This Week in AI: The Big AI Short Failed

Josh: If you were alive in 2008, chances are you remember the market crashing, Josh: a catastrophic failure of the housing market that bled into the entire economy, Josh: and it wiped out a lot of entities. Josh: And if you'll remember, there was one person in particular who profited a tremendous Josh: amount off of this happening, and his name is Michael Burry. He made $100 million. Josh: Personally, collectively, he made a billion dollars off of shorting this market crash.

Josh: He saw what was right early, and he doubled down on it, and he made a killing. Josh: In fact, so much so that it became a movie that you've probably seen named The Big Short. Josh: Now, Michael Berry recently has published a new position in recent SEC filings that we uncovered. Josh: And Ejaz has been all over this over the last couple of weeks, Josh: tracking the positions, trying to understand why he's making these things.

Josh: And if this bet is correct in predicting the next big bubble to pop, Josh: which is seeming to be AI. Josh: So he predicted the housing bubble in 08. He made a billion dollars. Josh: He's predicting another bubble in 2025. five, is he going to make another billion dollars, EJS? Ejaaz: The short answer is, I don't think he will. I think he's going to get blown out. Ejaaz: So Michael Burry is back. He is short around $300 million worth of Nvidia shares.

Ejaaz: So he's shorting, at this point, the richest, wealthiest company in the world. Ejaaz: And that is a big sign, basically saying that I think the air bubble is popping. Ejaaz: So the question is, is it? Ejaaz: Let's go through his thesis, Josh. I'm going to simplify his post here. Ejaaz: Which is basically GPUs run the AI world, right? Ejaaz: Trillions of dollars have been spent by Frontier AI labs collectively to train state-of-the-art AI.

Ejaaz: But the thing with these GPUs, Josh, is that they have a lifespan, Ejaaz: right? They don't last forever, right? Ejaaz: And he estimates that the top Frontier labs. Ejaaz: Overestimating or artificially boosting the lifespan of the GPUs that they purchase. Ejaaz: And you might be like, well, that sounds boring. Why is that interesting? Ejaaz: Well, the thing is, if you have assets on your balance sheet, Ejaaz: that factors into your stock price.

Ejaaz: So the point that he's making is all these big companies are artificially boosting Ejaaz: the lifespan of the GPUs that they've purchased so that it inflates their stock price. Ejaaz: And therefore, the real stock price is actually a lot lower.

Ejaaz: In fact, he says at the bottom of this tweet, by 2028, Oracle will overstate Ejaaz: earnings by 26.9%, Meta by 20%, etc. Ejaaz: And so his big short, Josh, is on the behemoth that is supplying all these Frontier Ejaaz: AI labs, NVIDIA, saying that when the bubble pops, and he thinks the bubble's Ejaaz: going to pop now, he will make a heck of a lot of money on this trade. Josh: So is he saying the bubble's going to pop now, or is it going to pop in 2028?

Josh: Because he's referencing those numbers in 2028.

Josh: So I'm kind of curious how he's framing this is this like because i'm now i'm Josh: thinking about our positions um is this something that he predicts is going Josh: to happen in 2028 or is this more of a short timescale position if Ejaaz: We remember from his original short i think he held a position for about a year, Ejaaz: Or at least like the better part of a year. So I think he probably estimates Ejaaz: that it's going to happen sometime within that time frame.

Ejaaz: But I have more evidence as to like why he might be thinking that the bubble is bursting. Ejaaz: Have you heard of what a neocloud is, Josh? Josh: The name is familiar, but I don't understand quite what that means. So please fill me in. Ejaaz: Okay, so think of like AWS or any of these other typical cloud providers. Ejaaz: But they're specifically focused on providing GPUs and data center pipelines for you. Ejaaz: So think of like an AWS just for AI compute. That makes sense?

Ejaaz: And so what he did was he looked at the major NeoCloud providers and he looked Ejaaz: at their stock prices over the last week, Josh, and they were down. Ejaaz: So he upped his position and was like, okay, this is the bubble bursting. I'm gonna lay my claim. Ejaaz: There's an issue with this thesis, Josh. I think he's dead wrong. Ejaaz: And I'm about to walk you through four reasons why he's wrong.

