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H-1b Shakeup, Kimmel Apology, Autism Causes, California Hate Speech Law

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

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  • H‑1B Fee Forces Market Repricing
    • The new $100,000 one-time H‑1B fee is meant to reduce low-wage abuse and redirect visas to higher-skilled roles.
    • David Sacks argues market scarcity will push employers to prioritize truly high-skilled hires. Transcript: Jason Calacanis Okay, listen, the topic of the week, H-1B visas are being overhauled. Trump administration announced a new $100,000 fee for all future H-1B applications. It’s a one-time fee. There’s been a little confusion about it and the details, but that’s how they do things in the 47th. Just some excitement, a big announcement, and then we figure out the details. Lutnick originally said it would be $100,000 a year, but then the White House clarified it will be a one-time fee. This is a huge jump. The current fee is nothing. It’s like $2,000 to $5,000 that you pay to the government. You might pay a lawyer, you know, double that or triple that to do the work for you if you’re a big corporation. But, you know, this hits on a lot of the Trump campaign promises, tougher on immigration, looking out for U.S. Workers. We’ve talked before here about the abuse in the H-1B system. I’ll give some of my personal, you know, insights in that after maybe I throw to you, Chamath. And before I do, they had an interesting poly market. Will courts block Trump’s 100K H-1B by September 30th? 3% chance of that happening. So it looks like everybody’s kind of aligned with this program. All right, Saks, I know you’re on the road, but your fans demand to hear your take on this. What’s your take? David Sacks I think it’s a good idea to have this $100,000 fee. And I’ll tell you the reason why is because right now there’s something like five times as many H-1B applications as there are slots. So I think they grant about 85,000 H-1Bs a year and many more apply for it. And as a result, they have a lottery where they just kind of, I guess, they randomly choose who the winners are going to be. And if you look over the past decade, roughly half the H1Bs go to these like IT consulting firms. And the average salary is like $65,000 a year. So it kind of puts the light to this idea that you hear that H1Bs are for like high skilled engineers ai researchers things like that that’s not in practice what happens uh in practice What happens is you have this lottery and a huge chunk of them end up going to low-end it jobs and i think by putting this hundred thousand dollar fee on it you encourage the applications To go to the actual higher skilled, higher paid jobs, where there’s actually a shortage of Americans, and you encourage US companies to try to fill those jobs with Americans first. And so I think, you know, putting aside some of the details, I think the big picture here is that they’re using market forces to put some scarcity around the h1b application and i think What that’s going to do is encourage applicants to to actually be these higher paid higher skilled jobs that the program is supposed to be for instead of these lower end it shop shops Jason Calacanis Yeah these are supposed to be for highly specialized (Time 0:02:22)
  • IT H‑1B Abuse From Jason’s Past
    • Jason described seeing indentured‑servitude style treatment in 1990s IT where H‑1B workers couldn’t refuse overtime.
    • He called it a disgrace that enabled wage suppression and overwork. Transcript: Jason Calacanis Are supposed to be for highly specialized workers i can tell you you know, when I was in IT in the early 90s, the abuse was happening all the time. And it was indentured servitude. It was disgraceful. The IT people would hire typically Indians, and they would say stuff to the effect of, these guys are going to work for half as much and twice as long. And they can’t say no. That’s the best part of it. They can’t say no when we put them on weekend coverage. They can’t say no if we want to do a build-out and they have to work 10 days in a row because we can kick them out of the country and they have 30 days to find a new job. And so it’s a giant scam on the bottom half of these. I witnessed it firsthand. Every discussion I’ve ever had about H-1Bs, you know, in relation to IT and consulting has always been about saving money. And the truth is, it’s been abused. (Time 0:05:20)
  • H‑1B Has Deviated From Its Original Purpose
    • Chamath notes H‑1B issuance has ballooned well beyond intended 85k, causing perceptible labor impact.
