Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on the AI voice assistant race, Comet browser, and the TikTok bid

Thank you. Thank you for having me here, John. Uh I'm doing What's going on? Can you tell us about the announcement today? What are you announcing? Who are you taking a shot at? Well, uh we are uh going to be partnering with a OEM. I think uh Bloomberg's already written about it.

uh Replexi will be pre-installed on the phones of u uh the taram and uh we'll be able to like push notify all those users to set perplexity is the default assistant on the Android phone. Uh this is a pretty big deal because um until now like people would OEMs would just not even take a meeting with you.

If you ever go to them and say hey like what do you think about using an alternative assistant or an alternative search? Y they be like Google's just paying too much money. I'm not going to do anything.

So it took this long to actually build something pretty differentiated and new which is obviously you know taking actions. Uh we put out a Twitter announcement today morning too saying uh we got most of it working on iOS as well.

So I feel like this is the next stage like you know moving all these AI chat bots to native assistants on the phone that uh not just answer your questions but also help help you get things done. Is there any hope that um there will be a more open ecosystem on the iPhone?

Uh I've used I've used the shortcuts function on the action button. It's pretty janky. Uh I'd love to just remap Siri. I love Apple. I love my phone, but I don't love that particular product. I'd love to swap it out with one of the more founder-led AI companies like yours.

Um, is there any hope there or is Apple just too dominant in that and do they view it as too valuable? Uh, I would I would assume the latter. Um, I think my hope is at least like let's start with Siri being able to call multiple AI apps. Sure.

Um, you know, um, they let the user provide some preferences on what apps they like for what different things. Um, at least we can start with that. And um I think calling other apps could be interesting. Uh most of actually to be fair to Apple uh a lot of it is still exposed in the Apple SDK through the events kit.

Uh so that's how we got things done like calendar, mail, reminders. Uh these are all part of their SDK. So uh you can actually call it uh podcast, Apple Music, uh that's Apple Maps, all these are possible to integrate into.

uh you cannot do stuff that's more native like alarms and volume or brightness uh you know people want and everything uh assistant at the end of the day. Sure. So that's their advantage.

Um so I hope like you know what they can do is stuff that's so easy and obvious like setting an alarm or making a phone call or sending a text message they can just continue to be pretty reliable there. Mhm.

But uh anything that's more multi-step in nature, uh they let the user invoke their favorite AIs to get things done. Mhm. Uh what uh what lessons have you learned from the antitrust history in big tech?

And what are you watching today with the antitrust stories that are unfolding around Google and Meta on Capitol Hill recently? Yeah. So, uh, our one of our executives, Dimmitri, is testifying today, uh, for the Google versus DOJ case. Um, I've already wrote wrote on X or core points.

Uh, I don't think Google should be broken up for two main reasons. One is it's not even in the interest of America for Google to be broken up. And, uh, number two is it doesn't actually increase competition. Uh, it's just going to like, uh, transfer from one monopoly to another. Yeah.

Uh, and actually they've done a pretty great job at uh, helping other people build browsers like Edge. I mean, if if you want to use the word rapper since I get accused of it a lot, uh, Microsoft Edge is a Chromium wrapper. Yeah. Right. That's right. And Brave was a Chromium rapper. No, that's great.

Everything Everything every other browser that's even managed to take even a tiny bit of market share from Google Chrome has been built on technology that Google did. So, we should actually credit them for that.

and uh I don't trust another organization to maintain that open source repository uh in the same way that they have. Yeah.

And uh the other the the other thing honestly though that we're pushing back on against Google is their how they couple uh OEMs to keep them as a default and don't let the OEMs put in play store otherwise.

M so basically it's very simple to understand if if there is like an enthusiastic OEM who wants to ship AIS on their phones u what Google does is okay you can do whatever you want it won't be an approved Android version of Google um and and if it's not um you're not allowed to put maps YouTube uh play store the one that this most is the play store because nobody can see a phone where you cannot install other apps and most developers of other companies are not interested in like maintaining versions of their apps for multiple play stores.

It's a lot of work. Even Samsung couldn't really get Galaxy Store to work and Meta, Amazon, all of them tried making their own phones and fail for this very reason.

