John Rush

this episode was crazy it was with john coogan and he had some of the biggest ideas i've heard all year these moonshot companies like it's either going to be like a billion dollar business or you're going to have literally lit a billion dollars of other people with money on fire it just seems like the bar to colonizing the moon is like orders of magnitude lower than than Mars.

And so the question is like, who's going to build this? Like, I think that there will be a startup that will take one of these humanoid robots, give it an AR-15, like a machine gun or a rifle. And I said, oh, and then they're going to raise like a $500 million seed round

Not that big of ideas, but there's a fine line between big idea and just hot take shit post. And I think today we're going to hit some of them that are complete meme companies. Some of them that maybe could be good. It's going to be on the listener and the viewer to decide which of these ideas are actually good and which are purely viral fodder for the media.

Let's start with cybersecurity for artificial intelligence companies. So if you have been following AI, there's been this interesting development. Obviously, a lot of people right now are thinking about how can I use AI to build a new app or a new company. And the obvious thing would be putting AI in your cybersecurity layer. So there's an incident report that goes out.

Hey, we got this user alert that someone is trying to log in like 10,000 times with different passwords. We should probably block them. Now, obviously, you could have an AI intermediate that interaction such that that's handled automatically instead of pinging your poor software developer at 2 a.m. He has to get up, check his pager, and say, oh, yeah, we should block that person.

We're getting DDoSed by Russia. Let's turn them off. Let's block that IP address. Obviously, a lot of people have thought about implementing artificial intelligence in part of the cybersecurity stack in order to beef up the existing cybersecurity solutions for all sorts of companies. Everything from Bank of America to Boeing to United Airlines, they all need cybersecurity.

every cyber security company knows ai can make their job easier so they're implementing this what i'm talking about is doing the flip side building a cyber security firm that's specifically designed to secure the now highest value digital assets in the world maybe next to crypto and bitcoin like if there's a whole bunch of bitcoin that's really valuable but other than that the next most valuable digital asset has to be the weights to these large language models and so

So OpenAI, it's rumored that they spent around $500 million training GPT-4. Now, all of those weights, once the GPUs go off and train the model, it all gets boiled down into these weights. It's just numbers in a file, essentially. It's in a very large database, but you could steal this. And there's a lot of...

fear-mongering and conspiracy theories in Silicon Valley right now to the effect that, oh, China has already stolen the weights to GPT-4. Maybe they already have stolen the weights to GPT-5. Who knows if it's real? I actually think most of these labs are pretty secure. But it goes without saying that these are going to be increasingly valuable targets for hackers to break into and steal. And so...

figuring out how to protect a digital asset like it's fort knox seems like something that's going to be a new and ongoing challenge for the artificial intelligence industry broadly now this is different from in past in past generations of tech because if you stole the code base to facebook and you were like okay i have all the code to facebook i'm gonna launch Facebook2.com.

Well, you don't have any of the users. People aren't going to your website. It's not valuable. But with the large language model weights, once you get the model, you can run that anywhere. You can stick that anywhere. You can wrap that into your own product. And all of a sudden, you're not paying OpenAI or Anthropic if you're able to steal the weights. And so...

These firms are going to need top-tier cybersecurity. They already do. A lot of these guys, they go to DEF CON. They talk to all the hackers. They have huge, huge resources allocated to this. But it's just going to become an ongoing problem.

And I think that there might be a new opportunity to figure out, to build a new company around securing these extremely, extremely valuable digital assets, which are the AI models. I think that there's a, in many ways, this is, you know, it's not an entirely novel problem. But if you look at what happened in crypto for a long time, there were kind of two things that were really valuable.

There was like Bitcoin, which was kind of like sticking around forever. And then there's this company called Chainalysis. Did you ever see this? So Chainalysis was a company that they didn't have a token. It wasn't a crypto company. They did the analysis to find like the fraudsters and they were like super downstream of the actual like cryptocurrency.

But that company, even when you talk to the most diehard crypto hater, they'd be like, oh, well, yeah, Chainalysis is probably like a good company because their cash flow is like independent of the underlying token prices because they're just getting paid to hunt down the criminals. And so Chainalysis

i think there's something there's something interesting and uncorrelated about doing cyber security for artificial intelligence companies where you could be indexed to the growth of artificial intelligence without directly needing you know some next benchmark to hit and and and you're not going to be in a situation where oh all of a sudden you know oh you got obsoleted by you know a uh like a current company um so anyway that's my first take

The cybersecurity for AI companies. Greg, what do you think about it?

Yeah, you know, this is somewhat related, but with the generative AI that's kind of dominating the performance ad market right now, AI-generated ads, ads generally across

Facebook are already being optimized and chosen through artificial intelligence, but increasingly the text will be generated on the fly per user and a brand will just kind of show up with like, hey, here's my product, do your best to portray it in the great light. And Facebook is going to wind up generating video, imagery, everything for your brand ultimately.

Generative AI is really going to transform digital advertising. But a lot of the big companies and big brands are super nervous about turning their brand over to a generative AI model that is known to have flaws and get things wrong occasionally.