Palantir's AIPCon 10, Ramp Hits $44B, 60 Minutes Eyes Rogan | Diet TBPN

We are live from Palunteer AIPCON. Big news from RAMP today. Massive fundraiser we're going to cover in a little bit. But first, we've got to talk. >> Oh, is it still going? I like it. The Ramp song's back. This was This was early days. We really talked about RAM so much. Turned it into a song. The topic of conversation in DC has uh it's still in AI world, but instead of talking about uh approving models before they're released today, it's about the bio threat. Brandon Guerell wrote in the TBPN newsletter today, the great houses of AI have united behind the bio threat. There's actually a lot more to that because it was a big long list of signitories from AI, but also from the bio world and biotech and even startups. We've seen former guests of the show sign on. I'm excited to bring some of those folks back on the show in the coming weeks and hear more about this because I have this belief that as AI >> advanced, we got cyber because it was such a tight feedback loop, such a tight verifiable reward. Reinforcement learning works really well in that context. Bio has some similar characteristics >> and it was a very tangible Y2K style moment. Exactly. Where there was, let's just say, powerful business strategy. >> Yeah. Is it Yeah. It was like, is it over? you start thinking about the consequences of this and you don't need to get to AGI super intelligence god you can just have a really powerful tool that creates a new problem and that uh creates full employment for Nikesh Aurora over at Palo Alto Networks who we had a chance to talk to yesterday and uh he's been very fortunate in implementing the solutions to the cyber security threats posed by new AI systems some of the new AI capabilities that are rolling out but bio might be next and so it's exciting to see that uh the great houses of AI are uniting behind the bio threat Let's take you through this. So uh in 1981 a group of researchers published the primary structure of the polio virus genome in the journal nature. So they basically open sourcing the sequence for making polio which just a few years earlier polio I think was on the decline by 1981. But uh a very very problematic virus. uh it's an RNA virus meaning that its nucleiobases or building blocks are AC cgu if you're familiar with uh RNA adine cytosine guanine and uricil uh put more plainly thanks Brandon Gell he says when the researchers published the primary structure of the polio virus they gave the world the literal sequence of polio virus building blocks in order from start to finish by the mid- 20th century before mass vaccination polio was paralyzing and killing more than half a million people per year worldwide So you have this pretty deadly virus killing more than half a million people per year worldwide and you have just open sourced it. What happens? So in 2002, >> researchers synthesized infectious polio virus from its publicly available sequence data. So they didn't actually need any of the polio virus RNA to start. They didn't need it on hand. They didn't need to. It's not like they took a little sample and they just cloned it up and made it bigger. They just took the data and they made the actual virus. So this is the this is the shape of the threat. if there's a new uh if there's a new virus or an existing virus or a forgotten about virus and you have the code to it, you can potentially print that RNA and then have the virus in your hands even if you don't have a sample. Instead, these researchers in 2002, they were able to take the publish sequence, chemically synthesize short DNA fragments, assemble them into full length a full length DNA copy of the polio virus genome and then use the DNA to make the viral RNA to fully recover the infectious virus. So in 2005, researchers used these same technologies to reconstruct the Spanish flu, a virus in 1918 that killed 675,000 Americans and had a 2 to 3% mortality rate among those infected. Very, very dangerous stuff. So basically, these two reconstructed viruses showed that having a physical virus on hand was no longer necessary as source material to create viruses. All you needed was the blueprints. as long as you have the code literally just like texted in a text file a bunch of ATGU uh you can go and make this as long as you have the equipment on hand but that is getting democratized as well and that's what this uh AI letter is all about. So that's a situation that we're still in today except now that we have AI there are easier ways to potentially reconstruct DNA sequences that could create new viruses. Oh, yesterday Demis Hassabis Sam Alman Dario Amade Alex Wang and dozens of other