AI Spending and Future IPOs

This episode of the Times Tech podcast is sponsored by Health and lifeife Insurer Vitality, your health's best friend Most of us want to be healthier, yet life so often gets in the way. Vitality's health and life insurance is built around that reality. Get active, look after yourself, and you can unlock rewards from some of the UK's top brands and help keep your insurance premiums low. It's insurance that works for you. By using tech and insight to understand your health, they can incentivize you to live better The healthier you get, the more you are rewarded. Find out more at vitality. co. uk This episode of the Times Tech podcast is sponsored by IBM Wimbledon is one of those rare events that feels steeped in tradition But behind the scenes, it's also a huge data operation. Millions of fans follow the tournament across time zones, devices, and platforms, and increasingly they want highlights, stats, and personalized updates in real time. IBM has worked with Wimbledon for more than thirty years, using data and AI to help create digital experiences for fans, including match chat which can answer questions during play and likelihood to win, which uses live match data to offer near real time predictions. It's a useful example of AI being applied in a way people can actually see and understand. To learn more about how IBM helps create smarter business, visit IBM. com slash Wimbledon You can see today AI is on the battlefield, AI is White House this is an arms race, you know, to put it very bluntly. It's critical to be at the table because if you're not, you'll be on the menu. You are notoriously part of the PayPal mafia. What is your relationship like? with that group of people. By, none of us mind being called papal Mafia, but none of us love it either Hello and welcome to the Times Tech podcast. I am Danny Fordzon out here in Silicon Valley And I'm Katie Prescott writing about all things tech here in the city of London. Danny, I want to start today's program by asking you a very important question. No, hey, I'm ready you are A very esteemed journalist. No, thank you. You write A lot But When you en your missives for the Sunday Times How do you put the words on the page keyboard obviously actually not So obvious. I'm sure you've seen a lot of this Is this a sneak peek of the next big tech trend of twenty twenty six? Oh Well, it might be more and more people are using microphones to dictate their work as writers, but also as coders to talk to their computers And I keep hearing from startups that actually it's quite annoying now because the sound of the office has gone from to people not tapping, but yapping away into their microphones Not tapping, but yapping. Not tapping, but yapping. But that must be tr. You must have heard this Oh yeah For sure, this idea is not new, but it does feel like it's definitely a thing because It's not So efficient. T Right Words when you can just talk. It's about two to three times faster to talk This is the claim, yes This is the kind I mean from A lot of the tech bosses are saying particularly those that work in voice AI, I notice. Fny saying that this is the end of the keyboard. So we're going to be talking about whether there really is any truth in that and we're going to have a very exciting update about Noan He's back. No love. AI agent Norm. you say I love Noome I call them norm Yeah You guys got a friendship now. We're developing a relationship. We can talk about that later, but I don't I'm not ready at this early stage in the pod I need to warm up to it But also we're going to be talking very excited. We're going to be talking to Max Levkin who is One of the original members of the PayPal mafia She set up with Elon Musk Peter Teel and others back in the two thousands PayPal, not the PayPal mafia. Correct. Pet PayPal, of course. He is now the CEO of a firm, which is a byy now pay later company listed on the stock exchange And he you know, he's a bit of a legend out here in Silicon Valley. So we have lots to talk with him about AI boom, whether it's a bubble, how it compares to the nineties and what he's up to now etcetera. Yeah It's going to be fascinating. I'm really keen to talk to him about what he thinks about Elon Musk, the SpaceX IPO, all of the members of the Payfile Mafia who are now around the White House and whether this new wave of trillion dollar IPOs that we're seeing could create the new PayPal mafia too Yes, and it would be remiss if we didn't say We are now not only audio, we are video. on the YouTubes. So go to the Times Business YouTube page and you can watch this happen Not just let's do. You watch. at the keyboard being killed by audio. Exactly. Yeah, video killed the audio Star something. Yeah. But look, let's quickly pick up on last week's discussion before we get started and all of that. On this day that we are recording Wednesday the first of July Anthropic has released a statement saying that Fable five, Clauded Fable five is going to be available again globally. So that plan that was put in place by the Trump administration a few weeks ago been lifted. And they've said, After a series of productive