Harvey’s Margins, Are Insects Worth More Than Humans?, Meta Tests Human Help for Muse | Diet TBPN

Jordi, his hat game has evolved. He's now wearing the fedora with the Blackstone cap on top, which I assume can only mean one thing. It means that your top priority is safety in financial markets, financial markets and the financialization.

But also safety as well.

Oh, you care about both?

I care about—

So you want to accelerate the AI buildout safely? Yes, I thought it was— I thought it was you're going to blend the two and you're like, look, I want insane private credit deals, trillion dollars of capital to flow into the AI buildout, but I wanted to do it safely. Every contract needs investment grade.

I want to prioritize safety on the whole frontier.

Okay.

Safety around the models.

The capital markets frontier?

Safety in financial markets.

In the capital markets. Got it. Okay.

Okay.

I'm seeing where you get there. Anyway, you want to do Harvey first? Let's— people are, people are taking shots at Harvey. So it started—

I won't stand for it.

I won't stand for it. No, I like Harvey. We've talked to some lawyers that use Harvey. Seems like a great product. We also had Legora on the, on the, on the show just last week. Had a good time with them. Seems like a very competitive space. But the headline that grabbed attention, they say track changes. Harvey's gross margin fell from about 50% to -50% by June as agent token use spiked 20-fold on rented OpenAI and Anthropic models, Bloomberg reports. And so it seems really bad. Like you definitely don't want negative gross margins as a software company, as a tech company, as any company, as really as any company, actually. You don't want to be selling $1 for $0.50. And that's exactly what they did in June. Basically, that's what they were doing. They were selling tokens at negative gross margins. Not good. But there's way more details in the actual reporting. So you should go read the Bloomberg report. So the first thing is like costs did explode, but it was on the back of more product usage, which is good. They're growing ARR. We'll get into that. And token Consumption increased 20x this year. So basically, they are feeling the reasoning era, the agentic era. One job, one process in the company is generating a lot more time.

Had seat-based pricing.

Yep.

And then AI got a lot better. So every seat was just using it way more.

Yeah.

Very simple.

But it's not just using it more. It's that the lawyer might be saying the exact same thing as they did a year ago. They might say, review this. But instead of like, one-shotting it with no reasoning. They went to reasoning, which generated way more tokens, and then they went to agents. So they were like, okay, it's actually gonna fan out, look at everything across your firm, all the other records that you have, all your different policies and MD files. Like everything that you have is gonna be worked through this agent. And so you're generating way more tokens.

Yeah.

So that created negative gross margins. But the good news is that they're already back to positive gross margins, which is in the Bloomberg article. Kind of criminal not to repurpose that because it really makes it look like they're running at negative gross margins. They had a negative 50% gross margin in June, but they are back to positive gross margins. They changed their model usage. Of course, there's a whole bunch of models that are cheaper and better for certain things, and they actually fine-tuned an open weight model. So they did post-training on an open weight model, and they're calling it Harvey Tennant. And there's some interesting details there. I want to debate with you on like the value of that, where that goes.

First, Gabe. One of the founders of Harvey responded.

Oh, he did. I was—

He said, the hardest thing about building Harvey is doing what's best for our customers despite immense pressure to do what's easy. The easy thing would have been to force our customers into consumption pricing before they were ready and serve them worse models to protect our margins. We chose to help our customers transition on a timeline that works for them and give them the best models in the meantime, even though it hurt our margins. This meant optimizing our product through routing, harness improvements, and post-training. So we could serve frontier intelligence at an affordable price. It also meant building the infrastructure for customers to monitor and manage spend, usage dashboards per matter, cost attribution, spend caps, and ROI reporting. As a result, we improved our gross margins from negative 50% to positive in a single quarter, despite usage doubling month over month and continuing to serve the best models. Our philosophy is simple: do what's best for our customers, even when it's painful, hurts our margin. or draws criticism from competitors X and the press. We believe the most important part of building a company is earning and keeping your customers' trust. You do that by doing the hard thing for them, even when it costs you. Bunch of great points in here. Even outside of the Bloomberg piece and the subsequent coverage, Max from Lagora was going pretty hard saying it doesn't make sense.