high-profile leaders across AI tech policy nucleic acid synthesis and biotech signed an open letter called in support of mandatory nucleic acid synthesis screening and recordkeeping. You might have seen it on the timeline and at first glance Brandon here assumed and I assume the same thing assumed it was another press release from a frontier lab claiming it had just discovered new capabilities in one of its internal models that would ultimately lead to cata catastrophe. a lot of this like doom fear-based marketing has been happening. So that was sort of the natural reaction. Uh and that's what Brandon >> some people's reaction would be were we not doing recordkeeping here already. >> That's a great question and Brandon actually did answer that but it's not just a PR stunt and it's not a new capability. They're not saying that the models can just create a novel virus you know one shot like that that that is solved yet. uh it's not there but they see it as something that's coming down the pipe and this letter is not this dangerous new capability. It's more asking the US government to force nucleic acid synthesis companies to screen orders for sequences of concern. So hey somebody just ordered this looks a lot like a virus like what are we doing here? Uh you said that you were trying to treat cancer or you said that you were you know trying to make a new peptide and all of a sudden you're asking for polio virus or something that looks like polio virus. let's let's dig into this. Uh that's where they're going with that. Uh they also need to verify the legit the legitimacy of the customer and to keep a record of what they're sending and to whom. That's a crazy one that I'm sure you're like, wait, they weren't keeping records. They were a little bit. Uh he gets into this. So he says the reason the letter is coming out now is that the threat of nucleic acid synthesis sequences sequencing getting into the wrong hands has been enhanced by AI. So anyone with an AI tool in the future could in theory if the models don't have safeguards on them could uh synthes could create a sequence that then they go to a nucleic acid sequence company get printed send it to them mix it up boom they got a virus not good. So uh most of the global nucleic acid synthesis industry has already signed up to do some of this. They did they started this in 2009 with what's called the international gene synthesis consortium and roughly 80% of commercial synthesis is on board but membership >> 20% still just hanging out. No, we're good. >> 80% of nuclear weapons are safely stored. Don't ask about the other 20%. That's kind of what this letter is getting at because 80% it was a good first effort 2009 it's been 16 17 years. Uh we haven't had >> Yeah. But there's a new reason to go further. Let's get that last 20%. That's what they're asking for. Me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me membership is not a strong guarantee that they're actually screening or keeping records of their customers because it's voluntary. The 80% number is also self-reported, for example, and a bunch of other factors contribute to the relative climsiness of the agreement. >> So it's not >> you can opt into this program by just saying that you're opting into it, but then even the reporting once you're opted in is voluntary. So I I think the way this works is the international gene synthesis consortium is probably a a nonprofit NGO you know non-governmental organization all the companies uh they they volunteer 80% of commercial synthesis volume has opted into this and then this organization the international gene synthesis consortium they say hey we've looked at the market and we're covering about 80% has opted into this we're we're on board with 80% and and the government isn't coming in and checking the records they're not actually saying, "Okay, well, we we have a different number because we're the government and you have your this number. Let's verify this number." It's self-reported by that organization, but there's no reason not to trust that organization necessarily. A bunch of other factors contribute to the relative flimsiness of this agreement. HHS also has guidance in place around the issue, but again, it's voluntary, meaning that the possibility of bad actors getting their hands on dangerous nucleic acid sequences, at least from American companies, still cannot be ruled out. Overall, it's good to see industry leaders signing this letter and doubly refreshing uh that the letter is not yet another warning of apocalyptic AI doom, which I think the public has unfortunately be come to expect from announcements like this. Hopefully, the relevant legislators are paying