José Macedo and Pondering Durian: The Birth of Delphi Intelligence

**Pondering Durian** (0:01)
You're now plugged in to The Delphi Podcast.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (0:07)
Hey, everyone, it's Tommy from Delphi Ventures, and today I'm joined by my partner, José and Pondering Durian, who's leading up our new initiative called Delphi Intelligence. It's one of the most exciting things we've ever done, and I'm really excited to talk to both of them about this. As a quick recap for Delphi's broad efforts in AI, we've invested over $25 million at the intersection of crypto AI over the past three years. We've hosted dozens of AI leaders on our podcast. Pondering Durian has created six foundational reports on crypto AI at our research company, and José, Luke, Kevin and the team have led two AI cohorts in Delphi Labs. Despite this, I still think Delphi Intelligence is one of the coolest and most exciting initiatives we've ever done in AI, and I'm really excited for it.
So Delphi Intelligence will be our free AI research hub where we're focused on sharing our own AI research and the research of other really smart folks in the field across all the domains of AI. We're going to include AI, robotics, frontier models, all the subsets including text, voice, video and a wide range of technical and non-technical topics. So today I'm joined by José and Pondering Durian, who I have the pleasure of asking questions to. These two guys are ridiculously smart at the intersection of AI, crypto, macro and much more. Shameless shills here, but if you want to read the research, visit delphiintelligence.io to sign up. And if you're an early stage founder seeking funding, feel free to get in touch with me or anyone else on the team. With that, let's dive into the episode. José, PD, how's it going?

**Pondering Durian** (1:49)
Thanks for having us on.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (1:51)
Yeah, PD, why don't you give a brief overview on Delphi Intelligence, then we'll dive into hot takes on AI.

**Pondering Durian** (1:58)
Yeah, yeah, sure. So I guess the the genesis or the playbook for Delphi Intelligence is is kind of roughly similar to what Delphi did on the crypto side, you know, maybe starting back in 2017, 2018 But just seems like there is a gap in the market between very technical papers on the one hand, and then kind of quick TLDR update newsletter types on the other. And it does seem like there's a gap that, you know, an institution like Delphi can fill by basically marrying the two and going deep in a bunch of different areas. So for instance, we just dropped a paper on or an essay on video models. We have another one on reinforcement learning. We have another one on AI browsers, and that'll just continue, you know, basically on a weekly basis, dropping large reports that are very similar to what Delphi has done on the crypto side, but just focused on topics in AI, in robotics and other emerging fields. And I think it's also going to be very complimentary to Delphi kind of expanding into a lot of these domains from an investment perspective. So it is kind of classic Delphi DNA, starting with research and going deep in the areas that we are excited about. And then also hopefully surfacing some interesting investment opportunities while we do that. And so, yeah, I'm super excited. Obviously, I've been working with the partners quite a bit, have been building out our internal AI focused team and launching this week was super exciting. So excited to hit the ground running.

**Tommy Shaughnessy** (3:32)
Zay, how do you feel about intelligence? I'm curious what you would want to see posted on the site for you to read.

**José Macedo** (3:39)
Yeah, I mean, I'm super pumped about intelligence. I kind of said this in the thread that we did this week. But yeah, I had my sort of the moment that that pulled me on crypto was this guy. I actually don't think I can dox him, but he's on Twitter, Koly B. He kind of pulled me on Ethereum. And pretty much since that week, I was just down the rabbit hole. And it was immediately I thought this is the most important and interesting tech I've ever seen. I need to devote my whole career and all my capital to it. And the only other time I felt like that since was reading Situational Awareness last year. Like I was already pretty bullish on AI. Obviously, you were in it very early, Tommy, and helping us all get up to speed. But that paper really solidified it for me. And since then, kind of been thinking about reading a lot, playing with it, investing in it, and just realized the best way that first of all, it's in a similar spot, I think, where crypto was in 2017, despite that might be weird to some people. But I think there's a lot of sort of experts in individual areas, but there's very few places you can go to get a good overview of what's happening and like kind of actionable, like alpha packed research, I think, at this point. And then, yeah, so I just think the best way to, the way we always do things at Delphi, once we get nerd sniped, you go down the rabbit hole, you do research that helps you get conviction, and then we can kind of deploy capital against that. And I think that's kind of the goal here, to understand, like AI really deeply, find some of the best researchers to both write about it within Delphi and then also curate. Because unlike Delphi, research is going to be free, so also curate some of the best research that we find around the web on this stuff. But yeah, yeah, the thing I'd most like to see is just...