    • He argues many visas route through foreign consultancies, not American employers, amplifying wage arbitrage. Transcript: Chamath Palihapitiya I came to the United States initially on a TN visa, which is the NAFTA visa between Canada and America. And then I switched to an H-1B and then I got my green card and my citizenship in the early 2010s. Elon came in on an H-1B, Sundar Pichai came on an H-1B, Satya Nadella came in on an H-1B. There’s a lot of folks that have done a lot of good things that have used this specific visa. That being said, I think Saks is right that people have found an end around and have been abusing this H1B system. There was an incredibly exhaustive thread by Robert Sterling, I think it was about a year ago, but I wanted to use that as a jumping off point to explain a couple of reasons why I think that There’s been rampant abuse. The first thing is the H-1B program is supposed to be 85,000 visas a year. But here is the data. And so what you see is that in many years, including the last several, it’s been upwards of 10 times that number. And so there are a lot of people that are getting shoehorned into this program. And when you see this, you can start to see why a lot of people are saying that there is wage suppression and that it’s taking away from American jobs. Because if the program was meant to be for $85,000, you would think, well, listen, that’s a drop in the bucket. Nobody would feel that in the American economy. But when you start talking about almost a million people a year, 600,000 to a million a year, that starts to be perceptible. And that is absorbing a lot of revenue and wages that would otherwise go to domestic born and legal immigrants that are already here. So that’s thing number one. Thing number two is there was a myth that these H1Bs were these extremely highly skilled people. And what Robert found out in the data is that actually no, it’s not really that case. And so I think the average salary, I just want to get this exactly right, it’s slightly under $120,000. Now, if you started to tell me that these were the best in class PhDs in all of these whiz bang industries where the companies are raising billions and billions of dollars, you already Know that this salary would not pass the smell test. Most executive assistants at tech startups make more than $119,000 a year. So the idea that some qualified grad is making this should already sort of set off alarm bells that maybe where there’s smoke, there’s fire. So that’s the second thing. So number one, we’ve been over allocating by five to 10x. Number two, these salaries aren’t these incredible salaries that you think of, which tends to mean that there is the potential, as Jason, you said, in some form of indentured servitude And wage suppression. That’s not good. And then the third thing is you would ask the question, well, who gets these things? And it turns out, as Sachs said, a large plurality of these visas don’t actually go to American companies that are looking to hire talent to make this American business do better. These are foreign companies that are arbitraging labor and bringing people in. So crazy. Cognizant is not an American business. Tata. Infosys is not an American business. Tata, Wipro. It’s not to say that that in and of itself is wrong, but you need to find the right visa class to do this under. Yeah, they’re hacking it. And so when you put all of this together, I think the sort of broad takeaway is from where this started and what it was intended to do, we’ve deviated pretty wildly. And I think that this is a very important reset. Off to spite our face. And it’s going to stop an inflow of incredible talent. And what I would just remind people is that it is really important to remember that when you are in the United States for a master’s or PhD, you already get an automatic visa. It’s called OPT. So you have multiple years when you graduate from a useful degree program in the United States to find a job. I have several of these folks that work for me at 80-90. These are incredible grads from Carnegie Mellon. They are off the charts smart, but because they did a master’s or a PhD, they come with a couple of years and you can oftentimes extend that. And that will give us a very good amount of time to figure out how exceptional they are. And then quite honestly, I would gladly pay the $100,000 to get these guys on an H-1B program. (Time 0:06:57)
  • Recruit Top Talent Proactively
    • Create a distinct, proactive recruitment stream for top scientists similar to Operation Paperclip.
