All In 171 - Show Notes

DOJ sues Apple for anti-competitive behavior in five categories.

Sacks: Both Apple and the government have good points but the government has no smoking gun in this case.
Friedberg: Apple makes great products and consumers are free to switch to Android or Windows or alternatives.
Jason: The fact that the App Store can tax every app by 30% is outrageous. They should allow consumers to choose whether they want to get apps off the App Store.
Friedberg: Government needs to stay out of this situation.
Sacks: Government goes after companies when they get too big and in this case they have a valid reason but it seems unlikely they will win.

Apple in talks with Google for Google to be the default the LLM on their devices.

Chamath: Inexcusable that Apple is backing down from this giant moment in tech. As such a huge company, they should be leaning into innovation and building their own LLM.

Friedberg: Apple is surely making their own models.

Sacks: How could Apple possibly be considering this after how disastrous Gemini was?

Chamath: Apple spent $30B on R&D last year. Where did it go?

A $418M settlement was reached by the National Association of Realtors. The NAR conspired to artificially inflate agent commissions. Broker commissions represent about $100B in the US and these changes are expected to lead to a 50% reduction in Realtors Nationwide.

Friedberg: with so much of the paperwork and documentation involved in the real estate transaction process becoming taking over by AI, the fee reduction will continue to drop. Predicts that in the future, the transaction fees will be a fixed fee. Massive disruption is happening in this industry and the consumer will benefit over time. There are 1.4m realtors and probably 10% of them make 50% of the income. The bottom performers will not be able to make a sustainable living as a realtor.

Sacks: Buyers won’t want to pay buyer’s fees. It’s game over for buyer’s agents. Skeptical that this policy will continue as planned due to how massive of a shakeup this is. The fee system is broken, it should be Based on performance.

Microsoft has acqui-hired AI employees and is spinning up a new company called Microsoft AI.

Sacks: Possibly this was to avoid anti-trust attention but more likely this was a bailout. The company (Inflection) wasn’t going anywhere so Microsoft bailed them out to get the talent.

Saudi Arabia plans a $40B AI fund to invest into AI companies. This would be the second biggest fund ever raised. How would you deploy it?

Sacks: He’d take his time, not rush to deploy all the capital. It’s hard to know who in the tech stack will capture the most value: chip makers, applications, infrastructure, etc.

Jason: He’d pick robotics to invest in.

Friedberg: the applications are where you can find interesting traditional business models.

Chamath: Most fund managers get wrong: not having enough reserves for winners. His biggest missed chances were not having enough extra to deploy to winners.

Reddit went public today at an $8B valuation and popped 50% on the first day of trading.

Chamath: Meme stocks are back and there’s a lot of speculation happening. also looks like we will get more rate cuts this year. This is the beginning of the beginning of exuberance.

Sacks: Inflation still hasn’t dropped enough so don’t factor in the rate cuts yet. Biden is polling negatively despite how well the economy is doing. Of the $35.8B of CRE loans last year, only a quarter were paid off. If rates don’t come down, there will be a problem.

Science corner: The universe is expanding for inexplicable reasons.

Friedberg: It’s long been known that the universe is expanding. It’s like there are raisins in a cake and as the cake bakes, the raisins are moving further away from each other. The rate of expansion is different at different parts of the universe. There is so little we understand about the structure of the universe.

A kidney was taken from the pig, some genes were edited out using CRISPR, and implanted into a man successfully. So far, it’s working well. This could be the beginning of a nearly infinite source of organs.

Elon had a huge week: Successful Starship launch, Neuralink human implant success, and more.