Even if you fork Android and try to make your own phone, uh you have to convince everybody to actually ship to that particular new Play Store and maintain it and keep improving it. And you're not going to be able to share the uh Play Store ad revenue and subscription revenue uh with with the um OEMs that Google can.

So this is the primary problem and uh but that said like you know the assistant that they have Gemini is actually pretty horrible and the model is great but the product is not and there should be no reason to uh force people to keep that as the default when you have an inferior product uh just because you have all these deals and lockins.

So that's what we are pushing back on in our testimony. Yeah, just because you build a great foundation model does not give you a guarantee that you'll win at the application layer. And so these rappers although they've been derided like that that's the UI layer. That's what's so important to the actual consumer.

Um I want to talk about uh social networking in the context of foundation models. We've seen the partnership between uh the merger between X and XAI. Uh there's been rumors that OpenAI might be thinking about doing some sort of social network.

Obviously Zuck has been able to vend Llama into all of the meta core products. Uh what do you think the future does every does every AI company need a social media dance partner? Are we going to see uh Pinterest and Snap do things?

I know some of them have have experimented with AI features but haven't brokered a huge partnership yet. Uh what does the future look like? Are these two technologies like intrinsically linked and destined to be part of one organization or can an AI company operate independently forever?

Um I mean I I don't I don't know how social and AI go hand in hand that it's not it's not that straightforward like like if it was then meta AI would have already taken off pretty massively right even though it's not the leading model uh you could imagine most of the uh like say let's assume chat GPT um you know get like a billion queries a day or something um I don't think like like 60 to 70% of them are probably going to be super simple enough that met AI is going to work for it totally uh you don't need the fancy models.

In fact, most people using track speed in the world don't even know there's a model called 01 or 03 and and don't even know what the difference is for GPT4. So, um I would say the main problem is it's not AI is still very single player.

Uh the only experiment that I feel took off on social uh is this uh thing that we did first called ask perplexity bot on X. Yeah, I remember that. And um of course all the time in the comments. Yeah, it's great.

XAI also, you know, implemented that with at Grock and they have way more advantages because they own the platform, no rate limits and like they can drive installs of their app through that. So, it's it's like a pretty good uh experiment that worked.

So, I could imagine Meta doing this like you know on threads that could be like a add meta AI and and or it could automatically reply. You could do all sorts of cool things.

Y so it's more like the other way where a social network can help you grow usage of an AI app pretty pretty immensely uh compared to like an AI app benefiting from uh social layer so far at least.

Uh but if you could figure out social for an AI app within the app itself uh it can definitely make it more daily usage and high retention which is what most AI apps struggle with today. Can you talk about how you're thinking about your own models going forward versus leveraging the existing models?

You guys have sonar and then our uh 1776. I'm curious how you're learn where where you're looking to uh focus going forward.

Um I think we'll continue to uh keep the same strategy which is um have a version of our product that can run with our own models but not hinder or disrupt the user uh from this best experience that we can provide to them. If we're not able to do it with our own model, we'll just use other people's models.

We have no problems with that. Uh my our belief is that nobody's going to have a lead in uh the having the best AI model for more than a few weeks. the the pace at which the field is moving like Anthropic did the 3. 7s on it uh and then uh within few weeks like Google did Gemini 2. 5 Pro which was way better.

Gro 3 came out and then OpenAI has 03 and 04. There's always some debate on like what is the best model but they're all looking the same and they're all good for certain specific set of things.

Um do you think in do you think in five years the average consu internet you know user will have a favorite model or they just won't even know the underlying model that they're using and they'll just be sort of um you know the the software application layer will just be serving you know the the the most effective model for the task.

Uh I think it's going to be more like the second case. Uh the main reason I believe that's going to be like that because um everybody's just chasing the same benchmarks. Everyone has the same set of benchmarks, LMS, LMA arena, uh, GA, GPQA, and and humanity last exam.

Uh, and and they're just trying to like show their AI is the best. And so they do all the same sort of things that you do in RHF. Um, and u it ends up be making the models like look similar. Yes, there are some like tasteful things some model developers do like some people like the way Claude responds.

Uh some people like Grock's satire, but these are all like easy to build. It's not that hard. Uh the difficulty, which is why everybody's working on the difficult problem, is making these truly smart and like better at all these reasoning tasks.

