This Week in Startups
00:46:25 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:46:25] S2: I would... I love served drinks. Yeah. [00:46:27] S0: That's fine. Absolutely. Alright. Keep going. [00:46:30] S2: Alright. Bloomberg reports that Apple is cutting the daily amount its engineering teams can spend on AI. In October, Apple lowered the daily AI spending cap for its engineering teams for $300 to $200. More cuts are in the works. Some allowances falling to $100 a day. Outside engineering, Apple is reportedly weighing a daily limit as low as $25. That I would blow through $25 a day pretty quickly, I think. It's a big change for a company that has worked to integrate AI into its engineering processes. I was fascinated by this change because those numbers sound very low to me. Do you think there is a type of work you could do at Apple in Cupertino where you would spend less than $20.25 bucks a day total on your on your AI? [00:47:17] S0: I mean, there's a big discussion right now going on in attack. If we're gonna have... If we're gonna be token constrained because we are data center and energy constrained [00:47:26] S2: Right. [00:47:27] S0: Where do the tokens come from? Well, people have been trained to have unlimited tokens. I think you're on a $40 plan for Grok, and our team's on a $40 a month plan that gets you all the stuff together. [00:47:38] S2: So individual is on the 40 a month plan, like, as part of the team. Yeah. [00:47:43] S0: So that's $500 a [00:47:45] S2: year. Yeah.
00:47:46 · Jason Calacanis
[00:47:46] S0: I think they're probably burning 2,000 in tokens a year. A thousand in tokens a year. Almost certainly. Yeah. The people who use it a lot. Then there's some people who don't use it at all, and that's kinda how these software licenses work. On Slack, you might have five people in your company who do 10 Slack messages a week, and there might be people who do a thousand a week. It's just the nature of these programs. I think the flat rate is designed to get you addicted to it, and gets you to move up the scale. But I think that the usage is getting so high because the value is so high that we're going to see the minimum price of entry for a corporation go to 100, dollars 200, even 300 per month to use these services. It's gonna be a $3.04, $5,000 a year subscription. This idea that you're gonna get away with a $500 one doesn't make much sense to me. I think it's much more valuable than a lot of SaaS software that costs 500 to 1,000 a seat. Yeah. So if you told me right now, you came to me and said like, Hey, Grok bot wants $100 a month instead of 40, I'd be like, Okay, can we just look at everybody's usage? And if somebody's not using it, let's get them off there, or have them share a login with somebody else, or something like that, which is what people do with SAS sometimes. You have those five people who barely use it, have a group login kind of situation. Sometimes they catch you when you do that, sometimes they don't. I don't know if it's against the terms of service or not for light usage. But yeah, I think it's gonna change. Apple is a very unique company in the world. They have their own way of doing things. They're like the one to watch in AI. They might come in last and do what they did with iPhone, come in last but best, and that could be very accretive. And they have the the best local hardware
00:49:33 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:49:33] S2: Right. [00:49:34] S0: For this outside of, like, Windows and the Spark stuff from NVIDIA. And and NVIDIA and Windows are working on that together, Jensen and Satya Nadella. So there's there's a chance, that they are just gonna give everybody a $20,000 Mac Studio for their desktop. I'm sure they're all on Mac Studios and top MacBooks anyway with Apple's products. [00:49:55] S2: Maybe. [00:49:55] S0: So they can run local models. [00:49:57] S2: I mean [00:49:57] S0: They'll be the first to be running local. [00:49:58] S2: That actually makes total sense to me for Apple just to be model agnostic. Like, we we have the platform and the apps, and then you could choose what version of it you wanna run, you know, and Claude through the cloud or run, you know, something through a llama directly on your on your device, whatever. That makes sense to me. [00:50:17] S0: Did you see MacBook release... Speaking of Apple, they released the ProLED XDR display. No. So they say it's gorgeous screen, and then you're gonna be able... It's gonna be a touchscreen apparently. Oh, wow. I believe that's the one that's the touchscreen. It's It does look like touchscreen. Expensive. [00:50:35] S2: It is a touchscreen. [00:50:37] S0: It's crazy. Right? And so, like Wow. I I don't know who needs this. [00:50:40] S2: How much is it to get shorter? [00:50:42] S0: Oh, just put it on the max. 16? Go put it on 16. Boom. You're at 3,400. Click 16. [00:50:48] S2: Yeah. That's Right? Buy from $33.99.