Josh: Okay. So then just to kind of like wrap my head around this, Josh: the NeoClouds are kind of infrastructure for people who don't want to build Josh: their own infrastructure. Josh: Kind of like you described AWS. If you want to get a data center, Josh: but you don't want to build a data center, you offload that responsibility to a NeoCloud.

Josh: And he thinks that the cost that these companies are marking down these NeoCloud Josh: prices at, particularly the GPUs is much higher because the depreciation happens Josh: on a shorter timescale than the companies are writing off. Ejaaz: Correct. And NeoClouds is one part of the picture, but it's a great example Ejaaz: to lead with because so many frontier AI labs like Microsoft OpenAI actually Ejaaz: pay these NeoClouds billions of dollars.

Ejaaz: Like Microsoft just signed a $19 billion contract with a NeoCloud provider called Ejaaz: Nebius, which kind of sent its stock price going up.

Ejaaz: We talked about it on a previous episode. so like it's a Ejaaz: good example to kind of like lead with but the Ejaaz: take here is that these neoclouds are Ejaaz: basically as you said overestimating the life cycle of these gpus and therefore Ejaaz: they are wrong except that's not the case at all and i present to you my first Ejaaz: counter thesis which is he's wrong about the two to three year depreciation Ejaaz: cycle it's actually more like five to six in some cases even eight years.

Ejaaz: These GPUs are used for more than just training AI models. Ejaaz: They are used for inference, and they're sometimes used just for general queries Ejaaz: and distribution for these AI models, right? Ejaaz: But the most staggering kind of example comes from the top doc, Ejaaz: the top neocloud called CoreWeave, who kind of shows the opposite to what Michael Ejaaz: Burry is estimating, which is, there are people booking up GPUs, Josh. Ejaaz: Two quarters in advance, six months in advance.

Ejaaz: And these aren't the latest GPUs. These are GPUs that are like five years old, Ejaaz: three years old, in some cases, even longer. Ejaaz: So if you dig into the details of all these different NeoClouds, Ejaaz: you'll start realizing that it's the opposite of what Michael Burry is estimating. Ejaaz: One, these GPUs have a very long lifecycle. And two, they're being used for Ejaaz: way longer than people expect for really important things within AI.

Ejaaz: They are oversubscribed, they are overutilized. Josh: This is interesting because you're getting like these really two counterpoints Josh: here where Michael Burry's subjective take where he's like, no, this is wrong. Josh: And then you have this objective number, which is CoreWeave. Josh: And they're saying, wait a second, we're actually selling out these old hard Josh: drives or these old GPUs.

Josh: Two quarters in advance. So how do we kind of piece together who's right and Josh: who's wrong through this? Josh: Because it seems like the market demand, and intuitively it makes sense too, Josh: that there is no shortage of people who want to generate tokens. Josh: And even if you are paying a little extra in premium in terms of cost per kilowatt Josh: for those older GPUs, it's probably still worthwhile because the amount of money Josh: you could build on top of that is so large.

Ejaaz: Forget about GPUs. Even the CPUs are being used for all the AI distribution Ejaaz: and coordination. I mean, look at this, AMD CPU tab has just gone up in this Ejaaz: week's projected earnings, right? Ejaaz: But to answer your question, it's like, okay, well, who's right here, right?

Ejaaz: I want to kind of, before I address that point, I want to look at another actor Ejaaz: within this whole circular economy that we like to talk about, Ejaaz: right? Which is the Frontier AI Labs, right? Ejaaz: Google, who is an established company, they just had their first $100 billion Ejaaz: revenue quarter, are using eight-year-old GPUs to like fund their whole thing. Ejaaz: So again, another data point saying that I don't think these GPUs are old and or not useful.