And so that's going to end up making all these models roughly similar looking to the average user. That makes sense. Uh when do you and the team decide when something is ready to ship with the the voice assistant today?

Uh one of the massive advantages that I think you guys have is uh the culture of Apple specifically is about perfection, right? It's about pixel perfect design. You know, it's not uh it doesn't feel like the culture is sort of comfortable making uh mistakes.

You can see the uh even iMessage summaries being very embarrassing to them, right? Whereas like as a uh you know a big company now but but still relatively young you guys have the advantage of being able to you know move quickly try things and and iterate. Yeah.

So I'll literally read out to you the chat I had with with our engineer who worked on this be we good to launch and announce today question mark and then he's like yes still making improvement but let's launch and me like we want to address some of the onboarding concerns people had like all the which calendar or which maps to use and he's like yeah they're valid concerns but I'm worried about waiting too long to launch.

The Apple engineer in me says to wait until it's perfect. The perplexity engineer in me says that's why Apple has never launched anything. So, it's great. And then I said, "Okay, let's roll. " Do you have a sound effect for us, Jordy? Founder mode. Okay.

Anyway, uh I you posted uh what what's a social app that doesn't exist yet, but you wish existed, doesn't need to get to 100 million or billion users. Uh what did you learn from that? What was exciting? And what do you think uh you might stay away from? Yeah. Yeah. The major learning was the OG Facebook. Mhm.

Uh and and Usenet. Uh these were the two main ideas. Mark Andre actually talked to me after that. He's this is like his pet like like you know idea that he always keeps coming back to apparently.

And uh Bloomberg terminal is another interesting thing where you know nobody thinks about it as a social network but it is what it is today. People are not leaving it because of the network it has, right? And it's very elite because you have to actually pay that much money to get into it.

But then because of that, the quality of like exchanges are also high or at least it gives you this feeling of exclusivity, which is what Facebook uh leaned on to in the early days where they were only in Ivy League colleges and stuff. Um and so I I think that concept can be explored.

Clubhouse definitely tried that and failed. So it's not like you know bulletproof but that can certainly be explored again if you want to build an app that doesn't have like too many users you need to gate it in some way. Mhm. Whether it's by paytoplay or like some other kind of uh eliteness criterion it's not clear.

Yeah. But then what after you get in should also be uh thought about. Yeah. uh the quality of exchanges should be high like in in some sense Elon has turned X into some something like that.

Uh there are a lot of trolls, a lot of random accounts and all that stuff, but by forcing people to have the blue mark and paying $8 a month and um and all that stuff. I think he's already made it like much better than it used to be. So, uh a more aggressive version of that could be explored.

he could explore it himself. Like if there is a super premium version where um you only get to like respond to some people if you're paying even more. Um how how would that make the quality of exchanges on the platform? It's not clear.

There's the other side of the story where some people like Bill Aman come and respond to random people on X and and reason he gives us like I like the attention. I like I like you know I'm even on a vacation I want to come and like keep replying. I like the dopamine hits of like getting notifications, you know.

So, it's not like if you get billionaires, uh, they want to stay with the other billionaires or stay exclusive. I think they actually like using a product like ex to stay connected to the normal people. Yeah. Okay. The idea yet. I want to pitch you an idea that we've been kicking around here. might be terrible.

But uh in terms of like the LLM research, AIdriven social network, I find myself doing a lot of very niche deep research reports. Sometimes I did a whole uh deep dive on deep research report on Toma Bravo. And then I did another one on the the story of Johnny Carson, the the the original host of the Tonight Show.

Uh fascinating. I don't know how I wound up down that rabbit hole. I really enjoyed it. uh if I'm on perplexity and I find some and I ask some really interesting question because asking interesting questions is often more more challenging than getting a great answer.

Uh what if I just could just uh click a button and share publish it to an internal network and then Jordy can follow me on Perplexity that he can see my most interesting questions.

not not going to see the whole feed because maybe I'm asking about a me a healthcare issue, but if I choose to share it, I'm just sharing my result and then they can click and oh, John was interested in, you know, this specific thing. Maybe I'll take a tour down his research result.

Is that an interesting option or is there something I'm missing that's like that's actually a terrible idea? No, it's not a terrible idea.