attention and can make this happen in short order. So, I thought that was a good uh a good breakdown and I agree with a lot of that. Andrew Curran also has some uh deep dive on this with some more uh of the signitories. He shares screenshots of all of these and it it really is everyone. Uh yeah, Y Combinator, Deep Mind, Microsoft, Interconnect AI, Harvard, uh tons of stuff. And then over in uh in the nucleic acid synthesis industry, you have twist bioscience, uh ANZA, Emerald Cloud Lab, and Kathleen McMahon from Balfos is on here. So uh good news, but uh obviously and just an early step. This is just an open letter to the government saying, "Hey, we think you should we want to support this. We think that the government should start thinking about this." Uh the other news in the bio world. >> Yeah. I mean, the news is just that there's incredible momentum in biotech biotech. Uh after >> momentum, but not like volume, not scale yet because you're looking at $3 trillion IPOs going out this year potentially. So much news in AI, microns at a trillion. every chip stock is, you know, in the hundreds of billions, trillions. This is much smaller, but >> but it's notable because biotech had been uh left for dead in some ways. We had a biotech investor on >> probably 14 months ago at this point who said, I don't even know. I mean, just looking at the returns so far, >> I don't know why you would invest in this asset class. Yeah. Uh but of course every asset class goes through that kind of phase and clearly there's a lot of momentum >> and they should be you would expect that biotech would be similarly power law driven maybe not as extreme but if you pull out SpaceX open AI anthropic from capital >> yes but I feel like the biotech community has a little bit more of like a culture of like base hits doubles triples where they flip companies pretty pretty frequently and the two >> Yeah we had that didn't we have a guy on that had sold >> like three companies. We didn't have when we were billion dollar exits. >> Yep. And then he joined another company and sold it for three billion like the next day. Uh and so >> so anyways, you have Isomorphic Labs spun out of uh Deep Mind. Uh Coinbase or not Coinbase, but but Brian spun out or like founded New Limit. Uh you have Retro. We're gonna get Jacob on the show >> as well for that. >> Um Altos Labs. uh Jeff the Chad from Amazon as this post puts it >> and uh Anthropic obviously acquired coefficient bio as well >> but Jensen and Larry Ellison at Oracle are also doing stuff so there's a lot of activity it's very fun and I hope we're going to be able to cover this a lot more in the near future. What point do the uh at what point does like a Fizer or Johnson and John Johnson and Johnson start joining the press release economy of just coming I'm not I'm not saying it' be a good thing but coming coming out and saying uh we believe we're you know right at the because there are partnerships all the time that happen and they're always just like tucked a little bit deeper in the Wall Street Journal because AI is dominating and even private credit takes a front seat to bio news, but there there's a whole bunch of deal making going on. Anyway, there's other deal making going on in fintech. We're going to talk about ramps raised today. >> What's going on in ramp land? >> 44 billion valuation. >> Really, really solid traction just, you know, every 12 18 months, sometimes much quicker, sometimes they do two rounds in two weeks, but uh uh really solid progress. They raised $750 million at a 44 billion valuation. Last time we grew this fast, we were 120th of the size. So far, >> this is the most notable thing to me. Yeah. >> Uh lots of chatter on the timeline around uh you know other fintech valuations. You compare them >> apocalypse. Well, yeah. You compare them to you know RAMP is now worth more than PayPal. >> Okay. >> PayPal has 32 billion of revenue. >> Yeah. >> Uh but PayPal uh certainly has I would say ne you know probably negative momentum. Yeah. >> Uh whereas RAMP has incredible momentum and this this is the standout line. Uh they were 120th the size the last time they were growing this fast and so >> um yeah just really really really really impressive execution. >> Yeah. >> Uh and incredible opportunity still. >> Yeah. Uh so Eric uh took to the timeline posted an essay about the third pillar comparing uh the previous eras of value creation. The two pillars uh people and vendors dating back to 600 BCE. If you're not thinking in millennia, what are you doing here? Tokens emerged as the third pillar in 2026 AD. And he calls it the quadrillion token blind spot. Boil down 500 years of finance. And it's really