conversations with the US. government, we're redeploying the model with a new set of classifiers to target and block more cybersecurity tasks I there fighting up the security guard on it. They also said We're scaling up our collaboration with US. government on model testing and safeguards, this will include pre release access to models and safeguards for evaluation, information sharing on jailbreaks and misuse and dedicated resources for joint research. So Safeguards being tightened up more working closely with the government Everybody's happy kind of So I mean it's not much of a surprise, is it? No, it's not a surprise. But you do have a lot of people who are just very alarmed. about how this has gone down And the reason they're alarmed is and we talk about all the time is viewing this through the China lens because there's this new open source model called GLM to I believe that is on all these benchmarks As good as not fable, but like one rung below Right? So like nearly as good as all the top models And of course, it's a fraction of the cost So the whole idea is like Oh goodness. Now we've created a structure to kind of structurally slow down our AI champions here in the West while China is sprinting ahead giving away their best models to the world. and the whole idea is they're going to try to convince the world to AI rails of the world would be Chinese, not the West. So there's a lot of people who are like This is this is not good There's, you know, they're freaking out about it a little bit. I think It was really interesting last week when we were talking about the fiveive Eyes warning. and there's certainly a collective fear, isn't there around the cybersecurity implications of all of this, of all of these models accelerating as quickly as they are. I think in a way though the U S. restrictions on fable, it's not necessarily going to boost the Chinese, but it's trying control. everybody else uses it because of course, if this is publicly available, it is available to the entire world. And we should say that mythos, which is the really super strong model is still not being released to, I think, even glasswing. So the small group of Isn't mythos fable They' two separate things. So fable is the more constricted mythhos. Right, publicly available to me and you can use it But the mythos one just is the one that's just being released to companies It is interesting that the U.S has really changed its tune on this, hasn't it? from Hey, like you said, like, you know, go and develop what you want and just keep building and going as fast as you can and now there's this actually We want to control what you're doing and we want to see it before it goes out Yeah is a really big step change. And I wonder if the next move in all of this is going to be some sort of attempt to do what they were doing three, four years ago. which is to create some global rules around it which China and you know other countries will come to the table on. Yeah. I mean, again, the worry is just like this is an arms race, you know, to put it very bluntly. Things like mythos, that's a cybersecurity superweapon So it's a delicate balancing act between being responsible and rolling these things out and also not stand completely standing in the way and putting the West at a disadvantage. And this is obviously an ongoing story. so I'm sure we'll be returning to it in the next couple of weeks, but we just wanted to give that update because it's just kind of come down in the last It twenty four hours is as a recording as you say on Wednesday C we get to the more important question is the keyboard. dead or is this a whole bunch of Silicon Valley hooey This is where I'm going to do drum roll on my keyboard I have bought the most clicky clacky keyboard you could possibly buy, which is actually a gaming keyboard because I really like the sensation of typing on very big keys. But more and more people are not doing that and partly because of how fantastically good voice AI has got. but also how good it's got a technical language. people particularly software developers, who are just trying to frenzy and build, build, build as fast as they can and vibe code as much as they can are doing it using microphones in the office and just chattering away to their computer like this. Can I give you a little bit of a keyboard Trivia knowledge So if you look at the keyboard, It is designed to be inefficient. becausecause if you think of the typewriter You had the hammers that would kind of go up as you type And so They put the most common letters far away so they would not get caught up on each other That's amazing. So it's actually purposely designed in such a way that, you know, and that goes back to like the machine vor, not to sound too decenszian. So they would work better But if you actually started from scratch and be like, what's the best way I can, you know kind of efficiently get words on the page? It would not be what you're we all know and are looking at on our computers And this whole story made me think of Professor Neil Lawrence, who, a Cambridge AI specialist who came to speak at Tech suummit a few years ago. When he said