    • Use government‑industry partnerships and national interest waivers to attract and retain strategic talent. Transcript: David Friedberg I think there should be two separate programs for what we could call highly skilled workers. What you were referring to at the end of World War II, there was a secret US operation called Operation Paperclip, where we tried to recruit German scientists and engineers. In 1945 and 1959, America recruited, I think, 1,600 of these scientists. So it was both, call it disabling to an American rival or adversary, but also expansive because that was when the nuclear industry was growing and much of nuclear science was being pioneered In the earlier days in Germany. And so the kind of American workforce expanded, but more importantly, a new industry was able to be enabled and unlocked and grown in the US. And then the German state was disabled by losing these scientists. One could make the case that a similar sort of scenario should exist today, that we should have a second operation paperclip. And perhaps it should be a continuing process rather than necessarily kind of this laissez-faire process that we have today, where we identify some of the top industries and the top Scientists and the top domains and go after those scientists proactively with government action, government support in partnership with private industry. If you look at papers being published across mainstream scientific journals, the majority of papers today across nearly every scientific domain are being published out of China. And this ranges from physics to chemistry to material science to biotech. And there’s a real case to be made that perhaps those scientists would be better off and America would be better off if they were doing their research pioneering here rather than there. So I think that there’s a very good strategic case to be made that perhaps like a more directed, high energy, high effort kind of operation paperclip be undertaken again around the world. The H1B program, I do agree, has been heavily abused as a way of kind of compensation arbitrage. And, you know, if you find a highly qualified, excellent talent, as we all know, for a high skilled laborer in engineering or science today, that person, if you amortize the H-1B over Seven years at 100K, that application fee, that’s 15K a year, call it. That certainly seems worth it for the right sort of talent. And it forces the question about can this person be found in the United States or not, the alternative would be to force a higher salary range, such that you as a company are now basically Being forced to pay a higher salary, which means you have to justify that this person is worth it to bring them in from ex US and you can’t find the talent locally. I’ll tell you a program where we do this where it doesn’t work in the US is called the H-2A program. This is the immigrant farm worker program that we use for temporary labor on farms. And the way that program is set up today is you have to pay the farm worker that comes in on an H2A, some amount over minimum wage. And the amount that you have to pay over minimum wage is a function of the average wage in that state across all industry. In the case of Florida, they’re paying $5 to $10 over minimum wage for farm workers, and they cannot get any Americans to work on the farm. And they’re being forced to pay $5 to $10 overage. And by the way, these farmers and these farm businesses are being heavily subsidized by the government. One way to think about the ridiculousness of what’s going on is the US taxpayer is paying a premium salary to foreign workers. What we should be doing is enabling when there’s no workers available in the US, we should be enabling a free flow of labor, but only in the case where there’s no workers available in the US. (Time 0:14:00)
  • Autism As Multiple Biological Pathways
    • Autism may be a set of phenotypes with multiple biological pathways rather than a single cause.
    • David Friedberg highlights cumulative environmental exposures and a possible folate‑receptor autoimmune pathway. Transcript: Jason Calacanis Let’s talk about autism and the press conference that happened this week with Bobby Kennedy and President Trump. Here is the chart. Autism has increased dramatically over the years. There’s a big debate of what’s causing this, and there’s obviously correlations. There’s causations. There’s the testing of this, and maybe we’re just testing a little bit too loosely around this, but we went from one in 10,000 in 1970 to one in 1,000 in 1995 to one in 32 in 2022. The press conference, Freeburg, was a little spicy and unique, performative maybe, were some of the criticisms, but there’s a real issue here. And why don’t you take us through it and educate us so we can kind of get to reality? Because the press is having a field day with us, obviously, on both sides. David Friedberg I think autism, just like Alzheimer’s, there may be several underlying conditions that lead to what we would call the phenotype of autism. That is, what we all observe is autism. You know, it’s considered a spectrum disorder. There’s many different variations of it. There may actually be many different underlying conditions or underlying drivers, biological drivers, that are causing it. One of the drivers that came up during the press conference and in the subsequent interviews that Marty McCary, head head of the FDA, has done is that they’ve identified and shared papers That have been out for some time that there is a receptor that absorbs folate, a type of vitamin B, and that that folate receptor may be attacked by the immune system. And as a result, you can’t really uptake vitamin B. And so those cells dysfunction. And when those cells are dysfunctional, you end up having what looks like what we call autism. And so one of the things that they announced is they’re going to work on getting the label updated for leucovorin, which will resolve for many people the folate receptor issue. The other thing they brought up is a paper that was done