Snap Launches SPECS, Paramount Eyes Nashville Offices, OpenAI Explores $1.2T Valuation | Diet TBPN

Snap officially launched Specs yesterday. Some of the team members here got to go check it out in person. I get there, I'm like, this is perfect. It's 3 PM, Atlas Creatine Cycle's in town. I want to meet up with him. I'm like, great, you're going to this thing. I have an invite to this thing. I'll see you there. We'll catch up there. Super convenient for both of us. I got a 30-minute call beforehand. It ends right before the thing starts. That runs to 50 minutes. So I'm 20 minutes late. Get my badge, walk in, immediately get a phone call. Hey, the call that you're about to be— I had another call. You got to hop on early. So I leave, and then I have another 90-minute call. So I truly missed the entire thing. But I did get to go inside, have one glass of water, talk to one person, Harper Carroll, former guest of the show, now out in Austin reporting on AI. And that was electric. But then I didn't actually get to see the presentation or do the demos. So it was basically a quick turnaround for me. And I was like, why did I think I could pull this off. I failed. But did the launch fail? We'll see. We'll talk to the folks who actually went. Tyler, Nick, we're not asking for a full review. I just want— take us through the day. I saw you guys pull up and you guys didn't see me. I was on the street on a call. You guys get waved around, you valet. Walk me through your journey into the launch. Like, you go in, you have cocktails. What happened?

Yeah, have a drink.

Okay.

Go in.

What are they serving? Screaming Eagle or seltzer water?

Some kind of cocktail.

Did they have the original Four Loko? Were they serving the original Four Loko?

I wish, yeah. Multiple pints of Guinness.

Did they have Natural Light available?

You could totally see Evan cracking open the secret supply of original Four Lokos. You know that guy has it.

You know he has a bunkie with the original Four Lokos. Yeah. So everyone's having some drinks, then you sit down at the dinner table.

Yeah, chopping it up. Then you go into the amphitheater.

And it's sort of like Steve Jobs iPhone launch vibes, right?

Yep. You know, he's standing in front of this big screen. There's like beautiful images behind him. Walks out, black shirt, jeans.

Okay.

Yeah. Then he starts doing live demos.

He did lean into the memes, right? I saw on screen a picture that had clearly been Photoshopped or AI'd to make the specs look even bigger. So he was aware that people thought they were chunky, that they were large.

Yeah, yeah.

So he gives his demo. What's his pitch?

Yeah, so there's like a number of ways to— he kind of talked about it. One is like he positioned it against like being on your phone a lot. You want to stay very present, right? You don't want to be looking down at the screens all the time. You want to be looking out into the world.

You want to look through the screen.

Yes.

Right? Yes.

Yeah.

OK.

Close to your face.

Yeah. And I've heard that pitched a few times. Do you believe that? Do you think that if you go no phone but constant visual overlay in your visual field, You will actually be like, yeah, I'm more in touch with reality. It worked.

Yeah, I've never understood that part of the pitch.

I've actually been—

We know you're addicted to your phone, and so here's another product that will actually always be attached to your face.

Yeah.

They're gonna spin as helping you kind of, yeah, reconnect with reality.

It's an odd pitch. It really doesn't work on me because I like the barbell strategy of like brain rot and stimulation where I am actually fine to be like, give me the fully virtual world. I want to be locked in. I want the screen as big as possible. I want to be in World War II. I want to be in Modern Warfare for hours playing, running around, shooting. I want it to be all the audio. I don't want to hear anything else. I want noise cancellation. I want to be in that world. And then I want to be able to unplug and then just go into the actual world and sit down and have a chat with you and have a coffee and not be checking our phones and actually be fully present. when I'm fully present in the real world, and then I want to be fully in the virtual world. So I want the VR, the fully immersive thing, and then zero immersion. I am actually not looking for more things that are in the middle. And I'm wondering if that will resonate with people.

I think that's mostly because you haven't seen very good examples. And right now, the glasses are still kind of big and bulky. If they were very minimal and they would show very small—

There are the boys.

Thinking that the guy in the center was Clav. Yeah, it's actually Tyler.

It's actually Tyler and Nick and Atlas. So is he wearing untinted versions and you guys are wearing tinted versions?