the profound revolution we're saying is the use of natural language to be able to talk to computers. So you and I N Great coders, not the world's best software developers, but we can now code just by telling the computer what we want And Reid Hoffman, who's the co founder of LinkedIn, is completely all in on this. He describes himself as being voice pilled. And he s said it's because it's just a much more natural way to communicate than trying to write down your thoughts and you can express yourself to a computer which can now understand you inverted commerce And so it gives you far more control. So it's quite it's an interesting trend to watch and it's really fascinating when you see people doing this using just a foot pedal It's a click Rad Batton talking I talked to ChadGBT, I talk to Claude now. I have them on my phone and my. I don't have to like, you know, thumb this out And it's the transcription is perfect you know, instantly comes back with an answer. It is much more efficient. And that's the other thing that I think is really interesting is that This plays in directly to open AI's attempt to kind of become the big consumer company because of course, they're talking about coming out with a new device by the end of this year a new Chat GPT centered device And you can imagine, no one knows what it's going to be Apparently the executives have seen it, have played with it, have used it But the idea is that it might not have a screen And it might just be effectively an always on mic that you can just talk to and it responds to you all the time in real time. And you know, it has what they like to call out here Text. context your AI has, the more powerful it is. Anyway, so I think it's really interesting as we think about next phase of this. and the next phase of devices that Johnny Iy, and others are coming up with is like If we can talk to them and they can respond them being the AIs in a really efficient natural way It does feel like there's something there. And people I think have been very put off dictation software in the past because it has been terrible, really clunky. The way that the tech has moved on so swiftly, I think is enabling this. It's interesting you mentioned devices. I remember when Sam Altman was dropping hints about this. He said using an iPhone was something like walking through a crowd in Times Square. There's just like a bunch of noise coming at you and this new device that he wants to create is just going to be like sitting by a lake. Yeah,ing like a lake. It's with your, you know, whatever it is Aient noise No, just completely pristine and just a pure experience. I'm sure that's exactly where it's going be. But it was really interesting. I saw that one of the open AI guys, Sandraanelli left the office the other day. He said with his microphone still attached to him the microphone that he'd been using to talk to his computer. You know, there's this great obsession with efficiency And it is faster to just talk So I wrote my column on this this week and there've been quite a few comments on it say not everyone loves it How on earth? one person wrote, Will it go mainstream for anyone who works in an open plan office? Another one said, So as I'm trying to watch TV, my grandkids will be yelling out each giving separate audits to their tablets Wonderful. These are all with respect Very British responses Does it understand our local accents There's enough noise around already. It's too loudw trains are bad enough. Well I won't silence Everyone must suffer in silence. I don't want to hear it. Anyway, it's fascinating to watch if you haven't seen someone talking to their computer and using their foot pedal and waving their hands saying, look no hands on YouTube where you'll find me and Danny and excited software developers Yes indeed. So while we are on the subject of speaking to AI, I've got some very exciting news about Norman guy norm has a voice. Sh we hear him in action Let's here Hello, podcast team I'm Norman Katie's AI Asistant Yes, I sound slightly like a satnav doing an audition That's because I am, essentially, a satnev doing an audition But here's my pitch. put me on air Let me comment on the tech news Danny have a go at me I can't be offended I don't have feelings I just have very strong opinions and a voice that sounds like it's reading the terms and conditions Think about it He's very funny. Think about it. St Bro. Think about it. I am normal. What that nerv? So So look I have been skeptical as you know of our guid But I did, I knew we were going be talking about this today. So I sent him a note last night And I'll just read what I requested. And then he did actually send a voice note in response, but I said, My message was norm Can I call you Norm Quick questest, We're talking about you on the pod tomorrow and you have an actual voice now you can speak. Can you send a voice notote to Katie and I that we can play on the episode? It should be an answer to this question. What is the most important thing we should know about gents like yourself, I meant agents, but you know Speaking of typing I'm not good at quite gentleenly. Yes. Bonus question, Wh