E160: 2024 Predictions! Markets, tech, politics, and more

Friedberg said one of his companies is replacing a vertical SaaS tool costing about $500,000 a year with software built internally by a single engineer. For him, AI and low-code tools turn once-defensible per-seat pricing into a commodity, forcing enterprise software margins and prices sharply lower.

Jason Calacanis disclosed that he is buying Anduril secondary shares and is trying to reach roughly 2% ownership so he can pursue a board seat. That is a far more consequential commitment than his on-air praise of Palmer Luckey: he is actively concentrating capital and seeking governance influence.

Chamath Palihapitiya said current AI APIs are too slow and token costs too high for many production workloads. He expects custom-hardware startups and open source to drive inference toward near-zero cost, undercutting today’s AI revenue model and pressuring private valuations such as OpenAI’s then-$90 billion secondary price.

David Sacks and Jack Selby have optioned Jimmy Soni’s The Founders and reached a deal with Drake’s DreamCrew to develop it for television. Sacks said the project was entering development, with HBO, Netflix or another major studio among plausible eventual homes.

Calacanis predicted the New York Times–OpenAI dispute would end in a nine-figure settlement plus recurring licensing payments. The wider thesis was that premium publishers and entertainment rights owners could turn AI training and generation into a recurring rights business rather than simply surrendering value to models.

Sacks argued the Federal Reserve would have to extend or replace BTFP because regional banks still carried impaired commercial-debt portfolios and needed liquidity. His point was that the supposedly temporary 2023 rescue mechanism had become difficult to withdraw while the yield curve remained inverted without risking renewed banking stress.

Friedberg confirmed he had spent thousands on radiation suits for his family, bought filtered fallout protection for his dogs, and had a bunker “underway.” Later he put the chance of nuclear use in conflict at only 1–2%, but roughly ten times higher than five years earlier.