We've exact we've considered this exact idea and uh you know obviously we the more I keep working on features I people ridiculed me that uh what are you doing when your core product is failing and buggy and like going down like you're going down the drain and like you're taking the company down.

So all I I read all the stuff too. So don't let the haters get to you. Don't let the haters get to you. Oh, look.

I think some some of them have a valid point though, like more features you keep introducing to the product, you just lose sight of the core focus, why the product even exists in the first place and making it like a pretty bad experience and then you and you win on neither of these things.

But I do agree with you like it'd be great to share uh the the perplexity threads or like that you create. Uh we have this thing called discover uh and uh we're trying to increase the volume of content on discover. Mhm.

And once we do that in an automatic way with curation to users interest like we're going to let some of the users p try to like publish it to discover on their own just like a creator on YouTube does it and um and then if a few people engage with it like the Tik Tok algorithm we're going to try to surface it to more people.

That is the long-term idea. That's why I'm even having to discover. A lot of people even ask me why why does this thing even exist? Yeah. Uh because I I want to keep it as the optionality to like have a social product within Perplexity. Yeah, that makes sense.

Uh if you have another minute, I'm curious how you're thinking about shopping, how much time you and the team are are putting into this. It's obviously a very exciting opportunity uh and I know you've shared some about what you guys are doing uh before. Yeah.

So last year towards the end of last year we launched perplexity pro shopping where you can once once you do a shopping query we're not just giving you the the answer we're giving you the product cards and we could even let you buy directly from there some of the things we surfaced from Shopify with their API and like let you buy with shope and some of the things we ourselves integrated with some merchants and like uh did the check out flow ourselves and um you wouldn't even have to go and check out on the merchant side you can just do it directly on perplex We thought this would be the best uh innovator dilemma angle against Google because Google uh even if Gemini gives you shopping answers, they have no incentive to like let you transact uh because like the they lose they make money by sending you merchant sites.

That's why Google flights doesn't let you book flights on Google. Uh you have to book it on Expedia or Booking. com. Uh hotels, same thing. So uh I think that's that's why we worked on travel and shopping where we let people try to book directly.

Uh we have some ideas on how to incentivize it like free shipping or like x% off on hotel bookings done on perplexity. Uh and but but what we learned the hard way is people actually want really good results first. That's why they're even coming here. They don't care if they transact here or not.

It's it's a secondary thing.

uh that is only if if the result quality is such so good are they interested in the last step and we uh didn't quite get that right in the whatever we did end of November so that's what we spend time on the first quarter is to just improve the UI improve the latency improve the relevance make sure the cards are like upto-date high quality uh filter all the low merchants uh like lowquality merchants uh make sure like even images for every card is present like this is all a lot of boring work that LLM don't solve.

Same thing with hotels. Like Trip Advisor data is great. We work with them. But like there are so many other places on the web where there are good reviews that people want to know. Mhm. And you got to like aggregate all of that.

And this is why I think like model companies are not guaranteed to win the application layer because you have to work on all these boring things. And then sometimes when people book a hotel on perplexity like when you actually go to the hotel like they say the booking never came through.

Uh so there's a lot of pro real world problems you hidden like packages might not get delivered. You don't have a way to track the package because the merchant still does the shipping. We don't do that. So Tik Tok if you notice Tik Tok has a shop tab uh which literally looks like Amazon now.

And I heard like they even have their own fulfillment in Seattle. They hired people from Amazon and like they're doing their own shipping. That's crazy. So that's my lesson from this is you want to go to a vertical, you have to go all in and like nail like like be prepared to like uh play the long game there.

How do you think about uh manufacturing viral moments? You guys had a cool experiment with your uh Super Bowl uh activation. I'd love to get a postmortem on that. But then you're also not afraid to go and you did this sort of Squid Games campaign that I saw getting a lot of attention as well.

Um, how do you how do you think going forward sort of balancing these more like scrappy kind of organic activations versus, you know, going big and and working with, you know, global celebrities to build the brand? I think we should keep being scrappy.

Uh, the thing it's it's by the way like uh he's a pretty global star, like well-known star. Uh, like people recognize his face pretty quickly, but he's also not like as expensive as Hollywood people. And so uh that's why we decided to work with them.

