Schmidt Out of Luck — EP 73 Ashlee Vance And Kylie Robison

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
All right, Kylie, how are you doing?

**Kylie Robison** (0:02)
I'm fabulous. How are you?

**Ashlee Vance** (0:03)
I'm good. We're back again. What are we doing this week?

**Kylie Robison** (0:07)
This week, I want to chat about our wonderful pod with Alexandr Wang.
Eric Schmidt got booed at a commencement speech. We have some interesting stuff on our substack, Phantom Neuro, the Texan Telescope Ranch. There was a verdict mere minutes before we started in the Sam and Elon trial. More drama in XAI land and more.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:30)
All right, let's hit it. I'm Ashley Vance.

**Kylie Robison** (0:32)
I'm Kylie Robison.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:33)
This is Core Memory. Here we go.

**Kylie Robison** (0:50)
So, Alex Pod, main takeaways, main thoughts.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:54)
Yes, so we got the pretty exclusive interview with Alex. He hadn't talked much in 11 months. I think he'd done one rando podcast, but he never really got into Meta's strategy. Yeah, hopefully people have listened to it. I thought, it was, well, actually, I really enjoyed chatting with Alex.
I know him a bit outside of when he's in a media situation. He's a bit different when he's in that. He's a bit freer. I thought he was, I thought, you know, we learned way more about Meta's business than we knew before, but Alex was a bit reserved on specifics and some things.

**Kylie Robison** (1:33)
Yeah, when people were asking me about it, I would say that he seemed quite nervous. I've only met him when he was at scale. I met him at a random conference briefly, but yeah, in this chair, I felt like he was a bit nervous to like hash out all the Meta stuff.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:48)
There's still this piece where I have to assume they're going to be very strong. I mean, they really do have just tons and tons of compute and they fall into that category of Google, Amazon, which is not exactly the AI behemoth so far. But these players just have endless resources at their disposal. It's an interesting dynamic that they have over there. Alex is 29, I think you said, and you got Nat Friedman ostensibly working under him. Nat used to be the CEO of GitHub. He's this long time open source executive, a major player in AI land alongside Daniel Gross, who also works there, had been investing in all the really the coolest AI companies.
Daniel had been with Ilya at, what is it? A safe super intelligence and so super interesting dynamic there. Just to have Alex as the boss. And then, I don't know, he's very dismissive of these ideas that there's already discord between him and Zuck in one camp, really wanted to push the limits of research and buzz in on this other side being more product focused. And Alex said, the reporters were all getting this wrong.

**Kylie Robison** (3:06)
Oh, the drama with these reporters. They're always so wrong. Let's get a deposition in there. Yeah, I felt like he was very dismissive of that, and of the claims Jan made of his age and him being too junior. I think you can have all the compute in the world, but we've both seen inside these big companies, it's very bureaucratic and slow. And the point of this lab was to move fast and be like a frontier lab. But I mean, you liked the model, right?
The only time I get to see this model is when it does horrifying things on Instagram.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:39)
So, I mean, like I said, in the podcast, it is weird that I'm not like a big Facebook person, but I'm massive on WhatsApp and then play around on Instagram. And I've got my Meta glasses, which I am unabashedly happy to say that I enjoy.
And I just never use their AI stuff at all, even though I'm living inside of many of their products. So that seems like a problem to me. I thought Muspark, I only played around with it for a couple of days. It was cool, it does this multi-agent thing when it's thinking through problems and it's a little bit different to what I've seen from some of the other labs. But I felt like it was, well, Alex wasn't claiming, it's really neck and neck. And you can feel that. It felt underwhelming in parts.

**Kylie Robison** (4:32)
Now I'm wondering, I'm gonna test my glasses. Hey, Meta, what famous author am I looking at right now?
Just do it. Thinking, thinking? I'd be shocked if it got it.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:49)
That's what that hurts.

**Kylie Robison** (4:50)
No, it should. It's just, I don't think the what is it looking at feature is all that good.