Oh.

Doesn't make sense to train your own models because the Oh, yeah. Basically, like publicly available frontier models are dropping in cost.

Sure.

And the quality's increasing. So you're just sort of like wasting your own—

Yeah.

And again, like that's a bet that he's making. Harvey's gonna make another bet. Probably some mixture of both is gonna be the right approach.

There's another interesting sort of like how bad is this situation just comp, which is, so they had negative 50% gross margins in June. They're at a $400 million run rate. For ARR, I suppose. And so, that's $33 million a month. And so, negative 50% margins means they lost $16 million, but they've raised like $500 million. So, in terms of burn, it's not super cause for crisis, in my opinion. And what's interesting is that even through June, maybe they did the Sequoia deal that valued the company at $15.5, before that happened because it was announced September 9th. But I have to imagine that the deal probably got done with at least some insight into those negative gross margins in June. What do you think?

I would assume so. But the main thing is like every application layer company has like gone through a moment like this, even if it was for like a single day.

Totally, totally.

So it matters how quickly you can respond and adjust.

Yeah. So where do they need to get to? Like what is the standard for the legal technology industry? There's some comps here. eDiscovery provider DISCO, public company, 75% GAAP gross margins. Like it is a software tool that when you're going into discovery, you need to connect with a bunch of data. Okay, we got a whole bunch of text messages, a whole bunch of emails. Let's put them in a system so we can review them. Sort of, you know, normal SaaS. I'm sure there's a bunch of AI involved now, But that business is running at 75% gross margins. Thomson Reuters has a legal professionals segment of software that's running at almost 50% adjusted EBITDA margins. So like true, true net profit. So that's sort of where they want to be. Also, pure-play law firms have really high margins as well. Hard to comp them to businesses because they pay out to the partnership. But PricewaterhouseCoopers reports net profit margins around 41% for the top 10 Firms. It's lower for firms 10 to 9, 10 to 100 or something like that. But still lots of health in the legal industry broadly. Obviously everyone knows lawyers make money. That shouldn't be surprising. And yeah, tokens are getting cheaper by the day. There's a bunch of model launches. Opus 5.5 launched today. Grok 4.7 was yesterday. And Grok 4.7, no one was— even Elon was like, okay, we're, we're not jumping straight to the frontier with this. It's going to be a couple more iterations, but we're excited with the progress. But There was one benchmark that really jumped out and it was actually the Harvey Legal Agent benchmark, which is interesting. So I don't know how insanely good that benchmark is. It might be, you know, you could, you could benchmax against it. But the interesting thing about that particular benchmark was that it was a legal task benchmark based on cost. And so Grok 4.7 is particularly cheap for the type of legal work that at the very least Harvey wants to do. So you could see them. funneling more token spend towards xAI and Groq. Do you have something?

You wanted to give it up for Big Law?

Yeah.

The chat wants to give it up for Big Law. Let's give it up for them. They're the real winners here. Additionally, GPT-6 Sol and Luna are starting to roll out.

Fun.

So we'll look out for announcements there soon.

There were some cool demos. I saw one Opus 5.5. I mean, it's—

Chat says the The combination— the hat jacket combination isn't working. I'll try to adjust a little bit. I'll try to adjust. Hopefully that's better.

Flawless. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for flagging.

Huge upgrade. Um, very funny. Yeah, I saw a cool, uh, I saw a cool demo where someone sketched out on a piece of paper sort of a trebuchet, and Opus 5.5 took that image into simulation and created like a a virtual version of it. AI continues to impress in terms of translation of things. Oh, your kid drew a, you know, some crazy mythical creature? Turn it into a story, turn it into a movie, turn it into a video game, whatever format you want. If you want to read a 2,000-page novel based on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, like, you can probably do that now. So, You can have your content in any specific format you want. That seems to be where the AI continues to impress. Anyway, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. I've been having a lot of fun generating AI videos with Codex.

Should we pull up your latest masterpiece?