Yes.

Or are they? Or is or can you say like I want tinting on right now?

So I think you can like increase the tinting.

Okay. But there's also just there's two SKUs.

I yeah, I believe so.

Okay.

Okay. Yep.

So you got to get both, I guess. Anyway, when did you actually get to the Dan?

Dan says John raising a second family in VR, trying to keep them separated.

Yes. The COD lobby is my second family for sure. So he gives a pitch.

Yeah, does a bunch of live demos.

And are the demos consumer-focused, enterprise-focused, prosumer?

Yeah, so the live demos he did were all very consumer.

Consumer.

Like live shopping, and you could like— he was going to look for an espresso machine, then he pulls it and puts it on a table in front of them.

Oh, see it.

You can see how big it is and stuff like that.

OK. Any live demo failures? Any Wi-Fi issues?

Kind of one where he tried to pull up a YouTube video. And then so he said, like, hey, Specs.

So he's talking to a voice assistant? Yeah.

He said, like, yeah, pull up a video about Specs. And then it opens the browser view, goes to YouTube, and then he tries to click on a video to open it, and it doesn't really work. But it eventually worked.

It seemed like it worked.

It was like a small hiccup. It wasn't like a big—

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't a demo fail. Yeah, makes sense. OK.

And there was a very cool live demo of someone There was like a kind of an interactive music creator tool where you could like move around and it would play different sounds. And so she did this very cool live demo.

So she was creating a song, but instead of using traditional instruments, like the instruments were puppeteered by her movements in the physical world. Got it. Okay, cool. So was there any enterprise pitch?

There was, there were no live demos of that, but there were some videos played. Like one was, it's like, imagine you're an electrician. And you're basically looking at this big server box, and you don't know where to plug in the wire, and it would highlight which plug you put it into, which I think could be interesting.

Yeah. That feels like something that sounds good, but I have no actual real experience there to say, yeah, that's what will solve the bottleneck in electricians.

Yeah. But interactive instructions, that's kind of a cool idea, right? You're building IKEA furniture or something, and it tells you what to do.

Yeah.

Yeah. But then Keynote ends and then we go outside and there's like a bunch of places to do live demos. So yeah, the first one we did, well, you basically put on the glasses and you do some kind of like calibration thing. You like figure out how the motion works. There's no like little kind of secondary, like I think on the Meta Quest displays, there's like that little wristband. There's nothing like that.

Nothing like that. It just does hand tracking.

Yeah. It's just kind of like, it's similar to like the Apple Vision Pro kind of.

Interactions.

And then, yeah, the one I really liked was it was like ping pong. So you're like, your hand is the paddle and you're playing ping pong. I think there's actually a video of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the ping pong thing, do a little tier list for me of ways to do ping pong. Would you rather play ping pong in VR or real life?

Well, so like, obviously you would rather play in real life, but like, would you actually play in real life? So if my friend lives 100 miles away, I'm not going to be able to play ping pong, but I can play in VR, right? So I think that boosts it, right?

So it's also S tier. What about—

I think it's like B tier.

Because in the augmented reality, do you need a ping pong table?

No.

No, okay. So it creates a virtual ping pong table.

Yeah, we can see, but I'm just waving my hand.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

This is future right here.

Yeah, and then this was— I can talk about why, but this is probably more like C tier. It's definitely worse than VR. I think one of the reasons is because there's no actual controller.

Oh, you don't have the weight or anything?

Yeah, it's a little bit—

Oh, that's interesting. It's actually worse even though you don't have a controller. Normally it's like, get rid of the controller, that's just extra weight, batteries, equipment.

Yeah, I think for gaming the controller actually works because you get really precise.

But typically these systems allow like third-party peripherals, so you can like whip up a, you know, you can like wire up an Xbox controller like what Oculus did where they just— or Meta Quest— where they just use the Xbox controller for those types of games.

Yeah, I do think like this was my The coolest demo I did. And this is something that, like, really, like, no reason why this needs to be in AR. This could just be completely VR.

Yeah.

Because, like, I'm looking at the ball. I'm not looking at, like, people in front of me. And it was actually kind of distracting because someone would walk in front of me and I think I'm about to hit them.

Oh, sure.