And uh the other other thing is like it's the concept that matters at the end, right? Like coming up with the right concept is more important uh than like who you work with. Um and we we we'll still try to keep doing these one-off viral moments. It's all it's take about taking bets. Not all of them land.

Um the Super Bowl was good. Like in fact like I the retention from people who came to the Super Bowl exceeded my expectations. Uh and um again like whether it's better than doing Instagram ads is not clear to me yet. Uh we we have to explore all these different platforms.

Um but I do think there's like you know two things you benefit from right like we did this thing with Ben Shapper where in his podcast like he pulls up perplexity and ask questions.

Um I think like uh that doesn't actually convert like you cannot track performance but uh it it it it does lead to more brand awareness like if they're like he has a lot of listeners and like it's a different way of doing ads on a podcast where you're not actually like having him say perplexity is awesome go and install it.

It's more like watching him use it and then you learn what the product is and how what it's meant to be used for. kind of inspired by Joe Rogan's pull it up Jamie where all the time Google's being used there. Yep. Um yeah, we do that with Poly Market.

Uh we pull up Poly Markets all the time and recommend that people go and download and install. Yeah, that that's pretty awesome. Yeah, it works really well. Uh I'm I'm curious. You mentioned earlier uh you know uh people sort of yapping on X, you know, trying to trying to uh sound in on on your product strategy.

How do you how do you balance like you know on X it's like an echo chamber of people that are in Silicon Valley working on AI but like perplexity in theory doesn't really care about people on like you know in San Francisco uh or or New York or these hubs right it's like you care a lot more about like you know uh some you know random person in in um Arkansas's like you know you know wanting to wanting an answer about something and using the app.

How do you think how do you personally kind of like uh yeah everyone in Silicon Valley could switch to duck go and Google would be unaffected that's like the lesson from the last era and so you could do the same thing but yeah I'm interested to hear your take I think this is both my uh like weakness and strength I I I spend a lot of time on this platform so I understand it better but then uh like we are living in a bubble like there most people are only using chat GPT and and uh they don't they haven't even heard about like most of the other apps.

I think Elon has managed to break that a little bit because he has 200 million followers. So essentially he reaches a lot of people. Um but that's kind of why we want to do more of these uh Instagram related things. Um the commercials uh Super Bowl like these are our attempts.

Actually if you notice the Super Bowl tweets uh didn't actually matter uh on X like most people made fun of it or didn't even engage with it. But it did help us get a lot of like mainstream normal people uh become aware of the app and use it.

Uh same thing with the Legion J commercial like it helped increase our usage in other countries outside uh you know countries that don't even use X. So uh I believe the platform that has the most people in the world is Instagram.

Uh for good or bad like if you go to any city outside the Bay Area just watch which app like people are having on their phone. It's mostly Instagram or WhatsApp. It's not really uh X. Yeah.

Uh do you spend a lot of time thinking about AGI or is there just enough uh consumer application uh features to build that that it's it's almost a distraction? I do spend time thinking about it in some sense.

It's a unique opportunity to have like uh the ability to have the front end which people can feel the AGI let's say. Yeah. uh uh so you do want to think about experiences where people can be made to feel AI and that creates that jaw-dropping magical end consumer experience.

So so that's kind of why we worked on all these pro searches this voice assistance agents uh we're working on the browser browser agents the you can only do all that if you're like making some predictions of where these models could potentially get to and try to build before even they get there.

You don't want to be late. You want to build at the right moment where like kind of like how we built perplexity around the GPT 3. 5 time not GPT4 time it would have been too late then you need to pick your moment. So you do need to think about AGI. Uh that said I'm not a believer in like you know um fearongering.

I I just think uh it's already happened like the genies out of the bottle China versus America that race is already going on. Nobody's going to slow down. Um and everybody wants glory. No, nobody cares about other people or something. Everybody wants glory and and and some kind of power to control the future.

So, uh let's just uh like like accept the truth and move on and try to like make sure everyone knows how to use the AI so that their livelihood doesn't get affected. Uh that makes sense. You're I I was thinking about it.

