adults. And for Apple to come out, it's like, you know, we know that you're spending hours and hours every day, you know, getting mindless entertainment from our devices. And so we get— we're giving you a bigger screen.

I don't think Apple needs to touch that. I think that like the things that they promote on their phone are good. Like you can answer your emails, you can connect with your friends, you can text them, you can watch educational videos. There's a positive flip to everything that's like a negative example. Yeah, there's some game that's brain rotty, but there's also some game that's really fun that you remember. You talk about Rust and Halo. Like, these are core memories for a lot of people. It's a positive thing.

Yeah.

So being able to do more of that. Plus, it's just like, you don't know when you're— it's very hard to plan ahead for like, oh, I'm going to get caught with an extra hour waiting at the DMV, or I'm going to wait on a plane, or I'm going to have some downtime, and I'm going to want to actually like Enjoy something more thoroughly. If you have the Duo, it's your daily driver. It's always on you. You didn't need to think, oh, I should have brought an iPad because I'm going to be stuck waiting in this line for 20 minutes. So I want to watch something nicely on a really big screen. You got the Duo in your pocket. You're good to go.

I'm not sold.

Get me a sales job.

I'm not sold, but get, get this guy a job at the Apple Store.

Tennis, tennis, tennis. There was a match that ended at 3:30 AM.

Early count.

And people are not happy about it. The Wall Street Journal's headline is, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, there's nothing cool about a tennis match that finishes at 3:33 AM. It's ridiculous. Sorry, but tennis at 3:33 AM isn't cool. It's ridiculous. What happened? Bill Ackman loved it. He said one of the greatest tennis matches ever. And very few got to see it live. This needs to be fixed now. It's unfair to the players, fans, and sponsors in the sports. What is the actual proposal? What do they want to change? Start the game earlier or cut it off entirely if it keeps going?

Yeah. So I'm trying to figure out why, why this ever was, is or was a thing. I— hopefully the Journal article can, can break it down. But I watched a little bit of this game. I went to bed.

It was—

yeah, I think I went to bed. It was actually a later night. I went to bed around 11.

Hmm.

Um, but the game was going well past 3.

Yeah.

Ben Shelton, who actually won the match, it was an upset, uh, was hitting 146-mile-an-hour serves at, at, uh, at Carlos. Carlos at one point was shooing off the, um, the, the camera crew because they were filming him and he was throwing, like, actively, like, gonna throw up. Like, he did. He was like pushing it so hard that he was gonna throw up into Into a towel. So yeah, really, really crazy. Wall Street Journal says sometimes this glorious sport can't get out of its own way. Everyone is expected to pretend night tennis is a fabulous experience. We're supposed to deploy the word epic and act like we didn't brush our teeth and hit the hay after Shelton took the second set. I do actually have a family member that did exactly that, like blowout second set. They were like, all right, like we're good, we're good. And it ended up being this incredible game.

Okay.

The US Open has long cultivated the idea that the wee hours are part of its identity, as much of, as much a part of the formula as the $23 honey deuce cocktails and the plume of cannabis smoke wafting in from a nearby park. Even ESPN feigns enthusiasm for the après-midnight when it would never schedule a tentpole like the Iron Bowl for such an uncommon hour. It's a city that never sleeps. Why should tennis? Okay. How many 3:30 a.m. finishes have you attended at Yankee Stadium? I appreciate the romance. New York remains a restless town where you can get a steak dinner and a tattoo on your back long after quitting time. The subway is 24/7 theater. You can crawl out of a bar at dawn. There are amateur bike races that start in the dark at 5:45 AM. It's zany, but Alcaraz versus Shelton isn't a corned beef sandwich at an all-night diner. Hmm. This sounds like AI slop. It's a marquee showcase for sport.

No, I, I, I've been reading this and I think that, I think it's just like Fun turns to crazy.

No, it's good. It's a marquee showcase for a sport that needs every bit of US attention it can get, and it got buried like a Tom Snyder sit-down with Buddy Hackett. Even people in Hawaii were like, this Alcaraz-Shelton match is running pretty late. This isn't a routine to celebrate. Okay, I'm sorry. A lot of, a lot of, a lot of, uh, we're gonna have to run this through Pangram.

Parallelism?

Yeah, this isn't a routine to celebrate. This is when someone needs to step in and scream, what are we doing?

You know, I found 2 new AI phrases. I don't remember both of them. One of them is, in our increasingly online world, when someone's writing about online culture or something that happened on the internet, or like with the boom of social media, like there's 2 phrases that were popularized because journalists who needed to write about things that happened online kept using this phrase. That got baked into the LLM, and then now it's getting spit back at people. And so a lot of people are turning away from the phrase in our increasingly online world. So avoid that one too, I guess.

Sashane says nighttime. You wouldn't understand that. It's a New York thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because I feel like you can maintain the mystique of the US Open by just having games wrap up around midnight. Like, it's still very much nighttime.

Totally.

Like, It's dark out. People are sleeping. Anyways, definitely seems just incredibly rough and unfair to the players. This has happened in UFC a few times where in order to hit a US time zone for the pay-per-view, the actual fighters have to be fighting at the equivalent of like 6:00 AM.

Oh, yeah. Where they are. Internationally, yeah.

Which is just— imagine waking— imagine One, going to sleep at like 10 knowing that you have to wake up and get in a death match at 6 AM sounds pretty rough. The alternative is just to stay up and like, you know, yeah, just try to, try to, try to—

Because it starts at 6, so you gotta get warmed up.

Like the whole event is starting at probably midnight.

Well, I guess the move would probably be just don't adjust for jet lag, like get there on your schedule and just treat it like I think it's a 6 PM fight for whatever your local time zone is, I suppose. I don't know. What do you think about this? Chairman Berb Bernanke, you can eat the same thing for breakfast every single day for like 20 years in a row and no one will say anything. It's normal. You eat the same thing for dinner for a month straight and people call you psychotic. I think it's fine to eat the same dinner every night for a month.

What's wrong with being a psycho? I used to do chicken and rice every night. For months, for years.

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