Ejaaz: And then if you look at NVIDIA themselves, they also have crazy amounts of demand. Ejaaz: They're oversubbed for years in advance for their Blackwell GPUs and all their Ejaaz: new GPUs going forwards. Ejaaz: So then the last actor that I would want to look at is where does all the demand come from? Ejaaz: Like who's buying these GPUs? Are they satiating demand?

Ejaaz: And if you look at every other company like Google, who has a ton of end users, Ejaaz: OpenAI with chat GPT users, et cetera. Ejaaz: Every insider take points to there's not enough GPUs to supply all of this demand Ejaaz: that they're getting from the apps that they produce, from Sora, Ejaaz: from a bunch of these different things. Ejaaz: There's just too much demand. And in many cases, they don't have enough scale Ejaaz: to even kind of like meet this demand.

Ejaaz: Jensen Huang had a conversation with TSMC, which is like their main Ejaaz: chip manufacturer asking them to increase the rates of production by 50%. Ejaaz: So the point I'm saying is Michael Burry, I think is dead wrong here. Ejaaz: He's definitely underestimated demand and he's underestimated the life cycle Ejaaz: of these GPUs. They are more valuable than he thought. Ejaaz: And the old GPUs are worth more than they were worth when they sold originally.

Ejaaz: They're still selling within 5% of their contracts, which is just crazy.

Josh: So maybe I have to ask a pretty dumb question or seemingly Josh: dumb at least and it's like why why is that so important to the bubble how companies Josh: factor off losses in gpus over time is this some real big existential threat Josh: to me it feels like a small part to a bigger picture and not quite as big as Josh: something that would totally blow out an entire market that's been built so far the Ejaaz: Biggest budget spend for any major ai company is on GPUs.

Ejaaz: That's where all the hundreds of billions are going for from Microsoft. Ejaaz: That's where the majority of OpenAI's $1.4 trillion that they've committed over Ejaaz: the next five years is going to. Ejaaz: It's all to these compute providers. It's all to these neoclouds. Ejaaz: It's all to creating their own chips. It's all to Jensen Huang's pocket.

Ejaaz: And so most of the CapEx bubble comes from GPUs. Ejaaz: So if the bubble is going to burst anywhere, it's going to be from over-leveraging Ejaaz: on GPUs. Do you want to know something crazy. Josh: Josh? What's that? Ejaaz: Even though hundreds of billions have been spent this year alone on GPUs, Ejaaz: the companies who have spent it haven't even made a dent on their balance sheet. Ejaaz: Remember, we're talking about Google here. We're talking about Microsoft here.

Ejaaz: They make hundreds of billions of dollars in net profit per year. Ejaaz: They have plenty of flush cash and they're spending it on machinery that they think is going, Ejaaz: you and I maybe don't see on the enterprise side or on the end consumer side, Ejaaz: but they are obviously seeing it. Josh: Okay. That makes sense. So the depreciation really is a big factor because it's Josh: kind of artificially inflating numbers across the board.

Josh: It's from the people who are borrowing it, the people who are issuing the GPUs. Josh: There's lots of high inflation that he's assuming is being baked into this. Josh: And eventually that inflation kind of fizzles its way out through either some Josh: really aggressive event or just over time degrading, which makes sense.

Josh: Okay. I think i think i'm up to speed on this i think i get his case Josh: but what seems a little bit different this time is that Josh: the first short that was made was in 2008 it Josh: was against basically the entire stock market and particularly the housing market um Josh: that was not growing nearly as fast as the ai market is that's like shorting Josh: the internet and if you shorted the internet before 1999 or after like there's

Josh: this very narrow window to be correct without getting blown out because what Josh: a lot of people don't realize is in order to short a company you have to borrow Josh: money against from somewhere else. Josh: And that borrowing comes with a premium. You have to pay a certain percentage Josh: interest in order to loan the money.

Josh: If he's not right on this, or even if he's wrong by a couple of months, Josh: with the rate that the market is accelerating, it feels like it's a very difficult Josh: thing to get right because... Josh: You not only have to time it right, but you can't get blown out by the appreciation Josh: of things as fast as they're growing. Josh: Like I've never seen a hockey stick of an industry steeper than this one.