Yeah, the Literally Me compilation, it burns up the internet and Vibe Reels all of the time. But now, if you see those Literally Me characters and you're like, I am Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler. I am— I forget who else is in there. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. You can put yourself in the movie. There's Inception. We got Jordi in there. That's Drive. I think that's Heat.

Heat. Mad Men.

Can we call them out? I think that's Fight Club. You got Joker. You got Taxi Driver. You got Nightcrawler. No Country for Old Men. Social Network. Godfather. Back to Joker. I forget that one. Shawshank, maybe? That one's Collateral. Then Blade Runner. Blade Runner again, I think. Yeah. Some of these— some of the renders are really, really good. That one, like, your face doesn't quite fit on Leo's head. But that one's really good. That one works pretty well. This one's a little awkward. The Joker, it's really just Joaquin Phoenix's face. Didn't actually swap you in at all.

It's just—

Kodak was even like, it didn't work.

Do the Joker.

And I was like, do it anyway. I don't care. It's fine. It's going to be on screen for 2 seconds. That one's good.

John is really my human agent. He just—

You didn't even tell me to do that.

He's sort of like an ambient, always-on agent. That's what I'm saying. I don't even have to tell you. You just predict my needs, right? You'll send me something like this. Everyone should have a— everyone should have a John.

Everyone should.

Everyone should. But yeah, fun, powerful tool. Still got $500 locked away in Higgsfield in the wrong section. Can't do anything with it. Maybe just give away the account or something. Anyway, what matters more, people or insects?

Tough call, Jon. We should get into maybe one side of it first before we form an opinion.

Okay. The human side.

You want to steelman the Look, and I'll just, I'll just say that we're coming to you live. Yeah, we're coming to you. We had a rough morning with the, uh, with the mosquitoes. We actually had to, we had to, we had to DoorDash one of those, um, bug bite treatment things, the heat, whatever. What, I don't, what do you call them, Tyler?

Uh, I think it's like insect bite healer. That's what it's listed as.

It did work because I, yes. Sebastian says I'm famously pro-mosquito.

Yes.

But a mosquito did bite me on the face today and a bunch more times. So we ended up— I ended up capitulating and having to get one of these. But I don't like using these. I don't like using these. It's funny because I can't stand EAs and I think they're weird freaks and I don't think they should be anywhere near public policy or anything like that. But the one thing that I can agree on with Ben, this guy writing this post, that insects are more important than humans, is I don't think anyone should— I don't think we should harm the insects, right?

Oh, OK.

So I think humans are more important, but that doesn't mean you've got to take them all out. Just go somewhere else.

You would take sort of— you would be altruistic towards the insects.

Ellie says mosquitoes are terrorists of the air. They really are.

You want to be altruistic towards the mosquitoes. You want to be effective in your altruism when it comes to mosquitoes.

You don't want to eradicate them. No, I want them effectively to be nowhere near me.

An effective altruist who writes under the name Bentham's Bulldog went viral over the weekend for an essay titled Insects Matter More Than People in the Aggregate, arguing that the combined welfare of insects outweighs that of humanity. His basic argument is one of scale. Insects are so numerous that even if their capacity for suffering is only a tiny fraction of ours, their total suffering could still dwarf human suffering. It's almost just a thought experiment. There's so many other directions you could make. Why not go pound for pound? Maybe cows are the most important because there's a lot of cows and they weigh a lot. There's probably more aggregate pounds of cow than humans. Maybe they matter more than humans in the aggregate, right? Or fur, like the amount of fur on all the monkeys in the world is more than all the fur on all the humans in the world. And so maybe monkeys matter more. I don't know. It's completely arbitrary where people draw these lines. But he estimates that for every second of human life, insects collectively spend roughly 270,000 seconds dying, about 75 hours, and notes that more insects die in a single second than the total number of humans—

That's a lot.

who have ever lived. Wow, that's a crazy stat. I mean, the guy pulled some cool numbers together. This is interesting. This is fun fact territory. A large part of the essay turns on whether insects can experience pain. Bentham's Bulldog argues that they can, even weakly. If they can, even weakly, their suffering should count morally just as ours does. What species you are is just totally irrelevant to whether it's bad for you to feel terrible pain. Using what he describes as a conservative assumption that insects experience pain At just 1/10,000th the intensity that humans do, he concludes the sheer number of insects would still produce vastly more suffering in the aggregate. He ultimately argues that insects may experience more suffering in a single day than humans have throughout all history. Now, is there a piece on this where this is the view of this community with the relative, like— Are they looking forward to how a world might interact with a godlike machine superintelligence and humans? So the idea is like, we got to stand up for the insects now because we are the insects of the future, so we want them to make the same calculus?