by Andrea Baccarelli, who’s dean of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. This paper is a bit old, where he took several studies and analyzed them and showed that across 46 studies, nine of them showed no association with acetaminophen, the main active ingredient, Tylenol. Four showed a negative association, meaning it was actually protective and good for the fetus. And 27 had a slightly positive association, which means that it was having some contributory effect to both ADHD and autism spectrum disorder when women would take acetaminophen While pregnant. And Nick, if you want to just pull up that image from the paper, this is the original paper that was published by Baccarelli. So again, he didn’t do any primary research, he didn’t actually go and study patients. He took the data from 46 other studies, and then he added it all together to run this kind of macro analysis. And you can see here that he showed some risk, there’s no specific way to quantify that risk. But there’s some increased risk of having attention deficit hyperactivity, or autism as a result of taking acetaminophen while pregnant. Now, I think autism, again, one of the underlyings might be this autoimmune condition associated with the folate receptor. What causes autoimmunity is a whole nother conversation. And we can get into the vaccine stuff if you guys want to, because there’s obviously a lot of conversations going on right now about the immune system being primed to have kind of an auto Antibody response. But there may be other contributing to it. So I think it’s pretty clear that our modern world, in the last couple of decades, there’s a cumulative effect of environmental exposures that children are getting, whether it’s microplastics, Whether it’s chemicals in the food, whether it’s just the environmental exposure in the air related to small molecules, whether it’s related to other things we’re putting in our body. Every one of these things, the way to think about it is maybe if it has a positive effect, it might increase your chance of autism by 0.05%. And then another thing might increase your chance by 0.07%, and so on and so forth. (Time 0:25:30)
  • Tylenol Link Is Statistical, Not Deterministic
    • Meta‑analysis found mixed evidence linking prenatal acetaminophen to ADHD/autism risk across 46 studies.
    • The association is statistical, dose‑responsive, and not deterministic for individual outcomes. Transcript: David Friedberg Chan School of Public Health. This paper is a bit old, where he took several studies and analyzed them and showed that across 46 studies, nine of them showed no association with acetaminophen, the main active ingredient, Tylenol. Four showed a negative association, meaning it was actually protective and good for the fetus. And 27 had a slightly positive association, which means that it was having some contributory effect to both ADHD and autism spectrum disorder when women would take acetaminophen While pregnant. And Nick, if you want to just pull up that image from the paper, this is the original paper that was published by Baccarelli. So again, he didn’t do any primary research, he didn’t actually go and study patients. He took the data from 46 other studies, and then he added it all together to run this kind of macro analysis. And you can see here that he showed some risk, there’s no specific way to quantify that risk. But there’s some increased risk of having attention deficit hyperactivity, or autism as a result of taking acetaminophen while pregnant. Now, I think autism, again, one of the underlyings might be this autoimmune condition associated with the folate receptor. (Time 0:27:30)
  • Don’t Medicate For Political Statements
    • Avoid public, performative medication stunts that could unintentionally raise risk.
    • Chamath urges pregnant women to consult doctors rather than follow political displays. Transcript: David Friedberg And that’s what the paper shows. Let me take the other side of this. Chamath Palihapitiya Here’s what we know. We know for sure that there is this potential autoimmune issue that you, as the mother, can express as an antibody. There’s an antibody test for it. We also know that the child can be tested for it. So at a minimum, we’re now at a point where we can create a very thorough, well-funded study to get to the core of this issue. Separately, to the extent that you do test positive, there will be some doctors and some parents that may decide to take LeucoVarin prophylactically and then also to administer it To the child before it’s clear whether they do or do not have autism. I have several friends who have kids on the spectrum. I talked to them about lucovarin. What they say is that when you have extreme autism, the drug is very effective. But when you have kids that are more sort of mild on the spectrum, then there’s a lot of benefit from behavioral modifications and behavioral training and that it’s not clear how effective That drug is. But in one specific case, one of my friends is considering it for their child. Here’s the point, though. I think the point is that we need to test for this. And I think that some combination of governments and industry should come together. Beyond that, the point that I want to make, though, is and I think, Freeberg, I don’t think you’re adding to the conversation when you say that there’s no determinism, because on the Off chance that there is, I would say that we don’t know yet. When you see women taking acetaminophen in this performative art way, basically to try to pwn Donald Trump, and it all over TikTok and it’s all over X, I just think it’s reckless. And I think it solves nothing. You’re supposed to go talk to your doctor about it in all weather conditions anyways. But then when you transform it into some sort of like protest vote without really knowing, I think is really dumb. (Time 0:32:58)
  • Test And Trial Targeted Autism Interventions
    • Test for folate‑receptor autoantibodies where indicated and fund longitudinal studies to clarify causation.