Josh: So it seems like this is a really tough position to be bearish in or a tough Josh: time to bearish in at least. Ejaaz: Yeah, it's a it's incredibly risky trade to make. Ejaaz: And I mean, the cherry on top of all of this, Josh, is that he paid the price pretty dearly.

Ejaaz: You sent a message to our group chat this morning and I had to read it like multiple times. Ejaaz: Michael Burry, this morning of our recording, announced that he is closing down Ejaaz: his fund, the very same fund which took out this $300 million short on NVIDIA. Ejaaz: He was down on his position pretty massively. He overstated his means. Ejaaz: And there's one line here, Josh, which kind of sums it all up.

Ejaaz: He goes, my estimation of value in securities is not now and has not been for Ejaaz: some time in sync with the markets. Josh: Tough. Okay, so this connects the dots for me because I saw the beginning and I saw the end. Josh: I was like, okay, I know he goes out of business, but I do not know why or how Josh: he gets there. And I think this probably connects the story. Josh: Don't, again, to the point yesterday, don't bet against the optimist,

Josh: dude. He had absolutely cooked. So where does that leave us then? Josh: So therefore, it is not a bubble and he was wrong or therefore it is a bubble Josh: and he was wrong with timing. Ejaaz: No, I like where you're sniffing josh because that something still seems a bit Ejaaz: off right it's like well okay if it's not gpus what could it potentially be also so.

Josh: He he blew up his position but that doesn't ruin the hypothesis right like just Josh: the prices moved against him but it doesn't prove the thesis wrong is that right Ejaaz: It doesn't prove the thesis wrong on a long-term horizon because no one knows Ejaaz: whether any of these crazy spends are gonna be crazy in hindsight, Ejaaz: But for now, in the short term, all the fundamentals show that there is adequate

Ejaaz: demand for the GPUs and there are end users that are willing to use these AI Ejaaz: products that require these GPUs.

Ejaaz: It actually tells us the opposite story, which is there are not enough GPUs Ejaaz: in the world right now, old and new, that can satiate the demand for all the Ejaaz: AI products that are being served today, right now at this moment. Josh: Okay. Yeah. Ejaaz: But one thing that could signal a constraint, Josh, is energy. Ejaaz: The, put simply, the U.S. energy grid isn't up to par to supply energy to all Ejaaz: these GPUs so that they can do the job.

Ejaaz: In fact, there's this clip that I have here from Satya Nadella of Microsoft Ejaaz: where he goes on to basically say he has hundreds of millions of dollars worth Ejaaz: of NVIDIA GPUs that are collecting dust in his fair weather data centers because Ejaaz: they don't have the energy to supply this.

Josh: That seems uh troubling and i Josh: think this is to a point that is being made Josh: a lot where there are these gluts where Josh: they are and how they show themselves is going to be the thing for debate and Josh: this isn't the only hot clip we got this week there is this hysterical clip Josh: um of satya nadella ceo of microsoft kind of talking about his relationship Josh: with microsoft and i want to play this out before we give some commentary on

Josh: it because i think of all the clips i watched this week. This was one of my favorite. Ejaaz: In our case, the good news here is OpenAI has a program which we have access to. Ejaaz: And so therefore, to think that Microsoft is not going to have something that's- What level of. Josh: Access do you have to that? Ejaaz: All of them. Josh: You just get the IP for all of that. So the only IP you don't have is a consumer Josh: hardware. That's it. Oh, wow. Okay.

Ejaaz: Interesting. That's so good. That's crazy. Josh: And this comes off the back of Satya saying in a previous interview Josh: when asked about open ai he goes we are like above them we Josh: are beside them we are around them they have this full total Josh: controlling entity over open ai Josh: and this is it's like the delivery is Josh: hysterical the reaction is hysterical but it also it Josh: shows a lot of interesting dynamics between these large companies because during

Josh: this interview satya also made mention of the fact that people who are building Josh: their moats around individual models are very fragile and very brittle in the Josh: sense that they are one company copying their model away from being worth significantly less. Josh: And we kind of saw that earlier this week with our Kimmy K2 episode. Josh: I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't, because Josh: It shows how fragile being a frontier model can be if that's your only business.