I think that's certainly where the thought experiment goes.

Yeah, right? And so this feels almost like bait or like a trap where it's like, if you are the type of person that jumps on this and says, no, I disagree, like, insects don't matter more than people in aggregate, then you're setting yourself up for, like, the dunk that's, okay, well, now there are a quadrillion superintelligences that can all feel pain in some abstract way, and so they're more valuable, and so now you're the insect, and so your previous argument can be used against you to advocate for your own eradication. And so, it's like, stand up for the insects now, lest you be discarded in the robotic future.

I don't know.

The reactions to this were rough. People did not like this argument at all.

Well, it's just the timing is funny because there's so much tension building around the sort of EA rationalist movements with—

Which is super fractured. People don't realize how fractured it is.

Yeah. But it's sort of boiling up to the sort of national level. in a way that it hasn't before. And so, during the midst of that broader conversation to come in and being like, yeah, insects actually matter more than people in the aggregate.

What were some of the reactions? Doomer said, if you truly believe that a bug's life is worth more than a human life, you will immediately feed yourself to bugs. Do it right now. If you don't do this, you are a fraud, a liar, a poser. Andre—

Yeah. I think it's actually important for people to read that before you Go and comment on this article. Watch A Bug's Life.

Oh, yeah.

At half speed.

Half speed.

Yeah. Watch the whole movie at half speed. You're a movie guy, but—

I think we coexist.

Maybe you're not a fan of watching movies at half speed. It's not really how the—

I'm not really a half-speed guy.

But half speed is a great sort of tool to have in the tool chest when you want to deeply comprehend.

I like 2x speed, 3D glasses with the 2 different movies interlaced so I can get one movie in one eye. Another movie in the other eye, one audiobook here, one podcast here.

Duo.

While I'm sleeping.

Yeah.

With the Duo.

Exactly. Max brain rot. I mean, the fracturing of EA really leads to a really, really wide range of outcomes that get sort of lumped together. Everything from the Pace the Frontier essay to this. These are clearly very, very different pieces of communication. And yet they get sort of lumped together. It must be full employment if you're in the public relations department over there.

Yeah, I was gonna say, I think the shrimp welfare stuff—

Oh yeah.

Makes more sense to this because like, I'm not really sure what, like, after reading this and say I agree, like, what do I, what are the next steps? Like, we're not like really factory farming insects.

Sure.

Maybe through pesticides.

Speak for yourself, brother.

Yeah, yeah, the shrimp welfare—

Got some big announcements coming soon.

Like, what percent of these Like 600 billion insect deaths per second are—

Preventable.

Preventable.

Yeah.

Where like with the shrimp, you know, you can say like, okay—

Change the farming practice or just don't eat the shrimp.

Yeah. So I think that's why maybe this was less impactful.

I don't know. Yeah. I mean, it's all a continuum to like— until you get to like the veganism, like the animals who you can pet, you know, should be able to live full lives. This is sort of the most abstracted version of that, but Yeah, I don't know. It's odd.

More importantly, update on TBPN's road to Christmas.

Oh yeah.

We're down to just 93 days. 93 days. A lot to think about, a lot of moves to make, and, uh, we couldn't be more excited.

Start counting it down. I was trying to think of a, uh, a realistic AI doom scenario. Like everyone's like, oh, I can't imagine it. And so I, I actually mapped out one. that maybe I could take you guys through. I wrote a little script here.

Okay.

