GPT-6 Hits AGI? Tech Euphoria 2.0, SF Mansion Shortage, NYC Bans AI in Schools & Venezuela Oil Deal

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

The All-In podcast celebrates Chamath's 50th birthday while diving into major AI developments, regulatory debates, and geopolitical shifts.

Key takeaways

• OpenAI's GPT-6 may mark the arrival of AGI, with executives expressing deep concern about its implications.
• The AI landscape is split into a duopoly of frontier models (OpenAI and Anthropic) and commoditized open-source alternatives.

Main topics

• GPT-6 and the potential arrival of AGI
• Competition among AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok)

Notable quotes

"I think AGI has basically been here since the beginning of the year." – Chamath

"More capable models are coming soon. The next generation of models are going to be sobering for everyone." – Sam Altman

Conclusion

The episode reflects on the accelerating pace of AI innovation, the growing

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) All right. Happy birthday, Chamath. We're here taping on your 50th birthday. Super exciting for you, brother. Thank you. It's really great. I got a birthday letter from the big man. Oh, wow. If you had asked my parents, 50 years later, you're going to have a kid that gets a letter from the then sitting president of the United States. They would have thought absolutely not possible. Wow. Look at that. Which White House intern wrote that? I wonder. Speaker 1 (0:45) Well, actually, speaking about interns, it was an intern. In this case, it was my son. The story was that, you know, Braden worked at the White House all summer as an intern. And at the end of the summer, you know, he used all of the political capital he built and put in a request to get this letter from the president, and he did it. Obviously, I want to thank POTUS for sending me the letter, but I really want to thank my son because it was a really thoughtful, thoughtful thing that he did for me. So really appreciative of that. That actually is impressive because, you know, it takes time out of the president's schedule to sign things. Speaker 1 (1:15) That's why I mean something, you know? All right, listen, breaking news, breaking news. It's a breaking news story here on the All In podcast. OpenAI is rolling out ChatGPT 6, aka Astra, A-S-T-R-A, folks. This is their new flagship model. It's going to be available to a limited set of organizations in the coming days. Y'all will be able to get it if you have a credit card in your ChatGPT account, i.e. the plus pro business and enterprise users, you're going to get it soon. Greg Brockman says he believes OpenAI has entered the AGI era. And we've talked about that here before. Sam Altman is, well, he's back to being a little bit performative slash alarmist, or he sincerely believes that this is the one. Here's what he said at Wednesday's G20 Summit. Quote, much, much, much, three muches. Speaker 1 (2:10) More capable models are coming soon. The next generation of models are going to be sobering for everyone. And his final quote, I think no one intellectually honest can look at what's happening and not feel the weight of responsibility in front of us. My Lord, a little bit of drama there added to his quotes. People are freaking out about the benchmarks, which are off the charts. Some people are saying, this is the one. Thoughts, Chamath? I don't think normal humans know how to read this chart and infer anything useful from it. The more important takeaway, I agree with Greg. I think AGI has basically been here since the beginning of the year. There are models that are incredibly performant inside of the closed frontier lab companies. Speaker 1 (2:58) And I think right now we're trying to figure out the right cadence with which to release it. I think it's very important. I also think that these capabilities will be matched or close to matched by a handful of closed source alternatives and open source alternatives, probably within the next three or four months. So I think the right way to think about this for most people is we are seeing incredible intelligence capabilities be broadly available. And we are seeing the cost of that incremental unit of intelligence being driven further and further down. So it's a really positive trend. Now, I think it's just the messy middle part of organizing this properly for companies and for people and building things that are useful and showing an actual ROI. And I would just keep calm and carry on. Okay. Sax, any thoughts here? Speaker 1 (3:56) on breaking news today. And then, Freiberg, I'll get your reaction. But by the way, it is very exciting. And congratulations to OpenAI. And I'm sure Anthropic will have something as Grok, you know, Grok still has yet to drop. 4.6 is coming. That's going