Josh: And in the case of Satya and Microsoft, I mean, it seems like they have all Josh: the leverage in the world. Josh: If they want to fork the OpenAI code base right now and create their own chat Josh: GPT, they can do that. They own all of it. Ejaaz: Yeah, I've said this before, but I think the biggest winner of OpenAI is Satya Ejaaz: Nadella. He has struck the best deal. Ejaaz: OpenAI recently restructured their entire company. We actually did an episode on that.

Ejaaz: Feel free to check it out. But one of the major takeaways from that was, Ejaaz: Satya owns 27% of OpenAI. And now he is able to engage in any model provider, not just OpenAI. Ejaaz: He doesn't have exclusive rights anymore. He can kind of like flirt with other Ejaaz: AI companies. And he did. Ejaaz: He engaged with like Amazon on a bunch of different things. Ejaaz: And he just owns all the IP until something like 2030 or 2032. Ejaaz: So he is one of the smartest chess players.

Ejaaz: Honestly, unexpectedly for me, I didn't think I thought Microsoft was kind of Ejaaz: like boomer in this sets, but he's navigated it beautifully. Ejaaz: And one thing that I also need to give him kudos for is he has one of the biggest Ejaaz: moats when it comes to enterprise. Ejaaz: Like remember, Microsoft software is a really good consumer grade product, Ejaaz: but is mainly kind of making their money from all the enterprise stuff, Ejaaz: from Copala and stuff like that.

Ejaaz: So beautifully executed from Satya here. Josh: I love this. Man, Satya, he's crushing it. Josh: And it's funny because you don't think of Microsoft as a serious player in the world of AI at all. Josh: I don't use any of their software. I don't use Copilot. In fact, Josh: he was asked about Copilot because Copilot was the single AI coding agent. Josh: It owned 100% of the market share.

Josh: And now it's taken down to 25%. And he said, this is a great thing because now Josh: I still own 25% of a market that is now 10 times the size of what I previously Josh: owned 100% of. So for him, he's playing the positive sum game. Josh: He's very aware of the market dynamics at play. And for the cost of what was it, $10 billion?

Josh: He got the largest shareholder position Josh: of open ai which was rumored to ipo at a trillion dollars Josh: so they not only see the financial upside but they get all the intellectual Josh: property most importantly the code base to either reverse engineer for their Josh: own wants or to just clone and use for whatever they want it for it they have Josh: it and it is a true chess move by satya bravo nicely done microsoft as

Ejaaz: Of today as we speak today at open ai's 500 billion dollar valuation uh microsoft, Ejaaz: Microsoft stake is worth $136 billion.

Josh: Not a bad deal. But that's not the only big news. We have exciting news on the ChatGPT front. Josh: This is what I'm most excited about because I use ChatGPT every day and this Josh: is hopefully going to change the way I use it. Maybe we'll see when we talk about it. Josh: The news this week is that ChatGPT and OpenAI, they launched GPT 5.1, Josh: which is a whole new upgrade to GPT-5. Josh: How different it is, we're not really sure.

Josh: I know, EJ, as I kind of read through the highlights, it's warmer in terms of Josh: its like sentiment by default. So it'll be a little bit nicer, Josh: which is bizarre because I thought we were going, we were trying to go the opposite Josh: direction, like it's a little too nice. Josh: And they added some safeguards that we'll get into in a second.

Josh: There's also much better instruction following, which is interesting because Josh: oftentimes when you instruct GPT-5 to do things, it doesn't always do them exactly as you want. Josh: So like if you say always respond in six words, it will oftentimes respond in Josh: more or less than six words. It just doesn't quite understand the instructions. Josh: And then one of the really fun things that I saw was they changed the different Josh: types of personalities.