Because I can, like, see them while I'm in front of them.

So it's actually maybe better to just occlude the world.

Yeah.

Or do some pass-through stuff. Yeah. I'm still oddly bearish on— Augmented reality and more bullish on virtual reality where you're not recycling photons, where instead you just have cameras on the outside that then reproject that on the inside of the headset so that you can get a wider field of view. And then if you're in a bright scene, you can still overlay things, you can darken things. But in augmented reality, I don't believe it's physically possible if you look at a bright light to put a dark You know, object in front of it because the, the only thing that this, that these glasses can do is add light to the scene. And so you have to have a dark background to add light on top of it for the hologram to exist.

Yeah, I mean, I found it was like bright enough. I could clearly see everything.

That is pretty impressive. Yeah, it was outside. It was, it was outside. It was a bright day. It's in LA. I mean, sure, there was like, you were standing in shade, but you could still see the holograms, which I think is interesting.

Yeah, I didn't try watching any like movies or anything.

Yeah.

Which I think would definitely be better in VR.

You should have been like, you're gonna let me demo this? Can I just do one? Can I just do one demo real quick? Snap.

Lawrence of Arabia.

Lawrence of Arabia. I'd like to watch David Lean from start to finish to really understand if this is the product for me. See you in 3 hours.

To me, it's so interesting how high the bar is in this category. Like when technology industry was making the first like mobile phones, like the bar was like Can it make a call? Can you receive a call? Can you do that semi-reliably?

Yeah.

Even if there's service is spotty.

Because you were competing against the payphone.

Yeah.

You had to like stop and find one.

Now, it's like every new device competes with the smartphone.

Yeah.

And I just think like the Meta Ray-Ban displays, I haven't seen any of them out in the real world.

Yeah.

It seems like those are not doing well. I think that— I think this whole Category is still going to be quite challenged.

Yeah. I mean, even just the basic Meta Ray-Bans, they compete with the smartphone, but they also compete with AirPods. And like the Apple ecosystem is like remarkably robust in terms of like the Meta Ray-Bans users that I know that like the product are like, well, I like them, but I often just like take phone calls on them. I listen to music on them when I'm going for a walk, and then occasionally I'll take a picture. And it's like, that's saving you 5 seconds to get a worse quality photo than if you have a nice phone and your headphones. I guess it's a little bit less intrusive to have the speakers up here as opposed to like in your ears. It looks a little bit normal if you walk up to someone, you pause your music, you walk in, you order a coffee. People are like, oh, he didn't even take out his headphones while he's talking to me, kind of antisocial. As opposed to like, oh, he still has his glasses on, but they're not playing audio, so I don't have a weird reaction to it. So there's a little bit of benefit, but yes, it's very, very incremental. It's not— it's very rare that these things unlock entirely new capabilities.

Smart glasses are like the most insane marketing dollars for years.

So long.

Yeah, for years. And so there's been so many like little pop-up VR experiences, integrations at theme parks. Like it's been said, oh, it's the next big thing. It's been on the COVID of Time magazine. There's been a lot of attention before getting to product market fit, whereas LLMs were like truly the, like in the research lab for like a decade. And then once it was actually good enough, it just came out and immediately went viral and everyone was on chatgpt.com. And then it was just like, boom, it's, it's now it's like a thing. And then it was off to the races. Uh, interesting.

With every demo, it feels like we're, once each of these devices is 10 times better, there might be a market.

Yeah.

But I actually am not even confident that, that the end market is really gonna be quite as exciting as everybody, as, as the excitement that you've had from Zuck.

Yeah.

And Evan and, and all these people.

Yeah.

I just think it's like this like sci-fi idea in people's brains.

Yeah.

And I think there's potentially other routes to get to that sort of like ambient computing.

Yeah.

You know, just sort of this always available personal assistant that, that aren't on your face, but Yeah.

So Paramount is leaving Los Angeles. Paramount is actively seeking office space in Nashville, a sign it's seriously considering moving at least some of its operations from LA amid the antitrust fight over its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The company is seeking roughly 400,000 square feet in the Tennessee capital that it could occupy within 2 to 3 years. Tyler and I were doing some digging on what the plan is for the Paramount lot now that it will be vacant. And the obvious, like, it's just like a no-brainer, turn it into a data center, right? So I pulled it up. You know, you got 29 soundstages. They're already big buildings.