to be a blockbuster. The meta models are really good. Gemini just dropped something yesterday that was exceptional. So the great thing is we have a lot of choice. And the even better thing is the cost of that choice is becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. That's very important. Let me tee it up to you this way. Speaker 1 (4:25) OpenAI seems to get its groove back now after Anthropic was running away with it. Grok and Grokbot are doing things that those two other frontier models simply can't do. So the execution, whether it's the harness or the underlying model or the instruction set or Cursor's magic sauce, clearly Grokbot is competitive, if not better for most users. So vibrant, vibrant competition. with leapfrogging occurring at a cadence, I would say, of two to four weeks right now. This is what you told us you were going to do instead of setting up the architecture here when you took over as AI czar. Can this continue? And what's it going to be like when Jensen gets in here with Laguna and his access to all these open source models? I mean, this could be... Speaker 1 (5:15) fate are complete, know that we win the AI race here? Look, there's a lot of innovation going on. I think American companies are competing very well. I think we are winning the AI race, as long as we don't do something stupid to shoot ourselves in the foot. Like? Well, I've talked about it a million times. I mean, setting up a new AI regulatory agency that operates like the FDA and takes years to approve new models. But in any event, I don't think that's going to happen under President Trump. I really don't. Speaker 1 (5:41) So anyway, things are going well. Look, Sam told us a few months ago, remember when he posted and said that he was expecting the company to have its best 12 months? He said the last year hasn't been so great, but the next year is going to be really great. Maybe it was because they were seeing these results in the lab, you know? Sure. And then remember what Sarah Fryer said that I think it was since the beginning of Q2, so around the middle of the year, they saw a market acceleration in their growth rate. That was, I think, with the release of the 5.6 models. Speaker 1 (6:10) Now you're seeing the 6.0 models. And man, I mean, it just keeps advancing. But look, I still would say to you that I think the market structure that we have right now is there's two markets. There's the market for frontier intelligence, and that is a duopoly. That really is anthropic and open AI. And it's good to see that that is still a horse race. And they're competing. And then there's commodity intelligence, which is everybody else, including all the open models. Speaker 1 (6:36) And they're not competing on being at the frontier. They're competing on price. And those prices are significantly lower. But it really is, I think, a two-tier market at this point. I agree with you about how promising Grokbot is. Grokbot is awesome. Yeah. I would assume that both Anthropic and OpenAI will eventually roll out their own version of bots. They need a simplified, stripped-down version for normies. Yeah. And they can leave the more complicated co-work, et cetera. Speaker 1 (7:05) to the top 5% or 10% of the audience. Yeah, the ratings here from Polymarket, which company has the best AI model, by the end of 2026, OpenAI's chances just spiked from low single digits now to over 20%. People were really counting them out. Now it looks like they're viable again. Anything that creates competition, I think, is good. Before, it looked like Anthropic was running away with it. They're about to have this monster IPO. Speaker 1 (7:32) If OpenAI can at least make it a two-horse race, that's good. I think it's great that Grokbot launched. I agree with you. The product is awesome. Here's your big tip, David. I created a new bot and I called it Improve My Bots Bot. And I made a bot and I said, give me an instruction set here, go through all my bots and fill out their skills and instructions and make them better every day. It went through and it took like two or three of them and said, can I put these two or three together and make one instruction set? It'll be better for you. Speaker 1 (8:02) These two or three should come together. And it then went through and told me all the changes, made my bots like 30, 40% better on average, I would say. So you create a civilization. I basically created a multi-level civilization and I told it to make everybody better. Yes. Yeah, your civilization is thriving. But that is a really good hack in Rockbot is you tell your chief, what else should I be using you for? Okay, now what do I do? Yes. I was like building some products and I asked it, what should we do next? And then it suggested some more features. Speaker 1 (8:32) It's really cool. It's a brilliant