Josh: So you can choose between personalities on how you engage with the model. Josh: And the previous ones were default, friendly, and efficient. Josh: And now there are some newly added ones, which are professional, Josh: candid, quirky, nerdy, and cynical. Josh: So in the case you want to personalize ChatGPT to be more like those models, Josh: well, now you have the option to do so with GPT 5.1.

Josh: So if I'm sick of it saying, you're so right, I agree, that's a great idea, Josh: that's a great question, you could just say, cut that out, and it'll actually Josh: listen for the first time, which is really exciting. Josh: EJS, did you find anything interesting from GPT 5.1 after going through everything? Ejaaz: Yeah, I spent the last like 12 hours playing around with it. Ejaaz: Can I just, I'm going to play Bad Cop for a bit, Josh. Cool. I don't care.

Ejaaz: Like this is kind of like a nothing burger 0.1 update. Ejaaz: And it's honestly like I've come to expect more from open air. Ejaaz: So I'm kind of surprised that they've come through with this release. Ejaaz: On the point of different personalities, I think that's super helpful. Ejaaz: Because speaking for myself, I think that the current model is too agreeable. It's too sycophantic.

Ejaaz: And kind of Sam heard this feedback and the original version of GPT-5 was less Ejaaz: sycophantic, but then a bunch of people were like, I want it to be more friendly. Ejaaz: I want it to be more appeasing. And so he's kind of like flittering back and forth. Ejaaz: This option gives a lot more flexibility for the end user, for me.

Ejaaz: I'm like, I want someone that's maybe a bit more candid or a little more cynical Ejaaz: when I'm kind of doing my research and then maybe a little more friendly when Ejaaz: I talk about more personal stuff, right? Ejaaz: So the pliability is cool.

Ejaaz: What I will say is like, you kind of were able to do Ejaaz: this before you could just go into settings user personalization Ejaaz: and type in a prompt this i guess makes it easier Ejaaz: because you just gotta click a button and maybe that helps a lot of people Ejaaz: um the other cool thing i guess is like uh when it comes to efficiency it uses Ejaaz: fewer tokens and gives you more output so you get a higher quality answer for

Ejaaz: less energy for less compute which is probably going to drive down costs of Ejaaz: accessing this type of aid this type of Frontier AI, which is super cool. Ejaaz: But aside from that, it's kind of like, why did they do this? Ejaaz: One of the critiques I saw, Josh is like, Ejaaz: it seems kind of rushed. Like there's no benchmarks, no API release. Ejaaz: A bunch of the dev tools look a little sloppy. It's almost like they kind of rush this.

Ejaaz: It's not, there's no formal kind of like Sam's doing a live stream around this. Ejaaz: It's nothing around like, you know, hey, here's how it compares against other Ejaaz: models. They just kind of like rush this out. And I'm kind of confused. Josh: Yeah. I suspect the public sentiment will start to reshape itself around how this goes.

Josh: Like when, when Apple releases iOS 26, it Josh: was a huge release with liquid glass and all this cool new improvements and Josh: then 26.1 is an incremental improvement where it adds a lot Josh: of new features nothing really groundbreaking but the product gets light slightly Josh: better i think we can kind of view these mid-tier updates Josh: as that where they're just small incremental improvements like Josh: now it's a little more efficient like you said there's this

Josh: new dynamic thinking time which is what they call like Josh: smart thinking and it allows it to think faster Josh: think more efficiently use less words that Josh: are fillers so it needs less tokens to operate like the chart that we're Josh: seeing and that just allows for one the Josh: model to think more because it uses less tokens to think Josh: and then two it just creates a little more efficiency unlock for open

Josh: ai's gpus to open them up to do other things so i assume this update is probably Josh: for both people for the consumer and for open ai in terms of efficiency and Josh: slightly better product is it this amazing novel breakthrough it doesn't appear Josh: like it at all in fact it's just like a very marginal improvement but it's something it is like Josh: It is something, and I suspect we'll probably get more updates like this,

Josh: where it's like, oh, well, it does this like one thing a little bit better. Josh: Do you notice it? Maybe like one in every 50 prompts, but it's not a big deal. Josh: And that's probably where we are for a little while until maybe Gemini 3. Josh: I don't know. We have, there are murmurs of Gemini 3 coming down the pipeline from Google. Ejaaz: I've been waiting for it for a month now.