    • Use targeted treatments like leucovorin when tests indicate dysfunction and study outcomes rigorously. Transcript: David Friedberg And this test, by the way, I’ll say this folate receptor anti auto antibody, there has been a test available, I think, since 2012. This has been around for some time. Chamath Palihapitiya In fact, cancer patients take this test, of course. David Friedberg Yeah. And there was a there was a paper published on this. I’m trying to find this paper. I’m not sure how much follow up there’s been. This is a SUNY paper, where these guys went and found folks that were scored very high on the autism spectrum disorder diagnostic test and they found a high prevalence over 70% had this Folate receptor autoantibody. This was one paper so I want to I don’t want to give it like a ton of credence. There’s a lot of follow up that’s happened since then and I’m not an expert in this space but I did kind of do some research on what the history is of this. And so this is a very well known kind of correlative effect. And it could be a very big contributor. But obviously, like no one should feel like, hey, if I don’t have auto antibodies, then my kid is fine. That doesn’t necessarily mean the case. Again, there may be several paths to autism. And the thing about acetaminophen, just like, hey, have a drink or smoke a cigarette, the more you do, the higher the risk. This is the case with with anything we put in our body. (Time 0:35:01)
  • Kimmel’s Return Met With Affiliate Pushback
    • ABC resumed Jimmy Kimmel but many Sinclair affiliates refused to air his return, reducing marketplace coverage.
    • The hosts debated whether Kimmel’s on‑air remarks constituted a true apology versus explanation. Transcript: Jason Calacanis So this is This Week in Censorship. So much to talk about. First story up, Jimmy Kimmel is back on the air. Earlier this week, Disney announced that ABC would resume airing Kimmel’s show. And I think that was Tuesday night. Disney explained why they suspended Kimmel last week to avoid further inflaming a tense situation an emotional moment for our country. And they call Kimmel’s comments ill-timed and thus insensitive. He came back and had a massive amount of reach. But Nexar and Sinclair’s affiliates, they decided to not air it. And that was 60% of the market. So interesting, Polymarket had Jimmy Kimmel canceled by September 30th. It was nearly 80% after Kimmel was suspended last week, but that’s plummeted to 1% since then. It was quite emotional. I’m guessing everybody watched it. I did not watch it. Oh, you didn’t watch it. Okay, we’ll play a clip here. You should watch what he said. Yeah, it was incredibly heartfelt and deft in terms of its execution. It was sincere. And here it is. David Sacks I don’t think what I have to say is going to make much of a difference. If you like me, you like me. If you don’t, you don’t. I have no illusions about changing anyone’s mind. But I do want to make something clear because it’s important to me as a human. And that is, you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man. I don’t I don’t think there’s anything funny about it. I posted a message on Instagram on the day he was killed, sending love to his family and asking for compassion. And I meant it. I still do. Nor was it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions of what it was obviously a deeply disturbed individual. That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make. But I understand that to some that felt either ill-timed or unclear or maybe both. And for those who think I did point a finger, I get why you’re upset. If the situation was reversed, there’s a good chance I’d have felt the same way. I have many friends and family members on the other side who I love and remain close to, even though we don’t agree on politics at all. I don’t think the murderer who shot Charlie Kirk represents anyone. This was a sick person who believed violence was a solution, and it isn’t. Ever. Jason Calacanis Yeah, and he references later in this apology of sorts. I think it was pretty clear he was apologizing. His own faith, his Christianity, and just how beautiful it was that the widow of Charlie Kerr had forgiven the shooter. And he got broken up about that as well. He then went on to do a bunch of jokes and have a normal show. It was massive ratings. Obviously, everybody was tuned into it. (Time 0:43:46)
  • Apology Without Specific Admission Falls Short
    • Critics say Kimmel apologized emotionally but failed to explicitly retract a false claim linking the shooter to MAGA.