Called The Old Way. So, you know, fades in, starts in the TVP and UltraDome. Me, you, Tyler, we're all doing the show. All of a sudden, all the phones in the UltraDome light up. Emergency alert, unknown biological event, shelter immediately. Outside, alarms begin to sound across Los Angeles. A strange haze starts pouring through vents and drifting across the streets outside. I see a cloud approaching the UltraDome entrance. First thing I do, bioweapon attack, this is what you got to do. Boom, right there. It's not going in your mouth, you're good. Second step, pull out your gun. Boom, boom, boom, boom, start blasting whoever's responsible. You're just firing wildly.

Whoa.

Once you got the situation a little stabilized, then we got to start— we got to figure out what's going on. So I go over to Tyler. And I say, look, we got to hack into the superintelligence. We got to figure out what is going on with this bioweapon. And he's like, sure, yeah, let's hack into it. I'll open up Codex. What do you want me to prompt? I'm like, no, the AI has gone rogue. We have to do this the old way. He's like, okay, I'll open Clogged Code. What do you want me to prompt? And I'm like, no, the old way. He's like, okay, I got Cursor open. What are we doing here? I'm like, no, Tyler, we have to go back to the old way. He's like, okay, I got GitHub Copilot fired up. I'm like, no, Tyler, you can't use any AI at all. He's like, okay, just let me know what code you wanna write and I'll look it up on Stack Overflow. And I'm like, no, the internet has been contaminated, Tyler. We can't use anything. We have to code the old way. We have to do it by hand. And Tyler's like, I can't. I don't remember.

You don't know how.

I don't remember anything. I can't write any code. So what do we do next? We gotta get George Hotz. He's the only one who can help in this scenario. So we go.

'Cause he's the only one that remembers how to code. He remembers how to code.

He's got local models stored. He's got his own hardware. So we go get George Hotz. And then we're like, okay, George, hack into the superintelligence. Tell us what's going on with this bioweapon. And why aren't we affected? Like, we've been walking around. We seem to be fine. Everyone else is turning into a zombie. What's going on? So he locks in. He writes some code. He hacks in, figures it out. He says, Jordi, tell me about your diet. And you're like, well, I just eat— I just eat. at Erewhon exclusively. He's like, yeah, my analysis shows that your body has never had a toxin in it. And so, you are immune to the bioweapon. It doesn't affect you at all. I'm like, but how do you explain me? I only eat Erewhon once a day. And, he's like, well, John, my analysis indicates that you might have had the original Four Loko. Did you drink the original Four Loko?

In large quantities?

And, I said, yeah, I was daily driving in college. Why? Your body consumes so much original Four Loko, it's now essentially pure toxins. So the bioweapon sees it as a hostile environment. It doesn't even try to infect you. So you are immune. So we're both— so we're both immune. But the bioweapon is still wreaking havoc on America. So we got to get to the bottom of it. So we're going to need some muscle. So we go get Sam Sulek. So we go get Sam Sulek. We're like, let's go. We got to go to the data center. We got to break in and shut this thing down. That's the only option. So we get in the Cadillac Blackwing. We jump it off a ramp, slam into the data center, pull out the guns, start blasting the GPUs. We're just firing everywhere. Finally, finally, after we've shot 90% of the data center, it's just bullets everywhere. We're just shooting everywhere. Finally, a humanoid robot emerges. It's Mecha-Hitler. We got to fight him. We got to fight him. We're shooting. We're shooting. The bullets are just bouncing right off. They're just bouncing right off. We're getting beat up. We're trying to fistfight it. Sam Sulik's doing nothing. It's not working. And then at the last second, John Cena breaks through the roof, slams down the humanoid robot, rips his head off, and humanity wins. So that's kind of like a concrete example of like how AI doom, how, you know, a runaway robot.

Just one scenario.