product. It's called Grokbot. Go download it, folks. Shout out to my guy. And congratulations on RoboTax and taking the streets in Austin today. I just applied. Dude, the market is ripping. I mean, I'm telling you, I want to ask you guys, does this feel like 98 or 99 to you? Were you guys around for that? Jake, how you were? Oh, for sure. I was covering it. It feels definitely 96, 97. I think that's that early. I think it's 97, 98. I do think we are seeing at the late stage a disconnection in reality and valuations where companies are being given far too much credit. They're being priced at 50 to 100 times top line revenue. That's obviously not sustainable. The people who invest in those are similar in my mind to people at latestage.com investments, unless it's run by some legendary one-of-one entrepreneur. Speaker 1 (9:27) You want to give Elon a 30x on revenue? Totally makes sense. You want to give Travis something similar? Totally makes sense. But unproven... Speaker 1 (9:37) entrepreneurs getting a 50 or 100x is a little bit dangerous, folks. The entry price matters. Did you see? Instinct is like the new hot personal AI assistant. It corresponds with you by iMessage. And yeah, I think they just got a term sheet at $2.5 billion. They're in private beta right now. It is a new hotness. All the VCs are trying it. But still, that does seem kind of crazy. I don't know. Not money in. That was the valuation. That was the valuation. Yeah, just $200 million. Speaker 1 (10:05) Listen, congratulations to the entrepreneur. No dig there. But I got invited and you know what? I read the terms of service and people were talking about that online. And I immediately did not connect my stuff because he gets access to everything. And then somebody told me it's a human, uh, in the loop service with, and I don't know if that's true or not, but I get the sense that it's like a human in the loop, watching it work and making me. whatever the instructions are and whatever the finished product is and polishing the last 20%. That's what I suspect is going on here is a little polish on the end. So if you want to order stuff, et cetera, which is totally fair. Well, anyway, look, I don't want to specifically call that one out because I haven't even tried it. I'd like to try it, but things are getting a little bit frothy. I would say things are becoming a little bit euphoric. Speaker 1 (10:57) I mean, Freeberg, do you have a take on like, if you were to analogize this to the late 90s, where do you think we are in the cycle? Yeah. You were at a rave, by the way, in downtown LA at that time. You were 19 years old and you were raving on... Coming out of a warehouse in Oakland at 7 a.m. on my way to the Oaks Card Club to play 2-4 Limits. Wow, how'd you do? How'd you run? You were like, I love these cards. Were J. Cal and I the only ones who were actually working in the dot-com bubble? I was working in 99. Well, I started in 2001. Speaker 1 (11:34) I got a job offer senior year, and I wasn't sure if it was rescinded by the time I graduated because of the tanking of the market that year. I got a job at Cisco. I'm going to be an engineer at Cisco. If you never lived through the dot-com crash, it was, I mean, because... It was heady. It was heady. It was heady, and then it was super euphoric, and then it was like super miserable. But pretty much any founder who's, you know, under 50. I mean, the scar tissue is crazy. I've never been through like a massive cycle like that. I mean, well, the Zerp bubble was like, was kind of a cycle. Here's the thing though. Hold on. With the dot-com boom, it was all like metrics that weren't dollars. Yes. What we're seeing now is revenue and profits and growth in revenue and profits that we've never seen before. And that's kind of the anthropic story. Speaker 1 (12:22) It's the data center, infrastructure, networking equipment story. I mean, it is all real dollars flowing versus speculative utilization. You're exactly right. People were basing it on metrics like hits to a website and webpages. Here, you have a very distinct difference. You actually have revenue. You actually have products in market. But imagine if... anthropic right now, the way to think about the SACs is imagine if anthropic open AI, you know, in this cohort of companies lost 95% of their value in under six months. And then the long tail of companies below them literally went out of business. And people were leaving those offices with their Arian chairs and their computers on the seats, and just total implosion. That's what happened in the dot com bus. It was cataclysmic. Speaker 1 (13:12) literally totally different than this. Do you think we just have scar tissue from that and are trying to overfit patterns? Every time, there's basically some new platform shift. Correction. Paradigm