Google's AI Brain Drain, SpaceX's Huge Quarter, Airtable's 90% Collapse, US Data Fuels China AI

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody, welcome back to your favorite podcast. It's the All-In Podcast. It's the summer. It's August 6th. Having a hard time getting a quorum here on the podcast, but David Friedberg is here. David Friedberg is back, our Sultan of Science. How are you doing, brother?

**David Friedberg** (0:15)
Great to be with you.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:17)
It's great to be with you. And everybody loves when Brad Gerstner is here.
He's your Bruce Wayne. If markets are your game, he brings that namaste to your payday.

**David Friedberg** (0:29)
Yes.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:29)
Buy his glasses at discount and he'll get you one of those fancy Trump accounts.

**David Friedberg** (0:33)
All right.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:34)
Welcome back to the program, Brad. I love it.

**David Friedberg** (0:36)
I love it.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:36)
You bring the rhymes back.
I bring a little intro back. We've been trying, Chamath is on the road right now. Chamath is on the road, but we will get a field report from Chamath. And I call Daniel. Somehow Sacks is going to be here, but you know how he is. He's always late because you can get a phone call from very important people, but he will break in at some point. Oh, wait, I see in the text here. Oh, there he is.

**David Sacks** (1:00)
Hey, guys.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:01)
You made it.

**David Sacks** (1:02)
How do you like my beautiful summer gilet?

**Jason Calacanis** (1:05)
It's incredible. It fits perfectly.
You look warm.

**David Sacks** (1:09)
I don't know how Chamath does this.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:29)
Well, here's the report, everybody. As everybody knows, Chamath is on the road. Oh, here he is. This is a photo of Sacks.
He went to check his data center progress. I think that's in Colorado or Nevada, where he was building a data center.

**David Sacks** (1:42)
I think that's on Dune.

**David Friedberg** (1:44)
Oh, it's on Dune.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:45)
Yes, Dune 4 Yes, there he is admiring himself. Oh, look, here's Nat.
You know when a meme has reached its peak, when your wife starts dunking on you, there it is.

**David Friedberg** (1:58)
And here we are.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:59)
This was at the Christmas party, I think. Oh, Brad, you were on CNBC with Andrew Ross Gawken. Oh, there you go.

**David Friedberg** (2:04)
I wasn't sure if it was my Twitter feed that was just selecting into it, but it nearly hit everyone, right? This was a viral thing.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:11)
This has hit everything. All right, listen, we got a lot to get to. Enough with the shenanigans and small talk. Google had two major shakeups to its AI staff on Wednesday. Demis Hassabis has moved to Chair of DeepMind and Chief Scientist at Google. Reports describe this as Demis stepping down or being kicked upstairs.
We'll get into that. But Google framed it as a promotion and says he was stepping up. Here's Axios' quote explaining the shakeup. Quote, Google's Gemini 3.5 Pro is months behind, with some company sources telling Axios that it's in part due to low morale. Interesting. Several top researchers, including Gemini's co-lead, have left the firm for competing AI labs. Chef Dean, plus three other AI superstars, are leaving Google to start a company called Discovery Loop. Dean is a legend, Friedberg, and I think you worked with him at Google, one of the world's great AI engineers. He was employee number 30, joined in 1999, and has worked there, from what I understand, continuously for 27 years. Discovery Loop's going to be focused on deep scientific breakthroughs in AI.
Google shows down 4% on the news of Dean leaving, so $200 billion in lost market cap, if you want to correlate those two things. Friedberg, this is your alma mater. What are your thoughts here? Is this creative destruction? Maybe these people weren't delivering and they wanted fresh blood, or is this just the siren call of doing a startup in an age of unlimited capital for AI and unlimited opportunity, just being too much for the OGs at Google to not take advantage of?

**David Friedberg** (3:42)
Maybe it's the third bucket, which is, if you're the board and the management, you're having a debate about how to best deploy capital. Google has made a commitment to deploy $200 billion in Capex this year in AI infrastructure data center build out. Because of the Capex and accelerated depreciation, making an investment in AI compute in the US right now is hugely tax advantaged. And because of the extreme demand for compute, it's a pretty obvious kind of ROIC model, return on invested capital. So if you make this sort of an investment, you have significant demand for that compute infrastructure. You're very good at running the compute infrastructure. That capital can deliver massive profit returns for you with very high confidence in some forecasted period. Building the most advanced frontier lab driven model also takes tens of billions of dollars of capital. And the question really is, can you deliver the profits from the model?