Loading summary
Transcript14 lines
- [00:00]
A
Miriam Maratti just raised another $2 billion for her company Thinking Machines Lab, which nobody really knows what it is yet. So today we're gonna talk more about that, why she's able to raise that much money and you know, what potentially could be happening here. We're gonna get into all that. But before we do, Jayden, why don't you tell em about our school community?
- [00:23]
B
Yeah. So every single week Jamie and I record a video that we don't post anywhere else and we're breaking down like insider insights on our businesses or our businesses, the revenue, the exact tactics and strategies, how they're using AI pretty much to grow and scale businesses. And if this is interesting to you, if you've ever wanted to grow and scale your business with AI, it's 19amonth and we would love to have you as one of our over 300 members that get on there, share insights, talk about what they're doing. I share revenue numbers, breakdowns of how much money I'm making from things, stuff I don't really share publicly, but it's all in this group and we would love to have you as a member. This week we actually recorded a whole video and breaking down some insider strategies that somebody I know has used to essentially grow their YouTube channel. They had, there's a new algorithm. I don't want to give away the whole thing, but pretty much they posted a video, got 250,000 views on YouTube. I break down a little bit of how they were able to do that, why and what you can do to grow with different video platforms, including meta and some interesting changes and algorithmic changes over there. So anyways, that's today, that's today's video. But every single week we release a video. We have over 50 videos on there. We've been doing this for over a year. So it's an amazing community. We'd love to have you as a part of it. And there's a link in the description to the school community. All right, let's get into what Miriam Marathi is doing. And also there's some interesting info I feel like on OpenAI that we'll break, we'll get into. But the first thing I wanted to bring up is just the fact that this is a seed round. She raised $2 billion in a seed round. And I can't sum this up any, any better than someone commented on her post where she kind of did this announcement. And the comment was so funny that I, I'll bring it up, but I just first wanted to read a little bit of what she, what she said about what they're doing? Because like Jamie alluded to, it's really hard to know what exactly they're doing. They, this is what she said in her tweet. She said, we're building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world through conversation, through site, through the messy way we collaborate. We're excited that in the next couple months we'll be able to share our first product, which will include a significant open source component and be useful for researchers and startups developing custom models. Soon we'll also share our best science to help the research community better understand frontier AI science systems. Anything stand out to you, Jamie, in that?
- [02:50]
A
I mean honestly, not too much open source. I guess she's making something open source doesn't. Not very many specifics at all. So I'm, I'm very impressed at the amount of money that she's able to raise. And if you go to their, I know if you go to their website too, it's even more cryptic. You really, you go take it line by line, you still will not be able to figure out what's going on here.
- [03:15]
B
So yeah, their website is also just as, I mean I don't even think they have. If you go to their website, they don't even have a favicon, like the little icon in the top of the like bookmark bar of the website. There's no favicon. It's still just generic. It's very, very cryptic. A plain white screen with like basically nothing on it. So it's interesting, but the ability they had to raise $2 billion and, and who they raised it from. So like if you look at their, if you look at, over at their tweet, she says, specifically she says to accelerate our progress, we're happy to confirm we raised. Led by a 16Z with partnership from Nvidia, a cell ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, Jane Street. So like these are major players and you don't really see companies like Nvidia investing unless they know they're gonna get a good ROI from the GPUs that you're gonna, going to buy from them. Pretty much. So pretty much Nvidia invests in all the AI companies that think are going to go somewhere because they know they're going to buy their GPUs. So this is like a really positive signal and they're only usually able to raise this money. Like she says, we have something coming out in the coming months, which means they already have a demo. So all of these Investors they've essentially shown a demo to. So there is some sort of product that probably exists that's, I mean, evidently pretty cool if they're able to get $2 billion and a, you know, a $12 million valuation from. So there's probably something there. What it is very tricky. The only clue we have on this is that in her post she says, I noticed she said something twice, which is collaborate. She's like, through, you know, through convert, through conversation, through the messy way we collaborate. And then in the next line she, she said, oh, somewhere else in here, she also said collaborate. So, like, I feel like collaboration. And I'm just going on a limb here. Like, imagine if you had like, Chad GPT, for example, where you essentially could have multiple, like, people all in the same thread. So maybe Jamie and I have the same Chat GPT thread where we share it with, like, five other friends. We're all working on a project together or working on putting together news stuff for this podcast. We ask it questions inside of Chat GPT and it's like answering us. Like, maybe there's some sort of, like, collaboration component that's kind of cool. I don't know that. That's my.
- [05:31]
A
That's a good guess. So that's so kind of like an AI version of Slack, basically, is what you're thinking, like, for companies to use. Okay. I think that's, I mean, that could be a, an interesting idea, especially if you're working on a big project with multiple people and you're, you know, using AI heavily. So, yeah, that's. That's a good guess. We'll see if you're right.
- [05:52]
B
Okay. Two funny gems I just have to bring up from the, from the comments on her post over on X. One of them, someone says, please honor the nickname everyone uses, Thinky. I don't know why. There's a whole bunch of people in the comments that are trying to turn her company, Thinking Machines Labs, into Thinky as the nickname. So maybe the, the name we got to report on in the future, Jamie. But another comment that I thought was pretty funny, someone said due to inflation, $1 million seed rounds are now $1 billion. I mean, it's really like quite astronomical for their seed round to be able to raise $2 billion. And I think their pre seed was like a billion dollars. So they have a. They've raised a lot of money. But the truth is, when you're building these foundational models, like, you need a lot of money to train the model for the data, for the compute, for all of that, so it also signals to me that they built something very serious. They've been able to train something serious. Probably some sort of competitor, some sort of AI model. What it will be able to do is not super clear, but they have a really powerful team. A whole bunch of, you know, former coworkers from OpenAI joined her. They've gotten a bunch of, you know, solid people from a whole bunch of different labs. So it feels like they've got the money, they've got the team and they're going to execute. But overall they definitely have a war chest to be able to compete with some big models. $3 billion is quite impressive.