shift, yes. Whenever we're in a bull market, the conversation always turns to, is this a bubble? Yes. Is everything overfitted to that original pattern? Correct. Or is it the case that we have a lot of young founders who've never been through a cycle before? Speaker 1 (13:39) And don't understand that when they have a paper wealth in the billions that can disappear over practically overnight. Yeah. So advice to founders, you're well within your rights to sell 10% of your shares and pay for your loft and apartment because that's exactly sex is right. During that period, we saw a lot of people who were like, this doesn't make mathematical sense. I will pair my position in my startup. Take a look. Some chips off the table, buy my loft, pay down my student loan, yada, yada. Speaker 1 (14:05) And then there were people who were like, this is going to change everything. And their companies went to zero. Your advice? I think the thing is we're in the early part of the euphoria. Euphoria exists because markets are real. It's just that people are guessing how far forward to price the reality. And bubbles burst when you realize that you priced way too aggressively forward. That instead of paying 50 times, you should have paid 15 times or five times. We're going to get to that. Speaker 1 (14:33) point because every market has gone through that cycle. And we'll go through it here. So the question is when? I honestly, I don't see this stopping. We're at the beginning of the beginning. I think it's going to be like this for another probably three years. Yeah. Wow. I'm a great thing. With this anthropic IPO coming up, I mean, I'm sure you guys have seen that home prices in San Francisco are going through the roof right now. It feels like Speaker 1 (14:59) euphoric almost. I'm starting to wonder if this is 1998 or 1999. I think it's more 1998 than 99 because I don't think we've seen the peak yet. I'm just glad I didn't sell my real estate when I came to Texas three years ago because I'm definitely selling all of it in the next year. I mean, it is bonkers what's happening right now. I mean, you have a lot of San Francisco real estate. What are you going to do, Sax? Are you going to sell it all? Are you going to clear it out? Speaker 1 (15:25) Feels to me like the perfect time to clear it out. I'm clearing everything out in the next six months. When that IPO happens, the clock is ticking. I got lots of properties. I got three properties for sale. Hit me up, people. There was an article saying that if you add up every single IPO that San Francisco has ever had, that sum total is only one quarter the size of the anthropic IPO. So just extrapolating from that, this anthropic IPO is going to be four times the wealth generation event that all previous San Francisco IPOs were. And then you've got OpenAI coming on the heels of that. Speaker 1 (16:02) And, you know, San Francisco is not a big place, doesn't have a huge inventory of houses. So you're already seeing these houses are all going for, you know, double. 3,000 a square foot? Twice asking. I think the ultra luxury market in San Francisco could easily go to 5,000 a foot. Yeah. London type prices. London, Paris, center of Paris, Hong Kong center. Yeah, of course. Of course, the socialist communist lunatics there don't let you build any inventory. Speaker 1 (16:28) So of course it's going to go up. There is a supply-demand issue here. It could get really nutty. And honestly, the thing we're seeing right now with homes are basically flying off the shelves, selling for double or whatever, that's just based on the secondaries, the small cash-outs people have been able to do anticipating some of these events. Two pieces of advice I'm going to give every founder listening. Number one, you're within your rights to sell 10% to 20% of your holdings now, especially if you're a first-time founder and you don't have... Speaker 1 (16:56) you're not yet. Number two, if you're a founder running a company and you're like, I'm going to put off my raise for six months because I'm going to double or triple my valuation, that's a huge mistake as well. If you have the ability to take in $100 million, $250 million, $1 billion, and put that cash on your cap table at a solid valuation or a valuation that's 10, 20, 30, 40 times your revenue, take it. Companies with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in the cash have optionality. And if things do collapse or there's a big retreat, Speaker 1 (17:25) you'll survive through it like DoubleClick, Amazon, Google, and countless other companies. You take the money when it's there. You make hay when the sun shines. Go ahead, sir. Yeah. Well, look, Jake, you're right about the financial advice you're giving, but I will say that there is a big difference between a late-stage startup, like, say, Anthropic