E170: Tech's Vibe Shift, TikTok ban debate, Vertical AI boom, Florida bans lab-grown meat & more

OpenAI’s CTO would not say whether YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram videos were used to train Sora, repeatedly saying she was unsure. Chamath and Sacks interpreted the hesitation as legal caution amid training-data lawsuits and treated YouTube use as plausible rather than established.

The House TikTok bill went beyond TikTok, covering certain apps and websites and defining foreign-adversary control to include persons “subject to the direction or control” of specified foreign actors. Sacks said that breadth risked abuse, while Chamath backed divestiture; the House had passed the measure 352–65.

Sacks disclosed an investment in Sourcegraph and argued that Devin’s agent-first approach is easier to showcase on new projects than existing codebases, where context-first tools matter more. With Devin’s cited benchmark at 13%, the group’s stronger prediction was experts supervising many AI agents, not developers disappearing.

Chamath said one of his children was tested for ADHD after struggling at school, and the family rejected medication and removed the iPad, apps, and video games instead. Over roughly six to eight weeks, he said grades rose from 60–70% to about 90% and the child’s engagement changed sharply.

Calacanis said his founder program accepts 10% of applicants and funds only 10% of those, putting the effective funding rate below 1%. His first test is whether a founder can recruit two or three people without funding; asking for money to find a cofounder, he said, means failing that test.

At recording, Florida’s cultivated-meat bill had cleared the legislature; Friedberg framed it as ranchers using regulation to block a future competitor. He said the technology was still about a decade from competitiveness and predicted similar state bans could ultimately provoke a federal-preemption fight. (flsenate.gov)