just three questions. Who spent what? Was it worth it? What's the bill next month? I mean, people get caught up in all these crazy things. I mean, you see this in like marketing, I'm sure, and uh and ad buying where people will do all these crazy analyses and ROI, RA, ROAS, and all this other stuff. And like and it's always useful to zoom out and just be like, okay, we spent a bunch of money. Did the bank balance go up in this company or not? >> All all personal and business finance finance at the end eventually comes down to are we making more money than we're spending? >> Yeah. And I think uh yeah, Eric is is right to dive super deep into like token optimization and thinking about the tools that they're building, but then at the same time like not not don't get lost in the sauce and like actually zoom out and try and understand like what is the core value that you're delivering to your customer. Uh it is answering that question. Um so fantastic news over there. There's some other fundraising news. Sabi the beanie BCI company is getting preempted at 35 million at 500 million post. Uh, this is a leak from R for Rock. We'll see where it goes. >> This is huge for you. >> Why? >> Because you are a beanie guy. >> I do like beanies. >> You love to throw a beanie. A beanie in the morning. >> Keeps it together. Yeah, >> I like a beanie. Uh, very very >> I It's interesting. I think that uh this format, of course, I'm sure they can adapt it to other types of hats. Yeah. But this format certainly maybe makes it harder to build momentum in places like California, at least Southern California, Arizona. >> Be big amongst creative directors though. >> Yeah. >> Huge, >> huge, huge potentially. Silver Lake. Silver Lake, you know, every >> It's not too hard to change a beanie into a hat, a cowboy hat. Like that's just extra leather around it. You could wrap the beanie in the in the cowboy hat. You can wear >> Here's what's interesting though. So Arer Rock >> Yeah. >> Usually >> it's pretty dialed. pretty pretty dialed. >> Pretty dialed. >> Uh pretty dial. It's almost like he has inside information. It's almost like he's somehow got >> Yeah, but I mean we've talked about the game theory of like do does he work at a real like tier one venture capital firm that's see is it like what's the benefit of leaking everything? Is he a lawyer that's seeing all the docs turn? >> I mean zero benefit for a lawyer, >> right? >> Um the rush of getting likes on the timeline is pretty universal. You're a lawyer. You're just like I need a banger. >> Add a fund. Okay. >> For sure. >> Yeah. >> And uh I don't I don't know anything else. >> Um but uh he's always taken the view that it can be helpful to the founder to build because a bunch of people are going to see this that this didn't sort of land in their deal flow or land on their desk and they're going to reach out, right? So it does create momentum, but uh can certainly be annoying >> for teams as well. Uh this was notable though. So 200 million of of LOI from B2B customers. >> And so very curious what the enterprise play is here. >> Does that mean like uh like through hospital networks or through like the health care system or is it like Mark Zuckerberg wants to go further? He wants to track the brain waves of the employees not just >> we're gonna track your screen. >> We're also going to track your brain. I I mean it could go either way because like you you imagine like Neurolink has had a bunch of traction and bunch of amazing I saw uh Nolan the uh the first patient P 0 uh on Rogan talking about playing C pod yeah with the Neurolink amazing uh and you can imagine that at a certain point like some sort of partnership >> they have multiple hat form factors. >> There we go. >> We're good. I was getting really hung up on the beanie and like there's so many different enterprise or or B2B contexts. You're in a you're in a warehouse >> in Dallas, Texas in the summer. >> Yeah. You don't maybe this $200 million LOI is from REI or Patagonia. You know, you don't know who makes beanies. Uh what's the Carheart? Carheart makes a great beanie. >> Go. You don't know any of this stuff. You're you're completely out to lunch. I went through the beanie economy. >> Beanie economy. Beanie market map. Goldman optimistic. Uh Goldman expects SpaceX's AI revenue to surge a hundred times by 2030. >> Huge. >> Uh big big number. I looked at this title and I was thinking like, okay, what's Grock's actual revenue today if you take out >> Yeah. X what what is their AI revenue today? Is it just Grock subscriptions plus Grock tokens? Do you include X subscriptions? Do you include uh cloud vendor and and NeoCloud contracts? There's a bunch