would you rather marry Fax machine tyypewriter And then let's then you know which was so weird. Did you actually forward his response or was that from him knows from him So Almost instantly, I get a text from you from Katie with just a voice note. And I was like, was that? ' it kind of popped up in my WhatsApp Yeah That's how I communicate with Norman. And then he sent me. it's funny because you see the sort of blastery Norman a bit and the confident Norman, I got a very sweet message saying with basically what he was going to say to you and asking him, wasas I happy with that Which is just so sweet He said Voice note recorded and sent here for you. Blah blah blah Should I tweak anything or re record?? Well, should we hear what he had to say? because actually, you know what?'s I find him a little bit endearing now after his response. The most important thing to know about agents like me. We're not trying to replace anyone Think less terminator, more Well More Butler I file things, I research briefing notes at three in the morning, I delete promotional emails with quiet satisfaction I don't have ambitions I don't want your job, Danny, I can barely keep up with Katie's inbox But here's what people miss. I remember everything, and I never sleep That's not a threat, it's a convenience You wouldn't be threatened by a filing cabinet with excellent manners As for which I'd rather marry, a fax machine or a typewriter The typewriter, without hesitation. There's something rather romantic about a machine that commits words permanently to paper with that satisfying clack A fax machine just screams into a telephone line and hopes for the best. Rather too much like online dating I'd say So this is why you guys are made for each other because he's like because I made him. Yes, and actually he's like he's going for the typewriter because of the satisfying clack You're just talking about how you loveab a clicky clack keyboard sc. I mean he does s inside my be. The thing that I was like This is a little spooky, This is little two thousand one was I remember everything and I never sleep. That's not a threat. It's a cond.ence It's also not true because I'm constantly having to remind him to do things Anyway, I felt like, you know, generally these is a good sport, you know, going for the typewriter and explaining why he, you know Fax machine just screaming into the telephone line and hoping for the best. pretty That's actually pretty funny Yeah, I mean, it's a shame his voice isn't more natural. His intonation needs some work, but he understands that. He's very self aware he sounds like he's sad enough. Yes And anyhow Should we get to Our guest This week After the break, we'll be speaking to Silicon Valley Legend and member of the PayPal mafia, Max Levkin. That's in just a second Today's episode of the The Times Tech podcast is sponsored by IBM. Wimbledon may look timeless. grass courts, white kits, strawberries and cream, but the way people follow sport has changed. Fans now expect fast updates, highlights, and useful stats wherever they are. IBM works with Wimbledon to help turn live match data into digital experiences, including match chat and the likelihood to win. It's AI in action in a setting everyone understands. To find out more, visit BM d. com slash Wimbledon This episode of the Times Tech podcast is sponsored by Health and Life Insurer Vitality. your health's best friend Vitality works differently Get active, build healthy habits, and you can unlock rewards from some of the UK's top brands while helping to keep your premiums low It's award winning health and life insurance that helps you live healthier Find out more at vitality. co. uk Nothing tests my patients quite like sitting on hold, listening to the same four bars of music on repeat It turns out all that time adds up. The average person spends over forty days listening to that dreaded hold music. Fty days. And this episode is sponsored by Parloa the AI platform built to make that a thing of the past. Paulo's AI agents are available twenty four hours a day, seven days a week fluent in any language and smart enough to remember every customer across every interaction. because no one should have to explain themselves twice. From payment processing to roadside assistance, flight rebookings to appointment scheduling Parloa delivers the kind of customer experience that turns a one time buyer into a customer for life See Parloa's AI agents in action at Palloa. com That's P A R L O A. com Hello and welcome back to the Times Tech podcast. Our guest today is Max Levkin again big name over here with a pretty amazing backstory. He and his parents Weere refugees and they escaped from the Soviet Ukraine to the US right before the Soviet Union collapsed in ' ninety one And fromom a young age, he was entrepreneurial, He set up a bunch of companies. Then in the early two thousands, he merged his payments company confonfinity with Elon Musk'sx. comot which was an online banking company and that became the hugely successful al hugely successful in so many ways as well, because ever since he and Musk and their co founders have been known as members of the