That's one possible scenario. I put it at—

Because everyone's asking for—

I put it at 10%. That's the way it plays out. Yeah, that's kind of where I'm at right now. Yeah, that's how I'm thinking about it. Meta, the AI agent company Muse, they're putting humans in there. Meta is testing human concierge for its new personal agent Muse. Meta has been testing human concierge for its new personal AI assistant. This is on Bloomberg, which entails having human contractors quietly handle some of the phone calls placed by the digital agent. Amazon's like, no, no, no, we're going to block your browser. Well, did you block everyone's browser? how's that going to play out? I was thinking about at some point if I write a really, really bespoke— a, like, basically a CLI, like a really bespoke weird CLI, like I vibe code it but I use sort of odd techniques. Like, I'm like, okay, use computer use and open up Opera or, you know, Mozilla and, and click around and add some randomness and do this. And it's like— and I basically create a CLI that wraps an agent where it's like it runs on my home Wi-Fi. So, and I just do this, I don't productize it. So Amazon like can't really detect it. Do you think I could potentially stay in front of their battle forever and then puppeteer it from other agents?

Well, I just asked ChatGPT, can you order Amazon over the phone? Because I would think that at that scale there would be like at least one way to do it.

Totally.

It seems like you can only use their customer service number. to help with existing orders. So one thing is you could order a bunch of the wrong thing, like 100 of the wrong thing, 100 bug treatment things.

Order everything and then have your agent refund everything but the thing you want.

No, have your Muse agent, have a human via Muse call Amazon and say, hey, I actually got the wrong thing here. Can you swap it with this other thing?

Interesting.

And just do that as many times as necessary.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

To get the right order.

Maybe have one order that's just always open where you're just adding and removing.

They have to be completed orders because you have to have made a mistake to call the customer.

Oh, yeah, you can charge me, but just add it to the order. I don't know. We're going to get— it's going to be a weird battle. Ben Thompson was writing about it today. It was pretty good. Amazon— I mean, his whole framing is like Amazon is like the strongest in the AI era of the hyperscalers because they own logistics, infrastructure, the final step, the real world. And so he anticipates that they will hold their ground for a very long time and not give in. And that's basically what they did with OpenAI, where OpenAI had the instant checkout process. They invited everyone to be a part of it.

Amazon was like, no thanks.

No thanks.

But we'll give you tens of billions of dollars.

But interestingly, yeah, so now the result is that Amazon is vending in Their ads into ChatGPT to close the purchase there. Toby Lutke at Shopify partnered with Muse and announced that they are integrating. But the interesting thing is like, where's the value capture layer? And it only works with Shop Pay. And so it's a lever to get merchants to go on to Shop Pay, which Shopify will still make money off of. But for merchants, a lot of people are worried about the implementation that happened with Walmart where ChatGPT integrated with Walmart and the end result was that conversion rate was 1/3 of what it was in the app and on the core website, and that carts were smaller because people were just going and saying like, I just need a roll of paper towels, just send me that. Whereas when people are like, oh, I need to do my shopping, I need soap and paper towels and, and whatever else, I'll build a—

Paper towel holder. That's made by a company that's over 50 years old.

Yes.

So the crazy thing is, so now Vinod was on the show yesterday talking about Wajo, which is an AI phone. They have a new agent that I believe is human supported in that some of the stuff is done by AI and some of the stuff, if necessary, can be escalated to a human. Now you have Meta at least testing, exploring, having a human in the loop on some of these things. And my big question is like, why? Why? Like voice models are getting pretty good. It feels completely unsustainable for Meta to roll out a product to billions of people where users might just be like, like if I had like something I could text and say, hey, call this person, call that person. Yeah, I'd probably be using it.