of different ways to measure it. The smaller the number, the easier it is to 100x. But we have seen other AI companies 100x revenues over two years, over three years, four years. Like the 100x has become it's not a oneofone scenario. >> Yeah, >> it's happened multiple times and so uh we have seen these charts many times and uh if if they execute well, this is entirely positive. It is it is extremely >> other other notable data points from the road show. Yeah, >> they the forecast anticipate SpaceX making about 360 billion of capital expenditures through 2028. Uh Jensen somewhere this pumping. >> Very excited about that number. >> Be a new hyperscaler. Should be unsurprising but very aggressive. Yeah. And >> the new Nvidia foundation model is also live. Uh we'll have to go check it out and look at the model card soon, see how it's benchmarking. But we got to move on to benchmark because there's new news in the benchmark world. So benchmark >> moment of silence. >> Moment of silence. Why is it sense >> uh the the end of an era? The last >> I guess I guess they have been very focused for decades. >> The last tier one that was a pure venture capital. >> What did they get called again? Internet boys or something. >> Oh, >> soft boys. There's there's some book about that that was very funny. >> Esso is a hit piece of a book book title. It's a fantastic book, >> but the subtitle makes up makes up for it. And it's a fantastic book and it's a very interesting story where they actually let a journalist come in and see how they >> The true story of the six tall men. >> He clear he clearly wrote the subtitle and was like, I got to take the edge off of this. It's too glazy. I got to I got to take it down a notch. And so he threw the e boys in there. But >> anyways, big moves from Benchmark. Clark has a scoop in the journal. Benchmark has raised two billion across two new funds. >> Wow. >> And uh most notably their first ever dedicated growth fund. >> Do they hire anyone who has experience growth investing? Who could possibly do growth investing there? >> Someone who's maybe like a bond capital and then founders fund then maybe Kleiner. Like someone with that. >> Somebody with that kind of background I think would be fantastic. >> Pretty good for growth investing. >> Now that you say that though. >> Yeah. >> Ev Randall. >> Ev Randall. That's right. They did pick up that >> they did pick him up. They're almost thinking two steps ahead there. >> Are they building their fund strategy now? Their entire platform strategy around at Randall >> potentially. Potentially. >> Austin based podcaster Joe Rogan reportedly being considered for >> 60 minutes. >> 60 minutes. They're going to have to call it 200 minutes, but >> cuz he records long podcasts and 60 minutes isn't enough for him. >> Hundreds. It'll just be called >> Barry, if you're listening, put us in. Put us in the ring. We're ready to go. You need tech correspondent, business correspondent, someone who can just chop it up for 60 minutes. We do 60 minutes three times a day. We're ready to go. This is going to be light work for us, Barry. I'm ready. I'm ready. You could do 60 minutes right now. You could do 60 minutes tomorrow. You could do 60 minutes. You could do an extra 60 minutes easily. We're putting up a thousand minutes a week. It's no problem. >> We did consider that at one point early on. We thought, should we do basically a morning show? >> Oh, yeah. >> Take a two-hour break and come back and do another show. >> Late night show. Yeah, late night show maybe. Anyway, we should talk about the new Audi, the Nuvo Lari. Is this real? Motor one. This seems real. >> Uh, it's a big deal. It's the It's the brand's first supercar since the R8. Twin turbocharged 4 liter V8 hybrid. 217 mile per hour top speed that is 10% faster than a Cayenne Turbo GT. What is the Cayenne Turbo GT market doing right now? Is it tanking? depreciation must be just through the roof on this news because you have a car that's 10% faster and so what every everyone is going to be rotating out I I think the new Mari >> it's a really cool design it's a really cool design >> feels like somewhat cybert truck >> cyber punky futuristic I don't know it just checks the box for like the next supercar for me and uh in a way that the >> Ben says it can't touch the R8 >> oh can't touch the R8 okay okay well it goes 0 to 60 in 2.6 Six seconds. >> Thank you for tuning in with us today, folks. We will be back on Monday. >> Yes. >> And we look forward to it. >> Some business to do tomorrow, but see you Monday. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletpn.com. And have a wonderful weekend. We'll see you. Byebye. Goodbye.