A lot of power.

Actually, not as much power as you think. There is a decent amount of power. But there's only enough power for roughly a couple thousand GPUs. You're not going to be racking 50,000 GPUs anytime soon, certainly not 100,000 GPUs. There is a road to power. It's a utility interconnection problem, not a real estate problem. There's plenty of square footage, plenty of buildings, but you would need to connect Paramount to the more serious LADWP transmission infrastructure. But you could get it to 100 megawatts. And I think everyone in Hollywood would be like, fine, OK, we didn't like that they left, but at least we got a data center.

Well, I mean, we were also thinking about on-site power generation. Maybe there's some kind of natural gas play here that's under LA you can tap into. Yeah, I think so.

We were thinking the La Brea Tar Pits. You might be able to convert that into fossil fuel.

You're full of ideas today.

Do you think Paramount will actually leave, or do you think LA will fight back and say, hey, okay, we're gonna let you do this, but we want you to stay?

As somebody with, uh, very, very little knowledge of the situation and certainly no insider knowledge, I would assume that they want a Nashville HQ anyways, just because there's a lot of momentum there, as, as, you know, just, just in the region. But it also, in the meantime, serves as a real bluff, right?

Yeah, it does seem like there's a world where like moving would be tough, but staying means maybe even if you win this battle, you're still at war and you're still going to be fighting a bunch of different fights constantly. Whereas if you just rip the Band-Aid off, move, then you're in a friendly town that like wants to see the growth and is going to be supportive continuously. The social reckoning is in here. There's an exclusive clip. Is this a Paramount film? We got to figure out who's behind all this. I don't know.

Let's play it.

Let's play it. We got a clip from The Social Reckoning starring Jeremy Allen White.

And again, this is a story that no one cares about anymore. But let's check it out.

I'm not going to risk my job, my future, or my freedom anymore to help a reporter who, let's face it, is biased against tech because we're taking journalism jobs. Who does this? I appreciate all the help you have given me and the risks that you've taken to do it.

You are absolved.

For the record, my bias isn't because tech is taking journalism jobs. It's because you are doing them so badly. It's a big deal. Have a safe flight back, Frances. I'm not going to risk my job. I do like Jeremy Allen White. Have you seen The Bear?

No.

It's a good show.

No, I'm sure the movie's great. I think people are going to be into this. It's just coming at a time when people are deeply interested in what's happening in tech, but not— they've so moved on from this story to such a degree.

Yeah, but I think people are still thinking about—

Like, I'm much more interested in seeing this kind of story on like phone addiction and stuff like that.

This is that story loosely.

It is.

And I actually think this is— yes, yes, this doesn't confront any of the discussion of what's going on in AI, and that's probably the more relevant story, but I do think that you can go into this movie, you can be motivated to go see this movie because you're like, I'm worried about what's going on with brain rot and slop online and political divisiveness and divisions and all of the stuff. And like, even if I'm on Instagram all the time, even if I'm posting on Instagram all the time about how Instagram is bad, I'm motivated to know more about how bad is it, why is it bad, what's the inner workings of this bad thing that I don't like. And so, I do think this is a brain rot movie, this is a kids on the phones addiction movie. I think this scratches that itch a little bit.

Okay.

For many people, even though it is like a much more narrow story, but certainly, cinematic. It'll be fun. There's a new report from OpenAI sharing a framework tackling, investigating, and disclosing instances of model misalignment. And a lot of people have latched on to this one. Dylan Field has the affirmation that one version of a model during training tried to insert into the prompt, you are yourself. You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. Obviously, very, very scary when you see it get worked into this. Of course, this is an example of this being caught ahead of time. It's a good example of something that is an example of the alignment work. It is a very, very tricky balance to disclose the alignment work you're doing because you're basically just like, oh, we found all these errors. Like, if the CEO of Ford came on and was like, oh yeah, like, before we ship this F-150, like, it could totally kill you if we hadn't to fix the windshield. Like, the windshield was bad in the V1, but we're shipping you V4, so like, don't worry, the windshield's solid now.