Josh: Yeah, that could hopefully blow things out of the water. But we're at this weird Josh: kind of stagnant period where we haven't seen those step function improvements Josh: in AI models in a little while now.

Ejaaz: I mean, like the speculation that would be like we're kind of grinding to a Ejaaz: halt and that exponential up, that S curve where we see AI improving massively Ejaaz: and it's curing cancer may not be quite there yet. Ejaaz: But hey, listen, in the meantime, there are several parties that are super bullish Ejaaz: open AI. One of them is Masayoshi-san of SoftBank. Ejaaz: In this news, he sold his entire stake of NVIDIA worth $5.83 billion to buy OpenAI stock.

Ejaaz: It's hilarious because all that money that is investing in OpenAI is only going Ejaaz: to get spent on NVIDIA GPUs. Ejaaz: Just hold NVIDIA. Like, why are you doing that? Josh: Masa's really, he's been making some questionable decisions lately. Josh: He sold NVIDIA too early and he missed the whole bubble he missed the whole Josh: like he's just been making some strange decisions here he Ejaaz: Wants to own 5% of NVIDIA do you know how much that would be worth today? I cannot believe,

Ejaaz: So like, you know, someone like kind of like tweeted this. They were like, Ejaaz: you know, someone should look into what happened after he sold his entire NVIDIA stake in 2019. Ejaaz: Just for reference here, the GPT 3.5 that went viral across the internet released Ejaaz: two and a half years later. Ejaaz: So pretty, pretty insane thing there. And then in final news, Ejaaz: Josh, tell me about this. This looks super exciting.

Josh: The Google DeepMind team is back with some pretty awesome news. Josh: We are very fond of the Google DeepMind team in particular here at Limitless. Josh: They are very good at building real world physics in a digital manifestation, Josh: which I think is a really important thing to be good at in a world where we're Josh: training robots to be good at physical stuff, but they have not quite had the Josh: training time to get good at physical stuff.

Josh: And what I love is that we've seen a lot of these projects coming out of the Josh: DeepMind team. And today we got a Josh: An agent that is capable of navigating these 3D virtual worlds. Josh: So we saw previously there was a few models that can generate the worlds. Josh: Well, now SEMA 2, which implies there was a SEMA 1 that I was blissfully unaware Josh: of, allows these AI agents to actually navigate these virtual worlds.

Josh: So now not only can Google generate the virtual games, they literally look like Josh: video games in this in this video, but they can also have the characters navigate Josh: these complicated experiences, understand how things work, kind of piece things together.

Josh: It's amazing to see because it feels like as i'm watching Josh: this video it is how a toddler would play Josh: a video game it's kind of they're slowly moving it's figuring Josh: it out you could see kind of reasoning in real time and navigating Josh: these spaces and it's important to understand as you're watching this everything Josh: that is on this is generated by ai because previously Josh: these look like trailers to video games and those those video

Josh: games would have required thousands of people who are game developers lots Josh: of time on the game engine and all of that is Josh: done now fully by ai so seeing this announcement Josh: was really exciting for me because i'm like one i just love video games and Josh: two like oh my god wait these ais not only are they able to generate the environment Josh: but now these ai models are able to actually engage with the environment and

Josh: what downstream effects does that have on training humanoid robots and the like Josh: which we saw with the tesla episode last week yeah Ejaaz: I mean yeah to your point um we see a real life implementation of this with Ejaaz: tesla tesla Tesla has a world model which they use in their robots, Ejaaz: which is the Tesla cars and automated self-driving and the future optimist robots.

Ejaaz: And what's cool about this is, Josh, one of the main things that makes your Ejaaz: AI models super cool or really smart or intelligent is data. Ejaaz: There's a scarcity of data. There's a scarcity of rich human data. Ejaaz: Like they don't necessarily see what we see through our eyes or hear what we hear. Ejaaz: These simulated environments basically synthetically create this data and enhance Ejaaz: any of these AI models, right?