- [07:18]
A
Yeah, that's insane. And I mean, I think they must have some kind of a plan to make money at least fairly soon after launch too. I mean, that's the other thing is a lot of these companies, you know, will lose money for years and years until they get a certain user base. But I feel like man, to raise that much money, they have to have some kind of monetization plan right off the bat. I don't know which your slack, your AI slack theory would support.
- [07:44]
B
I suppose the one thing that I do think is like kind of interesting is I feel like in the last year, well, okay, I just feel like these numbers are getting more and more inflated. Everyone said it was a bubble and then somehow it just keeps growing. And in the last year we had, we had some high profile companies do like these sort of exits. So an example of that was like Mustafa Sulaiman. He created, he raised a billion dollars first of all. Then he created Inflection, which had its own model. They like launched it, you could test it. It was interesting. I mean this was like year, over a year ago, right? So he was really kind of early on it. But the thing that was interesting to me was he got bought out, I think for $1 billion essentially. Like the money got returned to investors, everyone got made whole, maybe it was like a couple billion, I'm not really exactly sure. But like he's had a tool for a long time and then he essentially just got acquired into Microsoft and he works there now. But what's interesting to me is like, I wonder if him and a whole bunch of these other players, if they'd stayed in the market and, and tried to keep growing their company. Like this is just so crazy to me that Miriam Ratty, like has no product out yet, but is constantly raising billions and billions more. I just feel like those companies that had products out, they had usage, they had traction, they'd Raised billions. If they would have also been able to just keep raising billions and maybe made a lot more money than ending their company to get Aqua hired. Which is like what it feels like all the AI companies nowadays are doing, getting Aqua hired and kind of ending the company. So anyways, I, I sometimes I wonder if they could have held out for a bigger payoff or, or just grown their companies, but maybe that's just, that's just me because I think that's kind of the, the fun road to take as a founder in tech.
- [09:24]
A
So if you were like, like a retail investor like me, and you don't really have access to some of these, you know, seed round type things, how what would you be thinking about? Right. I guess we shouldn't give investing advice, but what kind of things are you interested in? And from an investment standpoint as like.
- [09:43]
B
A just a normal person, like, okay, well, completely not investment advice in any way, but I will say one product that I'm interested in conceptually and I haven't done research, so you can go research it. But Robinhood, if you'll remember, released a product a while back that essentially it allows you to trade paper shares of companies. So they're not real shares, they're private companies, not public companies. So something like SpaceX or OpenAI that you can essentially like buy paper shares that trade against the value of what the company is and as it increases in value. And it was just kind of like a weird thing that open AI, like after Robinhood came out with it, it's like Robinhood does not own any shares. They're not real shares. Be careful with what you buy. That's not real. Blah, blah, that was like open a. I said that after Robinhood announced it and then Robinhood replied and said actually some special purpose vehicle, some SPACs, pretty much that we own a controlling partnership in, have actually own shares of OpenAI. So when you're buying them, you actually are buying like a percentage of a share that we technically own. I don't know, it's kind of this convoluted thing, but. So I don't know too much about it, but I do think that that's interesting if you're interested in getting into these companies. Like, I think there are some sort of clever ways or loopholes, maybe secondaries, but you know, not investment advice. Things that I personally have invested in. I'll just say that are number one Nvidia and number two Tesla. I think both of those companies are poised to do really well in the AI run up. And I know, Tesla, like, it feels like the sad markets might be saturated and also feels like they've had a couple quarters of declining sales. But I think with their. The reason I'm interested anyways is because of their Optimus robots that they're going to combine with Grok, and apparently Elon's trying to get Tesla to invest like $2 billion into XAI and then Tesla will get the upside as XAI grows. So anyways, long story short, I think that. I think those are two companies I'm interested in, not financial advice. They could both, you know, get completely go to zero. And do not get mad at me for. For saying. But yeah, it's. There's a. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening in AI right now, and I think you definitely want to find some way to capitalize on it because it's growing like crazy.
- [11:57]
A
Cool. Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing. I guess I just have, you know, I guess you could call them fantasies of investing in one of these, like, startups, you know, somehow finding some way and then, you know, hitting it big. But.
- [12:10]
B
Okay, well, I do have one more piece of advice for you then, Jamie, and that is the number one investment you can make is actually in yourself. And the number one way to do that is by joining the AI Hustle school community and. And getting the resource of over 60 insider videos on how to use AI to grow and scale your businesses. So maybe there's a good, perfect flag that we did not set up that ahead of time.
- [12:33]
A
That's true.
- [12:34]
B
No, but, yeah, no, it's totally true. It's amazing. So we'd love to have you in the group. Hey, if you enjoyed the episode today, make sure to leave us a rating and review wherever you get your episodes. Thank you so much for tuning in. We really appreciate you sticking around, being a listener, and going on this crazy AI journey with us. We hope you all have a fantastic rest of your day.