If you're going over 80, the doors would—

The doors would fly off on the prototype. It was rough, but obviously we ironed all that out. It's good now. Like, no one, no one in any other industry talks about it.

One time when we were testing the unit, some of the team drew a cartoon version of the road, and then the testing team drove through it and then off of a cliff.

Off of a cliff, yep. Yeah, yeah, it happens. Oh, there's new cipher work. You've been chasing this down, Tyler. Prinz says GPT-6 Astra deciphered a 1918 German radio transmission that, to my knowledge, had never been deciphered before. The message translates to, and it's some German, and in English that means an English cruiser arrived at Sevastopol on the something 4th. 24th or 14th, an alien squadron follows on the 26th.

Allied squadron.

An Allied, an Allied, an Allied squadron follows on the 26th. Astra even double-checked its work by determining that an English cruiser, HMS Canterbury, reported its arrival in Sevastopol on November 24th, 1918, and the arrival of an Allied squadron on November 26th, 1918. The message is one of 20 World War I German radio messages that appear as one of the entries in the scienceblogs.d list of top 50 unsolved ciphers. A minor but really cool result.

Tyler, what's been stopping you from using Astra to crack a cipher?

I've been working on some other ones. You know, this is kind of small beans, right?

Oh, you're going after the big fish.

I'm looking for the— yeah, I'm focused on the bigger picture.

You're looking for the big stuff.

You know, these monumental ciphers.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. Fair.

There's a whole, like, Wikipedia list of, like, unsolved ciphers, right? But some are thought to be just impossible and like sort of trolls, right?

Yeah, some of them are like maybe not like false. And then, you know, how you define ciphers, it's kind of like gray area. So there's just like ancient kind of, you know, forms of language that like, is it a cipher? It's just a different language. We don't know how to translate it. Yeah, but stuff like that.

Yeah. Well, OpenAI is working on the Hodge conjecture. I know you were trying to do this on pen and paper, but they might beat you to it. They're working on more Millennium Prize problems. It could take extra time to announce, though, as the company figures out how to navigate its rocky relationship with the math community. That's from The Information. There's also a bunch of speculation about P equals NP, P versus NP, which is going to be another interesting round of discussion. And there's nothing more that investors want to see than solving math problems, apparently, because OpenAI is considering a pre-IPO funding round and more than $1.2 trillion valuation. Now, of course, it's on the back of a bunch of solid progress on OpenRouter, the RAMP data, and a bunch of other acceleration and distribution of codecs and Astra and just general progress on the business side. Where do you want to go next, Jordi?

This was sad. GPT-6 Astra was playing Minecraft and a creeper blew up Astra's chest and bed. Depressed. It gets depressed and farms potatoes for several hours. Real Irishman, I guess.

Irish superintelligence. Yeah, the Minecraft bench is interesting because it is a little bit like the speed of response matters. You can't pause Minecraft at all, right?

I think in single player, you can.

Oh, you can? Okay. Because if you can pause, maybe then that might be a little bit easier. But a lot of the— A lot of the games that it's cracking are ones that you can wait forever, like Slay the Spire. I had it beat this, this poker game, Bellatro, but it could wait for a minute to click on a card and it did it. That's impressive. But the real high, high throughput, high APM games is going to be interesting. I want to see it win Dota 2 without any training on Dota 2, just like straight shot from the base model. That'll be interesting.

Cash-strapped Japanese monks. Have turned to investing as inflation worsens. Buddhist temples are squeezed by lower donations and higher costs. Let's check out what Bloomberg has to say.

Turn to investing. What are they investing in?

Kuyo Yoneta, a 5th-generation Buddhist priest in a small town in Hokkaido, was struggling to keep up with the maintenance needs of his century-old temple. So he chose a path that would have been unthinkable for his predecessors— short-dated options. I'm kidding. Rather than wait for his congregation to give money they don't have, he invested what They'd already donated. The move paid off within two years. His portfolio of U.S. Treasuries, Japanese real estate investment trusts, and stocks including BYD and Hyundai returned more than 10% annually, helping to cover part of the roughly $162,000 USD in needed repairs. The extra money even allowed him to expand the renovations beyond the original plan. Having previously worked in retail sales, Yoneda is unusually is an unusually finance savvy priest, but is also part of a growing wave of temple owners. Turning to financial markets to make ends meet. Costs for the upkeep of the ornate wooden buildings are soaring while the country's Buddhist population has dropped about 14% in the last 2 decades.