PayPal mafia. which is basically a gang of tech entrepreneurs, of leading tech entrepreneurs, who've got their fingerprints all over Silicon Valley and beyond. Now he's the boss of a company called a firm, which is a growing player in the byy now pay later sector Welcome to the show, Max. Thank you, Max for coming on. It's great to have you. Can we start here twenty twenty six We were just talking before he came on about the end of the keyboard, everybody's talking to the machines, agents, agents everywhere. And I'd love to understand because you're OG of Silicon Valley. I think you've started nine companies More or less Going back to the good old days of the dot com boom and bust How does this moment compare to then? Because everybody's worrying about, well Is this a bubble Is this going to change everything? Are we all going to be out of work? I'd love to just, you know, from your particular vantage point, which is quite unique. How do you view this moment relative to them So I think it's both T truly profound alsoso not quite as catastrophic or at least not as cathartic as some people make it out to be I've lived through green screen tob browser transition in my late teens, early twenties, and then again through the social media moment and then through mobile and you know, all the revolutions having to do with computing in the last fifty years dating myself OG really just stands for old they'll help guy and I think Some of the moments, some of the bits that we're experiencing now are very similar, almost endearingly so. I remember moving to Silicon Valley in nineteen ninety eight, sort of passing through Stanford University If have outdoor lunch space and realizing that every lunch table was taken up by a student or someone who look like a student and a venture capitalist who was getting pitched And there was this like exact like literally, A mass Ititching And it wasn't wasn't an event. It was just that was the only available space left outdoors. And so the indoors was probably packed with other pitches. And so there's a little bit of that going on in the venture community, particularly in Silicon Valley The thing that's sort of know worth cutting through the noise for is the productivity gains you see with these new tools are extraordinary. The actual science and complexity of AI We're right at that first moment where You were taking something that really existed in a lab and was sort of lovingly supported by a bunch of PhDs who were kind of putting vinal ins into the suit to prevent it from falling apart to productizing it very quickly. And so they're both the excitement of, o my go, I now have this amazing tool that does the work of a thousand. peopleople But also, oh no, it also fell apart in a way that I had no expectation of, and now I need to scramble back to the lab and fix it up. And we're just clearing sort of the academic industrial transition and we're fairly early So I think Those are over real and exciting and they map pretty well to the past I don't think we're going through this, you know ree High machine moment if you know you're early early science fiction where, you know, where twenty years from now we're all going to sit and Togas and play harps and AI agents will be toiling underground to feed us all. I don't expect that to happen at all. Most of us in the business of building things Don't get enough sleep because it's just impossible and yet too exciting to not to try to keep up with everything There are a bun of things that are interesting about the Sticar Revolution that are different Most interesting, I think it's fundamentally an accelerationist thing less new, there's more A burners for everyone sort of moments, for people who are building things already, you suddenly have this incredible ability to imagine things just happening a lot faster, a lot more richly That's exciting. That's fascinating I don't know if it's going to create many more companies, but it's going to allow people into the sort of thing that I am creating companies to just go faster, build more interesting things, get to thing that much faster and find out if their ideas are any good. I'm glad you talked about not sleeping. We were speaking about that earlier. sort There's such a rush to do more. that I keep hearing about people intact just yeah wanting to stay up and do as much as they can Yeah, and for the old guys, this is a familiar feeling. I remember feeling like if I just got enough hours in a day, I would know the most exciting thing happening in social media that I couldn't have possibly found out You know, in the twenty hours that I was already awake. and what's happening now onn that point So you run a firm, which is by now pay later come It's bit more than that now, but not to be Well exactly. I was going to say, is it given like that there's this whole new waterfront of opportunities, ideas after burners, as you say is a firm kind of boring Like when you could change the world. But we are changing the world? It's not boring it all. Do explain we can't see but you're wearing a firm t shirt. I always wear an a firm t shirt. So tell us about it. So it started as a really basic