All-In Podcast Episode 156 - Show Notes

Show notes:

• Besties discuss the Apple Vision Pro. Friedberg mentions the huge potential he sees for training and on-the-job augmentation. Chamath expresses concern for the younger generation who is suffering massively from depression and health issues that now they might be spending even more time in virtual worlds. Sacks: we’ve been on the verge of VR ‘happening’ for 30 years but we’re still not there yet - form factor still needs to shrink down and get more natural.
• Is the Vision Pro like buying a computer, cellphone, or something else? It’s something new entirely. It may replace computers to an extent but it will also replace phones.
• Friedberg says the Vision Pro will be a $100 million product for Apple over the coming years.
• Meta vs Snap: Meta is up, snap down. The way Snap is structured, it’s not worth owning and they don’t respond to shareholder feedback. Operating expenses are rising steeply while revenue is not keeping up. They are cutting expenses too little too late. Employees compensated $1.3b on $35m of FCF; they paid employees 40x beyond what they made. Meta has way more products, more infrastructure, and more users.
• A SaaS ‘bounce’ is happening. After bottoming in Q3 2023, many companies beat expectations in Q4 and we’re seeing growth again. After 6-7 quarters of negative growth, we’re seeing quarter over quarter growth again.
• More and more companies are building software internally which is cutting into the moats and profitability of many SaaS companies.
• Chamath says open-source AI models will crush proprietary, closed models. Sacks argues that consumers want whatever is best and right now that’s ChatGPT, if they maintain that they can continue being the leaders.
• As the training parameters of a model converge, the quality of outputs converge. We are already reaching levels of diminishing returns on these models and all the major competitors are converging in terms of quality of outputs. People will then choose to go with whichever model is cheapest.
• Friedberg: The biggest source of data he can identify right now is Youtube. Over 500 hours of content uploaded pre minute, >2 petabytes of data per day! Youtube might be 300x larger than Quantum Crawl. If data is the most valuable asset in AI, Google has the world’s largest asset to leverage.
• Total US commercial real estate: $20 trillion asset class. $6T is debt, about half owned by banks and thrifts. Equity holders in CRE have lost up to 60% of their value, which is going to hurt retirees and pension holders.
• Residential real estate is also in trouble because of the high cost of borrowing now.