Ep. 031 - EMERGENCY EPISODE: Are We Doomed? | Jordan Nanos, Doug O'Laughlin, Max Kan, Joey Brookhart

Jordan Nanos (0:00)

You guys ready to talk about the end of the world?

Doug O'Laughlin (0:03)

Yeah, dude, what's your P-Doom, Joey? I'm sorry about that.

Joey Brookhart (0:07)

I'm a linear extrapolator, Max. I can't think that far through. That's too far up here, like, in capabilities.

I don't know, I think we get, like, I don't know, we get a major hack or something. People freak out. I think it starts there. The P-Doom, like, I don't know.

Jordan Nanos (0:25)

Joey, even if it's a linear extrapolation from the last four years of experience that you've had, you think that P-Doom by the end of your life is impossible.

Joey Brookhart (0:38)

No, it's not impossible. I mean, you get it in, like, you could get it in four years easy.

Jordan Nanos (0:43)

With a linear?

Joey Brookhart (0:44)

With a linear extrapolation, yeah. That's a hot take, dude. Dude, linear from, like, linear from the start of, like, last year. You're like, even from, like, late 22, you're just like, I guess we're in 2026 now, so I guess four years, yeah.

Jordan Nanos (1:00)

Joey's like, man, just look at the ARR net editions, man.

Joey Brookhart (1:06)

I've never seen a number so big.

I gave a comment to the LA Times today, like, they called me up. They didn't call me up. They, like, I called the guy up and he's like, he's like, hey, there's some stuff on this. He's like, well, Ed Zitron said, like, you know, if, you know, if I was like, you put me on the record, Ed Zitron is a moron. I was like, look at, look at, I was like, look at any past call of Ed Zitron.

Jordan Nanos (1:36)

Dude. Yeah. Let's, yeah.

The track record is crazy. But okay, I think the, what I've, what I've now learned is that we have a new benchmark where we can measure model capability progress. It's called the Joey Benchmark and it's just ARR. Yes.

Joey Brookhart (1:54)

That's all that matters.

Jordan Nanos (1:55)

Yeah, dude. It's just a lot of ARR.

Joey Brookhart (1:58)

We've seen this now twice in the last month, not maybe six weeks or something. The only thing that matters is people's future view of Anthropic and OpenAI ARR and the pace, what's that's going on versus expectations. The entire Semi's trade is dependent on that and it's going to be dependent on that.

It makes up a lot of share market cap.

Doug O'Laughlin (2:21)

But you got to add in Azure plus AWS year-for-year revenue growth. These are the only four numbers that matter in the history of the universe. Never have they dropped Azure. You're telling me these are the only four numbers that matter, bro.

Joey Brookhart (2:34)

Azure CC growth guide used to be the number. It's going to be the Anthropic Net New ARR guide.

Jordan Nanos (2:39)

I was getting replaced.

Joey Brookhart (2:40)

It's replaced.

Doug O'Laughlin (2:42)

Is EWS out too? We only care about OPTI plus Anthropic Net New ARR now?

Joey Brookhart (2:46)

All they're going to care about.

Doug O'Laughlin (2:49)

Two numbers, with which the entire fate of TAP lives on.

Joey Brookhart (2:53)

The hyperscalers are like a level abstracted away from the end demand. They're literally renters of compute.

Doug O'Laughlin (3:03)

Just glorified in the end clouds.

Joey Brookhart (3:06)

They have a very nice business. They do other stuff. They sell CPUs too.

Jordan Nanos (3:15)

EWS and Azure are glorified in the end clouds now.

Doug O'Laughlin (3:18)

Put it on the directory D.

Joey Brookhart (3:20)

They're dumb pipes. That's what you used to say in the internet, like the telecom. They're dumb pipes. That's what Amazon and Microsoft and Google.

You know Meta's Neo Cloud apparently. Jeremy says a few gigawatts of 100 billion dollars of open source to me, right?

Jordan Nanos (3:43)

Is this a timing thing? Are these companies so dysfunctional that their research organization buys from Neo Clouds and then their Cloud organization sells to other companies' research organizations? Where like Meta goes and strikes up a deal with CoreWeave, and then Meta Compute goes and sells their computes, OpenAI or something.

Doug O'Laughlin (4:06)

They might sell it to OpenAI to do short-term tasks, but it's still preferable to start building the compute because in the event that Meta does well, they can sort of claw it back. Or they could also monetize open-source tokens, I think Jerby's claim, on that similar short-term time-pricing. I actually don't think it's cognitive dissonance because the key, but the important thing, which we've hard-found before, is just the potential to have a ton of trainee compute in the event that your research lab starts doing really well.