Grok 4 Wows, The Bitter Lesson, Elon's Third Party, AI Browsers, SCOTUS backs POTUS on RIFs

ChamathCommentary

Chamath believes building a browser is a terrible capital allocation decision for Perplexity in 2025, but argues the company's best path to a durable business is replacing Bloomberg in financial data and information — a $100B opportunity where Perplexity already shows strong product quality.

“I think building a browser is an absolutely stupid capital allocation decision. Just totally stupid and unjustifiable in 2025. Specifically for Perplexity, I think their path to building a legacy business is to replace Bloomberg”▶ Listen · 52:26 ⚑

Keith argues Perplexity is toast absent a major product pivot like the Comet browser, as ChatGPT is becoming the default AI verb for consumers, leaving no space for Perplexity's core search product.

“I think it's a great Hail Mary attempt by Perplexity. I think absent something like this, Perplexity is toast. Like for the stat about ChatGPT going to a billion users, like it's becoming the verb... There's nothing left of perplexity if”▶ Listen · 48:44 ⚑

Keith (Guest) argues there is a very short half-life on human-labeled data businesses like Scale AI, as machines are already matching or surpassing human labeling quality in autonomous vehicle and other domains, meaning investors focused on revenue traction missed a fundamental obsolescence risk.

“I think there's a very short half-life on human-labeled data. And so everybody who's investing in these companies, they're just looking at revenue traction, really didn't understand that there may be a year, 2 years, 3 years max when”▶ Listen · 30:18 ⚑

ChamathCommentary

Chamath argues that Meta's $15B bet on Scale AI is a wager on human-labeled data, which the Bitter Lesson and Grok 4's results show is the losing architectural approach — implying Scale AI's business model faces severe structural headwinds.

“What has Llama been doing? They just spent $15 billion to buy 49% of Scale AI. That's exactly a bet on human knowledge.”▶ Listen · 23:20 ⚑

Keith acknowledges OpenAI has an exceptional product team and leads on product, but argues it cannot compete on the factory/compute level with xAI and must ship a device to stay relevant — framing it as strong on product but structurally disadvantaged on infrastructure.

“OpenAI, for your point, they do have a good product team and they need to stay ahead on the product level because they can't compete on the factory level. The way to stay ahead of the product level is shipping a device.”▶ Listen · 45:11 ⚑

ChamathCommentarytracking against the call

Chamath argues that xAI's bet on massive compute scale and a general-computation approach (the 'Bitter Lesson') has allowed Grok 4 to leapfrog all competitors in under 2.5 years, with future iterations relying on synthetic data rather than human labeling — a compounding structural advantage over rivals like OpenAI, Google, and Meta who remain dependent on human-labeled data.

“Two things. One is how quickly, starting in March of 2023, so we're talking about less than 2.5 years, what this team has accomplished and how how far ahead they are of everybody else, as demonstrated by this.”▶ Listen · 20:48 ⚑

Keith argues that Grok 4's results show Meta has missed the AI boat and needs to build a whole new AI team, having failed to keep pace despite massive spending.

“Grok, if anything, Grok 4 shows that Mark really does need to spend money to build a whole new team because everything they've done in AI has also missed the boat.”▶ Listen · 55:46 ⚑

Travis (Guest/Kalanick) acknowledges Apple's AI performance has been 'absolutely miserable' but notes that vertical integration keeps the company worth trillions despite missing the most important technology breakthrough in 70 years.

“Despite missing the AI wave, still a pretty good company from any empirical standpoint. I mean, like, the performance is absolutely miserable on the most important technology breakthrough of the last 70 years, but the company's still alive”▶ Listen · 44:54 ⚑

Keith argues Google Search is toast and that the assets best positioned to save Alphabet have nothing to do with search — framing the core search business as a loser against ChatGPT unless Google combines Chrome with Gemini into a competitive product.

“Google Search, cross-search is toast. And since they have Chrome and they theoretically have a, a quality team in Gemini, they should be putting these two things together and company to compete with ChatGPT, they're gonna lose the search ga”▶ Listen · 49:15 ⚑

ChamathCommentary

Chamath draws a parallel between Tesla FSD's compute-scale bet (billions of driving miles, cameras only, no LiDAR) and xAI's Grok strategy, arguing both reflect the winning 'Bitter Lesson' approach of general computation over human-engineered heuristics — validating Tesla's autonomous driving architecture.

“He made this bet once before, which was Tesla FSD versus Waymo, and Tesla FSD only had cameras... the bet was, I'll just collect billions and billions of driving miles before anybody else does and apply general compute, and it'll get to”▶ Listen · 23:40 ⚑