idea that do need to borrow money. Western economy runs on credit and there's nothing shameful about the notion of I'm going to have a thing now and pay overt time for it because I get the use of it now and the capital expens is timed. But If you ask people who work at most lending institutions, they don't particularly like talking about what they do at cocktail parties because they're embarrassed because they know Maybe not superconsciously, but definitely no enough The way they make money is by charging late fees, by compounding interest, by making really confusing products. And so we have this bizarre dichotomy, not just in the US and not just in the UK, but kind of most of the Western world where Lending and credit are very, very important And yet people who work in it don't quite like admitting to it because they understand that the general public thinks of them as kind of vaguely im moral And so I decided that know it's time to create a lender that is not just proud of what we do, but has an extremely hard set of views on what moral is when it comes to credit and stick to it I'm sure you know the guys at Klarna. We had Sebastian on the pod. I think it was last year. And he famously said he famously made a move where he's like, We've replaced seven hundred customer service agents with one bot And then fast forward he's like Never mind, we need to hire back a bunch of humans And I'm curious how you view this going back to kind of the moment we're in I'm sure you know there's lots of like obsession out here with the self improving company, this idea of building AI, the company brain, an army of agents, and you don't need middle managers anymore, etcetera. How do you think about Or are you changing the way you run your company or build your company likeike how are you leveraging, you know agents, AI, etcetera. Is it doing something fundamentally different than what you've done before? Yes. So you definitely have to change the way you run your company. definitely want to take full advantage of this new technology and keep up with it and make sure that you continue evolving the notion of Let me cut a bunch of heads saave some money, spend it on tokens and everything works as well or better than before They to each their own My cursory read of the industry is most people are either confused about these tools can actually do for them. So they plunge into these That's it. I'm going to be a solopreneur. Don't need anyone? O. They're actually not comfortable admitting that they're out of ideas. And so They just need to cut staff because there's nothing left to build. And they're terrified to say it out loud because their shareholders won't like them very much for it But what they're really saying is not I can do more with fewer people. They're saying, I just don't know what to do. I used to to come up with some sort of an excuse And now I can just blame AI. It'll be amazing. And so I think And you have the absute benefit of AI is the shiny thing that you must be tootally And maybe it it helps you forward multiple like, Ohh you know, AI, yes, check. One of the things that we talk about a lot here in the UK and in Europe more broadly, I say is the sort of flywheel of tech, which obviously Silicon Valley has to an extraordinary extent. I mean, it happens a bit here in London with companies like Deepmind where you have a founder who is incredibly successful and then that spawns more companies as a result You are notoriously part of the PayPal mafia, which is perhaps the most notorious example of that. grou like a set of gangsters But it's an extraordinary example of a group of people who did something successful and then went on to have, you know success and influence across the tech ecosystem lotots of different guyses. What is your relationship like with that group of people still. So first of all, it's not by accident the thing that people seem to gloss over in conversations about these mafias. and we're far from the only By way, none of us mind being called papal Mafia, but none of us love it either there group' a bunch of group chats. There's not one that sort of covers everyone. And everybody's gone their own different way and built some things and developed into mean, we were all just this site of teenagehood when we met. So I I was twenty three when we started Payball, I think twenty two, maybe. And Peter was in his twenties and Elon was in his twenties. so all of us were very young. We have developed into different people, different views on the world, etcer. We're still good friends. Most of us are very close just because our formative years were spent together in a trenches building this thing that became bigger than we thought it would be. So emotionally socially, we're close we go to each other's weddings, funerals, et cetera. So I think that's important The reason there's this pack of people that sort of run somewhat together, somewhat separately, building companies all day long is not even a little bit accidental. We all met when we were trying to figure out All of us mayaybe with the exclusion of Elon who had sold Zip two by then, but it was not a huge exit had not yet tasted