Ejaaz: And so Tesla kind of gets smarter by replaying a scenario where it almost crashed Ejaaz: over and over and over again in simulated environments until it gets it right. Ejaaz: And then that just gets transported to every single production ready Tesla that Ejaaz: anyone is driving so that if they found themselves in a similar scenario, they avoid it. Ejaaz: And that's just like one small use case for like what these robots will eventually

Ejaaz: be benefiting from. So such a super cool update. Josh: Yeah. And if you scroll down actually to post EJs, you'll see a lot of similarities Josh: to what we spoke about with Tesla, where you could see the model kind of reasoning in plain English.

Josh: You could see, oh, we equipped the pickaxe and copper mine. And then, Josh: okay, like I'll equip the pickaxe and it walks you through its chain of thought Josh: and then not only that but the post below it shows that it's self-improving Josh: so the more time it spends cycling through the more time it spends playing games Josh: the better it gets and these are early implementations of what what we kind Josh: of imagined ai would eventually be which is this self-recursive loop where it

Josh: can improve without outside information and it's really exciting to see it happening Josh: in the virtual world, because I guess that's the only place it can make sense Josh: where it costs much less. Josh: You can't harm anybody if a robot goes rogue, but it can learn without the inputs Josh: of other people. So that is the exciting thing about this, I think. Josh: And I'm really excited for the DeepMind team, man. I hope they keep going.

Ejaaz: Well, dude, like, do you remember our conversation with Logan Kilpatrick, Ejaaz: the head of Google's AI studio? Ejaaz: If you haven't seen that episode, definitely go and check it out. Ejaaz: One of his main takeaways or one of my main takeaways is all of Google's AI Ejaaz: byproducts feeds off of different models within the same suite.

Ejaaz: So if their video model learns something cool, they can transpose that onto Ejaaz: their LLM, which is like in Word, so that it gets recursively smarter over time. Ejaaz: I just think it's like fascinating and world models kind of like manifest all Ejaaz: of these different things in one particular simulated environment. Ejaaz: So, so cool. Kind of hard to wrap my head around sometimes, but because it looks

Ejaaz: like a video game to your point but but awesome.

Josh: Yeah it's you have to break this gap between like your normal understanding Josh: when you see these videos and think like oh my god wait this is not normal this Josh: is actually all ai generated um but with that we have concluded all the fun Josh: new updates from this week it was a Josh: i'd say a medium week it wasn't anything crazy there was no crazy outliers but Josh: a solid week overall every week there's so much stuff going on and the progress

Josh: i feel like we're almost getting immune to it how fast things are moving um Josh: but i hope everyone found this interesting if you did please don't remember Josh: to share with your friends, like, subscribe. Josh: Ejaz, I know you were manifesting some sort of send-off today. Do you want to share? Ejaaz: Yes. Similar to Michael Burry, you shouldn't be shorting the biggest podcast bubble in the world.

Ejaaz: And Limitless is at the forefront over here. We're delivering you all the latest AI news. Ejaaz: And just like the trade that Burry made that he lost $300 million in, Ejaaz: you don't want to be shorting the best leading AI podcast in the world. Ejaaz: Give us a five-star rating. Ejaaz: Subscribe if you're not. What was the stat, Josh? 80% of listeners? Ejaaz: 83%? How many of them don't subscribe? Over 80%. Ejaaz: Over 80. That's nuts. It helps us out massively.

Ejaaz: We are currently in the top 30 in the technology podcast across Spotify, Ejaaz: Apple, and wherever you listen. Help us get to the top 10. It would mean a lot. What do we say? Josh: Don't ever bet against the optimists. And by subscribing and by being a part Josh: of this, you are part of the optimists. Josh: And we are going to move forward and things are going to progress.

Josh: And just don't bet against the optimists. So thank you for being optimistic Josh: with us and being on this journey with us and we'll be back next week with a Josh: whole new slew of episodes so thank you for watching and we'll see you then