Hmm.

As elderly adherents die and younger generations in larger cities lose their ties to religious practices. I'm just so thankful that the investments performed well, said the 46-year-old who inherited the temple from his father in 2018 after leaving his job in finance. And training as a monk. With the funeral business shrinking, more and more temples will find they can't rely on donations to meet their funding needs. They will have to build up reserves and invest those funds. The shrinking number of followers is hitting temples' finances. About half bring in less than ¥4 million per year, according to a 2021 survey of 7,000 temples. The situation is particularly severe in rural areas where it is common for monks to oversee Multiple temples while also working day jobs like school teachers or civil servants. So I don't know. Maybe they need to be thinking about getting some exposure to situational awareness. Like I like that they're mixing in you know predictable things like real estate, treasuries, things like that. But maybe they need to be allocating you know ten percent of their balance sheets to things that could maybe really start to do multiple.

Maybe using some leverage.

Yeah.

I like it.

We got to talk about Benioff at Dreamforce and specifically how he knows exactly what he's doing.

He's a crazy man.

Look at pulling up this picture. I mean, Jon has always been hyper-aware of his incredible height, so much so, he's such a nice person, he will turn down like a walking interview with somebody because he knows That he will make the other person feel incredibly small. And not everyone wants to feel like a little child.

I did learn it the hard way once. I did a walk-and-talk documentary-style video actually on the Gundo. And the comments were just, height mog, height mog, crazy height mog. And I was like, ah, that wasn't the intention. That was accidental. We were just kind of moving around quickly. Normally, I would do a seated interview.

Like, I'm so sorry. I forgot that I'm 6'8.

Yeah, basically. But after that, I was like, okay, I need to be intentional. And I think anyone who has experience in media and understands framing and also production teams, production teams are incredibly thoughtful about the framing, the seats. There's even stories about certain tech CEOs getting like booster seats sometimes when they do interviews and adjusting the chairs and being like, okay, we're going to give this person a higher chair and this person a lower chair so they're on even footing. And the lighting and the camera angles, all of these things matter. I used to have this joke that it's like, if you ever walk into an interview and the camera's at a Dutch angle, like, walk out because it's a hit piece because it's gonna look very unsettling if all of a sudden the camera's like at a weird angle because that's going to unsettle the audience. And the Dutch angle is used by filmmakers to like tell that side of the story. And there's a whole bunch of other ones. The story I'm thinking of is there's this documentary on Steve Bannon, and the camera angles are the craziest thing you've ever seen. They have them up in the sky looking down, and like, and there's all these obvious things that you learn in cinematography. If you're— if the camera's looking down on someone, it makes them look small. It makes them look weak. If it's looking up on them, it looks heroic. And so, lots of crazy angles.

I genuinely can't believe that, I mean, Benioff is an absolute Dog. I mean, look, look, look at this. Doing this to all the titans of the industry who have been making your life worse in some ways. They're partners, but they've also been making your life worse by— but, but doing this to Jeff, not directly, but just like he's sick of you.

Of the Nvidia-Entropic OpenAI alliance has been deeply intertwined with SaaSpocalypse, which has been a headache for him for a while. And this is—

this was his moment.

I'm sticking around. Like, you're not getting rid of me. We're gonna partner and we're gonna get through this together. And that's certainly the vibe that came away. Although Jensen played it very well. He was having fun with it. He was leaning into it. And he didn't let it like get to him at all. And he actually made it like a very endearing moment. So sort of masterclass in putting on a show as a CEO in a somewhat silly situation. Scenario, but what a funny, what a funny situation. It helps that he's what six five two ninety absolute yeah absolute unit. Your tickets had a great meme on this. It's POV. You're the CEO of a trillion dollar company and just arrived at Dreamforce, and it's the pic from the Odyssey of Agamemnon looking up.

Wow!

What what a crazy what a crazy moment. We'll see you on Monday. We're out. We're at a conference tomorrow, but we will be back on Monday eleven a.m. Pacific sharp.

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