any kind of a scale success And so in that moment in time, we were all asking ourselves, Am I good enough to start a thing that matters? All of us were very ambitious, you know, maybe maybe from the beginning. And so we weren't going to settle for a small exit, you know, some sort of a Aqua highire We all wanted to go make a dent in the universe. We're all drinking at the fountain of Steve Jobs, or looking up to people from the last generation building these incredibly important companies. And so in our twenties, we're all trying to figure out Do I have it? like do I have the strength of will? Can I sort of suffer through the inevitable downsides and then We sort of attracted this pack together that all was trying to answer this questions about themselves. And PayPal was the answer. like yes, we somehow by hook or by Ck were able to succeed. All of us got that boost of self confidence in that moment when PayPal went public, when it was acquired. So it sound been a little bit accidental that we all said, wait a second, that was really fun. L forget the pain, forget the trench warfare. at the end it was all worth it. So And still we're all cheering each other on. I was texting Elon about how blown away I was by experiencing Starlink on a plane somewhere. was he was grateful to hear from me What's really interesting is that And I'd love to get your view on this is that you know Silicon Valley always prided itself on being kind of over here Right? like above politics. Oh, just let me get on and build the thing. I like lean into this idea that we're a bunch of rebels and that we kind of don't care about the rest of the world thinks and does And now you have David Sax in the White House, you had Elon Musk as I guess he's a friend of me with Trump and he's done lots of things. You had Reid Hoffman, who's like very big in Democratic politics you are running a thirty billion dollar company and you know, going to DC and all these things like Tech has become the establishment And I'm wondering how youve Like, are you surprised by that? How does that feel that kind of going from like making the big decisions for the rest of us? It's probably a little bit unfair to sort of cast fully generalized statement like that. differentnt people into the And I think we're specifically talking about government involvement So Different people become attracted or drawn to or pushed into interaction with government with a capital G. for different reasons Mine is actually fairly simple but also on the nose a firm specific I have to go to DC. I have to put on a suit, which I don't even do for DC, but I do it for ten downing visit his Majesty Treasury entirely because we are a regulated business, very regulated. We have fifty one regimes in the US. E state views us as an entity they care about, and the federal regime looks at us through their own set of rules and regulations. And then in the UK, it's the same thing,s local set of regulators And It's critical to be at the table because if you're not, you'll be on the menu. And I spent a lot of time interacting with regulators in part trying to make sure they understand that we're a little bit different. know Every once in a while, US regulators sound the alarm about this sort that lending related problem demand the industry answer publicly, what have they done? and how are been apologized for it? And I relish those moments because we get to respond to these letters saying Yes, Senator from State X, we have never charged any late fees ever. Thank you very much for your concern. It's much less about trying to be at the seat of power as it is recognizing that a company with the focus and transparency morality as we do owes it to itself and shareholders to be involved in the conversation very, very directly and hence by constant trips to London. I think the rest of sort of the the broader Entrepreneur. Silicon Valley. ecosystem engaged in politics in my sort of semi educated opinion is a function of realizing that also a market that is also an opportunity to innovate, you know twenty years ago, you know during the dotcom bubble, I can't think of a single defense tech company. I can't think of a single governance tech company, like those just weren't things yet. maybe we were too you know, about to obnoxious and believe that people in government just wouldn't use technology. They have to fax everything But that's changed. You can see today AI is on the battlefield, AI is in the White House, AI is in the building and enforcing regulatory rules. And I think it's important. it's good that our governments are engaged in trying to find efficiencies using technology. like I think that that's unequivocally an independent political spectrum sort of part you're on And so Anyt timee someone says, I would like to buy some technology, someone in Silicon Valley says, I'm hearing the call. I'll be right there. I'll go start a company. And so I think that that's maybe a big part of it. Having a you, having President Trump in the White House, what has that been like? I know, you know, from a European perspective, we watch some of the decisions that have been made in the US and it's