Innovators
1 Curated Dialogues
Keith Rabois
Key Views & Dialogues
Grok 4 Wows, The Bitter Lesson, Third Party, AI Browsers, SCOTUS backs POTUS on RIFs
Grok 4 now ranks above OpenAI’s o3-pro and Gemini 2.5 Pro, as xAI scales Colossus from 100k to 1M GPUs in under two and a half years. The panel questions Llama’s $15B Scale AI stake as human-labeled data may have only a one-to-three-year half-life, while robot kitchens cut labor from 30-35% to 7-10% and browser economics remain unresolved.
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- Grok 4 tops the benchmarks — Artificial Analysis now ranks it above OpenAI’s o3-pro and Gemini 2.5 Pro, less than two and a half years after starting in March 2023. Chamath reads it as vindication of Rich Sutton’s Bitter Lesson: general compute scaled on Colossus (100k → 250k → 1M GPUs) beats human-knowledge approaches — and puts a question mark over Llama’s $15B for 49% of Scale AI, “exactly a bet on human knowledge.”
- Human-labeled data has a short half-life, Keith Rabois warns: “there may be a year, two years, three years max, when anybody uses human labeled data for maybe anything” — a direct shot at investors chasing revenue traction at Scale, Mercor, and Surge. His caveat on the Bitter Lesson itself: it only holds where data is abundant — “physical world AI is lacking in data, and so you just try to approximate humans.”
- Travis Kalanick has been doing “vibe physics” at 4 a.m. with GPT and Grok — “I’ve gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs” — but is honest that Grok 3 and existing ChatGPT can’t originate ideas: getting one past conventional wisdom is “like pulling a donkey.” The prize is a scientific-method machine: “game the F over. You just light up more GPUs, and you just got, like, 1,000 more PhD students working for you.”
- Building a browser is “an absolutely stupid capital allocation decision” in 2025, per Chamath — “a glorified markup reader” — and Perplexity’s real prize is replacing Bloomberg’s “atrocious” $25k/year terminal, “a $100 billion enterprise” there for the taking. Keith is blunter: ChatGPT is becoming the verb at a billion users, “there’s nothing left of Perplexity if they can’t pull this off” — and “Google Search is toast” too.
- Elon’s third party splits the panel: Keith calls him “probably a replacement level politician” — Michael Jordan playing baseball — notes no true third-party Senate win since 1970, and concedes only “a few House races.” Travis is all in (“Elon is almost always right… I’m on the Elon train”), and Chamath says the mechanics changed: 2023 FEC guidance lets super PACs run full ground games, and 3-5 independent candidates equals real leverage with the filibuster “on borrowed time.”
- SCOTUS backed Trump’s RIF plans 8-1. Chamath: the “CEO of the United States” must be able to fire people, and had DOGE launched after this ruling it would have gone through “like a hot knife through butter” — though Keith counters “that ruling doesn’t happen without DOGE,” and warns only planning was approved; implementation “may not be 8-1.”
- Travis’s robot kitchens drop labor from 30-35% of revenue to 7-10% — a 60-sq-ft machine doing 300 bowls an hour, aimed at an “internet food court” where anything can be made in an 8,000-sq-ft facility. On the Pony.ai chatter: “there’s no real deal right now, but there is definitely some inbound.”