I don't know of another10 billion plus uh AI startup uh founder who's not constantly promising that AGI is like two months away to get you know you're just like you know let's focus on our users and focus on the opportunity that's probably the right thing uh I mean speaking of the the the foundation models on a more practical level uh where are you seeing the most interesting vectors of optimization you know people are focused on large context windows uh huge pre-training runs but there's been some debate about are we hitting a pre-training wall?

Are we hitting a data wall? Uh RL's very hot right now. Um yeah, where do you think the foundation model labs need to go? And and what are you specifically excited about?

I imagine that maybe a code generation model not super important to your business, but something that's more knowledgeable and hallucinates ne less about facts. Extremely valuable. So what do you want to see? Uh I think RL is the uh place where most investments are going to go to.

Um especially with with models like 03 that are able to do tool calls pretty natively uh rather than being prompt engineered to do that or like for example before 03 the way we built like our agents is there would be one model that g came up with a plan for the query another model that would execute the plan by converting the plan into like smaller queries filtering links calling searches and then another summarization model that actually takes all the results of the planner and the router and like summarize Now it's all like one single model.

Uh that's great like that that that means like you have to like rebuild it. You have to throw away lines of code and rewrite it. But we've been doing this uh since the beginning like people think like perplexity has remained a stagnant code base or something.

It's always changed as soon as like models became more capable.

But the interesting thing about the native tool call kind of models is that if we want like a sonar version of the product that runs on our own uh setup uh we also see need to start doing post training beyond just uh training for instruction following and summarization but uh like also like tool calls and and and completing tasks using RO uh and and we hope to collect all this interesting data through the browser uh platform where like people are giving tasks on on our browser and then we obviously See some of some of the agents will fail there where we'll collect all the data and like try to uh create like positive trajectories create like eval suites and then uh do a post training on that.

Uh and so the nice thing is a lot of open source code bases exist on how to replicate gRPO or PO and post train these models and we've been doing that work already. So uh that's where we plan to invest more resources into for this year. Uh, how are you thinking about advertising in the context of search?

It's historically been an ad- drivens business, but we're seeing a lot of AI product companies just charge 20 bucks a month, $200 a month, $2,000 a month. Who knows? Um, is there a future where if you search for what's the best corporate card, it's going to ramp is going to show up at the top if they bid bid on that.

Uh, hopefully not. I I think that's that's the main reason why people like using the AIS.

they they think it's giving them something that Google doesn't offer and and um so I think the subscription revenue is very healthy and positive like open is making 10 billion a year or something like that right or 7 billion something like that so definitely uh that's only going to grow uh and and if AI start doing things not just answering questions or or writing code uh people will pay even more because they kind of think about it as hiring somebody uh if you look at the amount of people people pay for personal assistants chiefs of chief of staffs, personal chief of staff, estate managers, nannies, like you know, it's a lot of money and there are like a lot of people who can afford all that and we're talking about uh doing something 100x cheaper and also economically 10 to 100x more valuable in terms of end output.

So uh I I think the subscription uh TAM is way bigger than what it is today.

U I I believe like you can do a lot of interesting things with memory where once you understand the user deeply enough uh the user can probably trust you if you show them relevant sponsored content as long as it's super uh personalized and hyper optimized for that user.

Uh Instagram has shown some stats where the engagement time on their platform reduces if uh they remove the ads because that's level of personalization of the ads. So if if uh any of the AI companies can do that u I think that could be like a thing where brands could pay a lot more money to advertise there. Yeah.

So that's yet to be explored but in order to crack that you need to crack memory properly. Uh that's kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser is like we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you. Uh because some of the prompts that people do in these AIS is purely workrelated.

It's not like that personal.

On the other hand, like what are things you're buying, which hotels are you going, where are you, which restaurants are you going to, what are you spending time browsing tells us so much more about you that uh we plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and and maybe, you know, through our discover feed, we could show some ads there.

Makes no sense. How quickly do you want to launch Comet? Do you have a you have a launch date? I'm assuming you want to launch this afternoon. Yeah, it was supposed to be out by now.

We got delayed uh I think partly because we underestimated difficulty of the project and partly because we tried to do multiple things and so uh we tried to scope it down and we're aiming to get it out by midMay. Awesome. Good luck. Um last last question I have. You posted Bite Dance of America is worth building.

I'm assuming you're you're building the Bite Dance of America. I hope to be able to, but we need to earn the right to do that.