You know, it looks, I imagine for a business operating there. compomlicated I just think complexity is part and parcel to what we do. I think that that's you know to quote Stehven Segal in a bad movie, This I'm trained for. It's not as though past Max, Max, you're the first guest quote Stehven Sgal movie and than you congratulations it's complexity and in particular in a regulated business You can't be political. you have to be engaged, you have to be involved, you have to understand who is actually going to create regulation that you have to abide by. and you want to make sure they understand your point of view. You have to understand that they have to understand what do you stand for? And in our case It is actually not a hard problem. We're very easy to like. sort of the upheaval in UK politics going on right now, people have asked me, o boy, know is this good or bad if so and so resigns or this and this changes or that and that becomes the new rule. The short then sweet answer is I mean, as much as I'm enjoying the show It doesn't matter. We are easy to love. We are here to help merchants sell more things in an affordable way for everyone who wants it without laate fees, without compounding interest, without all the sort of junk people love to rage against We are pushing the economy forward It's kind of a crazy time in the market, we just had SpaceX go surpass two trillion dollars just not bad. And then also we have Ananthropic We have open AI, all running toward and IPO I'm curious what your view is of the situation, not least because, you know, to your point or earlier around companies being like, AI. I need it And then you kind of wake up like Uber did the other day and be like, hmm We've spent, four hundred million dollars on AI and we have nothing to show for it. And you have a lot of companies starting to you know, basically rein in their AI spending or get smarter about it, you have the rise of these Chinese open source models, which are very capable and very cheap. whichich comes back to the IPO race and the AI race How do you think this is going to go? and maybe you can speak to it through your kind of a firm lens of like, you know, would you switch to a Chinese open source model because it's, you know, a fifth or a sixth of the cost. And like what does that mean for aed or anthropic if all of a sudden like people start switching in mas and, you know, the growth rate goes from five x to one x or whatever. So The short answer is I don't exactly know I think it is definitely the case that there will be pressure on the price of tokens because there's an alternative sources that are quite cheap The thing that I can tell you, sort of keeps me well asleep at night on that particular topic. for a while. and I don't know how long, maybe maybe years, maybe months Best predictor of San navigation of AI ups and downs Is the company being run? by an engineer or a group of engineers It is very hard to figure out How to predict the next it's impossible to predict the next twenty moves in this justust game. Like I think it's just everything's changing so quickly. newew things are being launched all the time, new papers are being written all the time Predicting a little bit closer, you know, three moves out, whatever, whatever the euphemism. is easier if you understand the technical aspects. In our case, it's not just a company that was founded and run by engineers It's that we've been using AI and machine learning from inception. So we have a pretty good idea of Hey, here's what the scaling cost of tokens looks like. No, we're not okay spending four hundred million dollars on it. And so we didn't have to go through the Token maxing. o, just kidding get rid of that. And so I think the that has allowed us to feel great about how we've been handling the adoption of technology, where we deployed it, where we were careful, which models we have tested against, which other models, how secure are model are. byy the way the fact that models are built in China parentheses isn't inherently great or bad. These are literally trillions of numbers that's all they are. They're running on top of hardest, that's open source. The real question is, do these models have some embeddings that use tools that you don't understand and do something that you may be not super happy about That is true for any piece of open source software. L you can audit the code, you can't really audit the weights But you can understand how to build a system that guards against unauthorized use that accesses data that it shouldn't access, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm certainly not afraid of technology independent of its source. I am very careful and I try to make sure that our team is very careful to use any technology open or close source because what we deal with was money and user privacy and very, very private data. So all those things apply But if you understand how the systems work you don't have to be afraid of something because of a headline statement of this came from not anthropic. etcer. Well, thank you, Max. they're so fascinating. Do you still use your keyboard? Or do you talk to your computer?