00:50:48 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:50:48] S2: Yeah. That's Right? Buy from $33.99. [00:50:52] S0: Okay. Let's just keep going down here and pick max memory. No. Pick the gray glass. You gotta pick each one or it doesn't let you go to the next. Nanotexture glass. Oh, I know. It didn't let you pick. [00:51:02] S2: Color. Pick... Okay. Silver. [00:51:04] S0: You gotta you gotta pick everything when you go through this. [00:51:05] S2: Nanotexture [00:51:06] S0: glass. Nanotext glass. Okay. Where where we at now? 36MMM5 [00:51:10] S2: pro max chip. [00:51:12] S0: Yeah. Okay. Chip. Go 18444. [00:51:15] S2: Customization, want unified [00:51:17] S0: 5,500. No. Top memory. Oh, yeah. Hit the drop down there. Top memory. What does it give you top memory? Hundred twenty eight days. Let's go. Storage. We'll go for Eight terabytes. 16 terabytes plus $7,000. Keyboard. [00:51:35] S2: We got the right keyboard already. [00:51:36] S0: No trade in. No trade in. We save our stuff. [00:51:39] S2: We're gonna buy it. $14,549. [00:51:44] S0: Hey. Just congratulations. You bought a 15,000 that you could put a... You could buy a used Tesla with hardware full [00:51:50] S2: time. Does look incredible, though. I'm sure it's a beautiful machine. [00:51:53] S0: I don't wanna touch my screen, Subway, John. Who was touching their screen on the laptop? I have an iPad for that. [00:51:57] S2: I don't like that. [00:51:58] S0: Just buy... Do you know what a great deal iPads are? Oh my god. They're close to free. I love a good iPad with keyboard. Yeah. You don't Delicious now.
00:51:58 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:51:58] S0: Just buy... Do you know what a great deal iPads are? Oh my god. They're close to free. I love a good iPad with keyboard. Yeah. You don't Delicious now. [00:52:06] S2: You don't need to be getting your laptop screen. That's silly. Know. Disgusting. [00:52:10] S0: I know. Disgratzia. You're gonna be eating... We're gonna have velvet tacos. You're gonna be touching your screen. [00:52:15] S2: It's no good with velvet tacos. Is no good with it. [00:52:17] S0: You gotta see Lon when he gets those velvet tacos when he's not on the Ozempic. When I move closer to the city, I'm gonna be in the office a lot more. We just gotta do a taco run. [00:52:39] S2: Oh, yeah. [00:52:39] S0: We'll... But we would do two tacos. We were reasonable. Right? Did I ever go three? [00:52:43] S2: No. I don't think we ever did three. Three three at Velvet Taco was too much. You would do... Right. You gotta do the two tacos, then you share a queso. I think that's You [00:52:50] S0: share a queso. You're good. Alright. Well, we're... Are we off duty? Is there something off duty you wanna talk about here? I finished house of... By way, I finished house of dragons. Excellent. [00:52:58] S2: Finally finished. Excellent. This season was pretty good. It started a little slow, but satisfying way. I I got into it. [00:53:05] S0: I'm very sad when dragons die. Yeah. I'm very sad when dragons die. [00:53:09] S2: They're like they're like dogs. They have little emotional connection to them. Well, I did [00:53:13] S0: That's just like... It reminds me of my bulldogs. That's exactly it.
00:53:13 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:53:13] S0: That's just like... It reminds me of my bulldogs. That's exactly it. [00:53:15] S2: Yeah. I did I did wanna talk to you about, just to get a little political, but in in more of a fun way. So one of the big memes that's going around post election or ideas that's photoground is that Okay. Woke is gonna come back, and all of the tech CEOs are going to get back in line and resume their [00:53:35] S0: They are. [00:53:35] S2: Their previous woke, ways of talking. And, here's a here's a funny one that I got of Zuckerberg. This is gonna be what Zuck looks like now. That's great. Like I like that. [00:53:47] S0: Rich. I saw somebody did a great video, like, we're all... We were always blue or something. [00:53:51] S2: So this one is a Reid Jackson's predicting Chamath. Tomorrow's gonna be like, there are only two priorities, inequality and climate change. He's gonna be back there. So I wanted to pick your pick your rate. Is it... Is that gonna happen? Do you think... Was this this jump over to Trump and to the right? Is that, like, a sincere... Like, the the... These guys have embraced that philosophy and that worldview, or do you think, oh, now that democrats are back in power, we're gonna see a lot of the tech CEOs and leadership come back to the fold and become democrats again?