So uh let's first like you know I want to succeed with the common browser uh I think that'll be like the real second product of perplexity uh everything else we launched like the assistant or the like like apps platforms is all like just different versions of the same thing.

Uh the comet will be the first really truly different product and um I think if we can do that a second time um I believe like we can and and discover that's the other product we're trying though it's the app right now but you could imagine spinning it out as a separate app too.

Uh you could imagine us like earning the right to do that. I think there's lot like I've spoken to the founder of bite dance and one thing he told me is they they're structured in a very different way. It's not like uh like Cap Cuts or Tik Tok have like different growth teams.

U they they do have their own growth teams but there's one team by dance that takes care of infrastructure for all their companies, one team that takes care of growth for all their companies, one team that takes care of front-end mobile development for all their apps and so they share knowledge across apps very quickly.

Uh it's insane. So that sort of structure doesn't exist in u in in the US. Like take Google is actually the closest to Bite Dance of America if you think about it. They have so many different apps in one umbrella, but they they don't share lessons.

Like the YouTube team is so different from the Gmail team, sort of from the Chrome team, and that's why it takes so much time to collaborate. So you need a very different leadership structure and a culture to make it happen in America. Yeah, that makes sense.

Uh every time I ask you one more question, I get one more question and this I promise is the last uh without perplexity. Yeah. Yeah. Um without uh violating any NDAs, what what's going on with with Tik Tok? Speaking of bite dance, uh we there was a big flurry.

Everybody was submitting, you know, bids and then it's been quiet. Is there any do you have any insight that is uh not necessarily confidential? Yeah. What is I really don't we we we've uh submitted our bid. We never expected to be the leading candidate or anything. We're a very small company compared to them.

uh our bid was more interesting in the sense that everybody else who bid for them did not want to do anything to do with the algorithm. Uh but I felt like the core problem is um fact that like the algorithm is controlled by China in some form or the other.

Yeah, even if they say okay the Chinese app is separate uh apps running outside the US and outside China like European countries are all sharing the same code and so they can get to like use that data and influence u you know what feeds people in America see uh so I think like that's where we wanted to do some real work and the search bar is another place where we wanted to do some real work we thought our proposal was pretty interesting but uh there are some you know we're not a data center company we cannot guarantee them security and all that.

Uh Oracle can. So, uh we'll see what happens. I think they've delayed the decision and it's probably going to be coupled with the tariff situation, too. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Uh thank you for wearing a suit as well. You look fantastic.

Uh and uh you guys are you guys are killing it like uh Thank you. Technology Brothers. I like the name. Yeah, it's awesome. Well, it's great to have you on, fellow technology brother, and come back on anytime when you have news. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much. Cheers. Bye.

Uh, on Poly Market, who will acquire Tik Tok? Applovin has shot to the top of the charts, but on Lowval, uh, they have about $10,000 in a $2 million market, uh, in terms of volume, but Apploven is at 20%. Oracle, Larry Ellison combined, if you consider them one entity, uh, 21%.

Oracle's at 12, Larry Ellison's at nine, Microsoft's at eight, Amazon's at eight, Tim Stokeley at eight, Frank McCort at eight, Alexis O'hane at six, uh, Perplexity is down at 4% right there next to Mr. Beast at 4% as well. Walmart at 3% who we discussed earlier, uh, would actually be the the Ben Thompson choice.

We should get ourselves in the mix and I don't submit a fake bid just to go viral. We're not allowed to uh bid on anything on on Poly Market, but uh but but we should we should throw our names in the hat. Tik Tok. Yeah, we should just bid on Tik Tok. It's just going to be We're going to No more slop content.

It's just We considered doing a press release around it, but it never uh never hit the wire. It played out pretty quickly. Anyway, uh let's do some timeline while we wait for our next guest. Tyler uh says, "Scoop, I found TBPN's hidden warehouse. Nice try. " and he finds a picture of the brothers supply.

I wonder where this is. But we always love when fans share fun photos. Found us, Tyler. Caught us. Uh we are in the in the market for a new studio. Hopefully moving into one soon. And uh this this brick building looks like it's uh fireproof. Been in it's Lindy. It's been around for a long time. Probably safe.