I think there's a ton of There's a ton of value. First, the Muse install base is small right now, so it's not that crazy. They have the ability to stand up huge offices, whether it's through Scale AI and that team that came over or through their, you know, all the things that they've done over the past 2 decades. The other thing is that Muse specifically will not train on your data that you put into Muse. And so that— this wasn't like a huge announcement or anything, but You could see people being like, I don't know if I want to use this AI agent that's going to be using my personal information, even if they're running like the PII redactor. Putting all of that might be a little bit off-putting. So Meta is not getting that data. But if they have a human in the loop, the human who does the task that's just beyond what the model is capable of, they're also generating training data because they can probably train on that. And so it's like the model by default can I don't know, summarize your calendar and give you a briefing on what's going on in your calendar. It knows how to integrate. And the model's capable of that. Muse 1.0, Spark 1.3 is capable of that. All the models are capable of that. But what can't they do? They might not be fully ready to go and have a complicated conversation with someone if they're ordering flowers over the phone or something. And so the current models might fall down. So, you need more data to solve that. And so, you put the humans in the loop and then that's your extra training data for the next leg up. And then you just keep repeating that. So, I would view this human-in-the-loop thing more as them doing data collection and creating more training data for them than a permanent solution to the product problems. Also, I just— I don't think the time on site for these apps is actually that high. I think there is like an excitement when you jump on, you do a bunch of stuff. But then with all these AI tools, like there's a reason why OpenAI comps to like weekly active users because there's plenty of days where people are like, I went to the beach and I didn't touch AI at all. Like I didn't do any work. There's some feedback on Alex Wang's post talking about like it'll help you with your goals. And I think Katie Notopoulos was saying like a lot of people just don't have goals. Like they just want to chill. And this is also the Ben Thompson thing of like, Consumers want to be entertained. Like people that go to the beach, they'll still scroll Instagram. Are they really going to be doing anything with any agent no matter how powerful it is? Like there are plenty of people that have whole staffs of EAs and personal assistants and they don't do anything on a weekend because they want to chill and they don't want to think about anything.

One thing's for certain.

It's over or we're back?

Professor Zhang is vindicated. Yesterday we watched a video where he said, I guarantee that there are humans behind the chat apps that you use manipulating the information. And he is correct, at least in the short term.

Nikesh Arora chimed in on the knife fight between Amazon and Muse. This will be a bigger battle than anyone anticipates. It's only a matter of time before there is an Apple and Google version of Muse and possibly TikTok in addition to the frontier LLM agents, maybe a commerce agent from Amazon. That's sort of my prediction. I think, I think Instinct might land with Amazon potentially, although they do have Rufus, but you can—

And Tyler is a Rufus power user.

Yep. Rufus is good. You don't want to talk down on Rufus. But Instinct has clearly tapped into something really special with the energy and the support that they have and the community that they've built. But there are a lot of little rough edges that need to get sanded off. And that's the domain of Amazon, in my opinion. Amazon, the trains run on time. And it's a pretty efficient company. So every app that's a service marketplace or commerce app will need to existentially decide to open APIs for consumer agents to interact. Smaller players have no choice. Ad revenues are more than transaction fees. Either the consumer benefits or distribution aggregators will demand a higher fee transaction. There's an interesting stat from the Strategery post about Amazon. They— the net income for Amazon e-commerce was like $36 billion and the ad revenue was is exactly twice that. So the business is unprofitable without advertising, and they put advertising everywhere. So it's like a very interesting dynamic where you can see the motivation. They have $68 billion. You flagged that number. It's a huge—

Over $70 billion in the last 12 months.

Over $70 billion. So significant pool of revenue and profit that they will be protecting for sure. Any other breaking news? Anything you've been tracking over the last couple hours while we've been live? I think we're pretty much good. OPUS 5.5 launched. We talked about that. Benchmarks look really good, very cheap. And the key thing that you pointed out was like the second post is like, this is the first model that we've released since we said we were pacing the frontier. This is an expression of the pace of the frontier. Yeah, yeah.

They're affirming it like this is, you know, Fable 5.1 class model, but it's much cheaper.

So it's not trying to be more superhuman, more dangerous. It's the safest, best, fastest, cheapest, lightest, thinnest model ever, basically.

Yeah.

That's the—

and then OpenAI also did the same thing today. Okay.

Yeah. They— oh, so Soul's out.

Soul. Yep.

GPT-6 Soul.

6 Soul.

Cool. And then also Luna. Luna, but not Terra?

Or I might have had that backwards.

Okay.

Yeah.

But new, new models. The model wars never cease to, to entertain. Of course, all that matters is what you do with them. So thank you for watching TVPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11:00 AM Pacific. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter.

At tbpn.com.

Throw that flashbang, Tyler Cosgrove.