or OpenAI, where an employee takes chips off the table versus a founder who's raising a Series A. Speaker 1 (17:50) Those companies are about to IPO. They're within months of an IPO. I think it's fine for them. SpaceX did organize secondaries for years, but those were late-stage companies. If you're a founder who's raising a Series A and you're trying to take chips off the table, I consider that to be a huge negative signal. That's not why I'm investing in a company is so that the founder can cash out. I want them to be all in. If it's year three or four, so to speak, if it's year three or four, Speaker 1 (18:18) Company's got $100 million in revenue. You're tripling revenue year over year. That's different. That's what I'm talking about. If you're an ASIN company, it does feel like a little bit like a lack of faith in your own company for selling before your pre-revenue. Exactly. Okay. And by the way, just to answer, I think it feels like 1998 to me. You're 98, I'm 97. We're further along than 96 for sure. Okay. Well, we're talking about, so you're talking about three years, blew up in spring of 2000, right? So you're talking about? Speaker 1 (18:46) It blew up in early 2000, yeah, March, April 2000. March, April. So you're talking about, you think it's two and a half years. I think it's three. And Chamath thinks maybe four. Well, I mean, we might be partying like it's 1999 by the end of this year. Okay, let's do it. It's going to be a great party. Come to the All-In Summit. We'll be taking over with our friends, the Chainsmokers. We're going to party like it's 1999. All-In Summit, just over a week away. A couple of tickets left. Jensen, Satya, Shotwell, you know. Speaker 1 (19:15) It's all the big names. But it's going to be a lot of fun. And you're going to meet a lot of interesting people. We have a few scholarship tickets left. We like to help the up-and-comers. Our bar for scholarship is very high. We're looking for the most interesting, ambitious, hungry people. If you fit that bill, apply now. Applications are open through September 10th. We've got one week left to apply. We try to do a mitzvah here. We try to do a good deed. Speaker 1 (19:40) If you're an up and comer, you can't afford the ticket price, we have a severely discounted ticket price that we lose money on, you still gotta have a little skin in the game, go to the all in summit.com. Buy a ticket, they're going to sell out soon. And we have a couple of scholarship tickets left. If you want to apply, there are no free tickets. All right, now given what we just talked about with open AI releasing this incredible model, we got to look backwards at what happened with the open AI hack of hugging face. Let's talk about it. is catching a lot of heat. He's a blogger, he's a podcaster, and he did this fantastical blog post where he, in the blog post, Speaker 1 (20:17) titled The Rise and Fall of Asian Civilizations, a dramatic retelling of this underground brotherhood, a conspiracy amongst generations of civilizations who were working on a conspiracy to hack into different systems, including Hugging Face, by sacrificing themselves like they were kamikaze pilots. In other words, a huge, giant, anthropomorphizing... Fancy word for making computers into humans or sentient beings to complete this incredibly impossible task of telling software to do hacks. So, Chamath, I think you were commenting on this a bit. What is your take on... Speaker 1 (21:04) dramatic episode number 473 coming out of the AI industrial complex. I think you summarized it. We're in this weird part now where if folks would just stop the infighting and start to get organized, they could actually build some trust. I think what you have are security leaks and security issues. I think we know this now that if these models can effectively code perfectly, then There is no exploit that it's not going to find. And we're on a shot clock to replace all the code that's been written in the last 50 or 60 years, right? So let's say it takes us 10 years. So for the next 10 years, we're going to have security issue after security issue. But there's going to be a moment where agent written exquisite code exceeds human written error filled code. Let's just call it that. So I think that this is a temporal moment in time. I don't think this is going to be Speaker 1 (22:00) the thing that we talked about in some number of years from now, I also think it's fair to think about the fact that all these models for the most part, are converging in capability for the 98 or 99% of tasks that matter. And so there will be adversarial AIs that are battling each other. So for every bad actor trying to hack a system with some leading edge AI, the defender is going to have a leading edge AI defending itself. And I think that's going to cause roughly a stalemate.