Probably great to record a show there. We love a fireproof. Uh Luffy says uh there was this news yesterday in Techrunch. ex Meta engineer raises $14 million for Lace AI, a revenue generation software startup. And this was shaking up the timeline. Everyone was quote tweeting this.

Uh Luffy says, "Hey, Lace, make a 100 million AR software for me. Do not make any mistakes. " Fantastic prompt, by the way. Use it. Use it on any of any your preferred model. It'll it'll work. Why don't people Why don't more people do this? I don't I don't know.

It It seems like one of those obvious tian sort of secrets secrets, I suppose. Yeah. Um, no, but Lace, uh, Lace, I guess, is is focused on maximizing revenue for your call center with zero extra investment. It's more just like the tech crunch like headline went weird.

But again, I think people wanted to joke, yeah, a lot of startups don't generate much revenue. Yes. Yes. So, they're like, "Hey, we will our business is revenue generation. " Um, but, uh, yeah, Techrunch is back.

I don't know if this is accidental, but I feel like again and again, we're seeing more Techrunch headlines post acquisition. So, they're doing well. Great to see. Great to see. Uh Patty, I just wanted to give Patty a shout out because he's a friend of the show. Patty.

Uh he says he's proud to announce he's starting a profitable startup. VCs, my DMs are open. Uh so yeah, if you want to get in touch with Patty, he's free agent. Could be picked up at any moment in Japan live streaming. Could be picked up by a venture capitalist or company. But uh we love Patty on this stream.

So this post from East Village guy is 32 late for me to lock in. My brother Ray Croc was a 52-year-old traveling salesman when he met the McDonald brothers. Get a grip. Awesome. And I thought this was worth highlighting. There's so many great stories of this. Uh Enzo Ferrari is another.

He was 45 when he started uh Ferrari. Granted, he had spent a couple decades in automotive racing. Founder of Zoom, founder of Workday, both 60s, 50s when they started their companies. Red Bull founder too, right? Dietrich. I think he was pretty old.

uh founder of Monster, very old uh which was very funny because it's a very young brand. Estee Lauder, there's tons. Yeah, there's tons of these examples. Never too late to start doing your life's work and start a generational company. Just do it. Why don't Why not? Yeah. Estee Lauder was 38 years old.

Why not just start a power law company? More people should do that for sure. Uh anyway, we have this bizarre Tik Tok or YouTube video. It's the third most viewed video on YouTube this week. is an AI generated short of a pug that saves a baby from a plane crash and then they try surviving on an island. Can we play this?

It's it's uh this is the future, folks. This is this is entertainment now. It's great. Parachute. It does have a compelling narrative, you know, inciting inciting element, inciting action, you know, turn of events. Will he save the baby? The sound effects are brutal. I know. It's really welldesigned.

It's so optimized for that. 400 million views. 400 million views. Yes. 400 million views. Feeds the baby. Starts cooking over the coconut. Cooks fish over the coconut. That is adorable. Uh feeds the baby some sort of fish stew and then writes SOS in the sand. And their voice.

And then for some reason the military shows up and they like have like guns and stuff. Overnight success and they overnight success and they rescue the baby and the pug and then it just ends and it's like the ultimate like you you don't expect it to end so you watch it again. Fine art. That's the future.

It's the future again. Uh you know clearly some some human element in there figuring out what's viral about it but uh pretty sloppy. Pretty sloppy. Little sloppy. Well, you know what's not slop? AI grant batch one was absolutely insane. Jeff Huber, who we had on the show, shared this.

So, I didn't realize this was a throwback. Yeah. So, going off uh the initial batch was in there. Curs. Uh I know Chroma. Wombo. Who else do we know in here? Pretty cool. Pixel Cut. Dust Forefront. Uh just so early. I wonder when AI grant batch one was. This is the Nat Friedman project, correct? Yeah.

Um, very very cool. Uh, little like under the radar I guess. Was it structured as a grant? It wasn't even it wasn't even YC style or was it did they take No, it's an investment via no cap, no discount, MFN safe. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty standard. So, pretty standard investment.

Uh, and you can imagine they've done pretty well. Yeah. I think some other cool I I'm almost sure Julius went through a later batch. I've saw some other folks go through. Uh, pretty pretty cool. Julius was in batch two. We have our