    • David Sacks warns lack of specific admission prevented full reconciliation and mirror‑side self‑reflection. Transcript: David Sacks He didn’t apologize and he didn’t say what he had done wrong. I guess what he said is that I didn’t mean to make light of the situation. It wasn’t my intent. It wasn’t his intent. Jason Calacanis It wasn’t his intent. It was an explanation more than an apology? Okay. David Sacks Nobody was accusing him of making light of the murder. What he did and what people were upset about is that he lied and said that the shooter was MAGA. And he did not hit the nail on the head in terms of addressing that. And he’s being called out for that. Now, look, I still think that his statement there, let’s call it an apology, was constructive and positive because at least he is showing empathy towards the other side. He obviously feels bad for Erica Kirk and for Charlie Kirk. And the current overheated political environment, just expressing empathy for the other side is a positive statement. And I think he definitely brought the temperature down. And I think later in the statement, he also makes an important point about, he says, you know, just selfishly, I have threats on me. And what he’s basically saying is, look, we don’t want to get into a civil war here. We don’t want to get into a cycle of tit for tat retaliation. Let’s not play Hatfields and McCoys. This is my words. He didn’t say this, but that was sort of the intimation of what he was saying. And I think that is a good thing to say. I mean, no one here should want a civil war and this thing can go off the rails really badly. So look, I think that his statements were positive and welcome and they showed empathy for the other side, but he did not fess up to what he really did wrong here, which was to claim that The shooter was MAGA. That was a thing that was deeply offensive. And hold on. And the reason why he did that is he was not the only one doing it. In the early days of this shooting, of this assassination, it was a talking point on the left that the shooter could be right wing. And the reason why people on the left were saying that is it was exculpatory. It was basically to put the blame on the other side instead of looking in the mirror and hopping to the fact that there is this rise of left-wing political violence and assassination Culture. As we demonstrated on the pod last week, by looking at all the data and all the numbers, there really is this poisonous ideology that is on the left. And yes, there’s some of it on the right, but way more of it on the left, that political violence can be used to solve problems. And the left really does need to look in the mirror and rid itself of that ideology. And by not admitting that this assassin was motivated by that ideology, they are ignoring that opportunity for self-reflection and for progress. Chamath Palihapitiya That last part is important. I think the point is that when you say that somebody is mentally deranged, what most normal people do is then say, oh, it was an aberration, it was an outlier. And I think that that is a dangerous way to try to sweep under the rug what is something that’s more virulent and is increasingly acceptable in society. David Sacks This guy might have been crazy in the sense that he was willing to use murder to achieve his objectives. I think we can all say on some level, that’s crazy. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t animated by ideology that lots of people believe. And I think the proof of this was the celebratory reaction to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. You saw it on TikTok. You saw it on Blue Sky. You saw it on corners of social media. You definitely saw it on Reddit, where you had thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk and basically buying into this idea of political Violence as the solution to their problem and to the idea that it was acceptable to use violence against people they hated. And so, again, this is the problem with the random nut theory, is that it really ignores all the evidence we have about the larger reaction to the Charlie Kirk assassination. And this is the thing that the left really doesn’t want to confront. It does not want to look in the mirror here and say that we have a problem on the left with this assassination culture. And we talked about this last week. And if you look at polling, they just did polling around this. And there’s still millions of people on the left who believe that the shooter was MAGA. And Jimmy Kimmel helped foster that belief with this disinformation that he put out there. And he really should have hit the nail on the head in terms of saying that he got that wrong, that it was wrong to say that. And he could have been a little bit clearer about that. I’m not dismissing the positive things he said, because I do think it was good for him to show that. I mean, I’m going to give him credit for getting emotional. I know a lot of people on the right think that it wasn’t sincere. I think that it probably was sincere. I’m going to give him credit for that. (Time 0:46:53)
  • LLMs Improve With Symbolic Planning
    • MIT research shows instruction tuning with symbolic planning dramatically improves LLM planning accuracy.
    • Teaching explicit state‑action plans produced up to 94% accuracy and large gains on chain‑of‑thought tasks. Transcript: David Friedberg Sax, I don’t know if you saw, but there were two papers that were published this week, each of which on their own, I would say were pretty kind of important. I’ll highlight the first one. And Nick, if you could just pull this first one up, this is the MIT paper. So this paper is called Teaching LLMs to Plan. And effectively, what this team did, and again, they were out of MIT in collaboration with a scientist at Microsoft AI in Mountain View. They basically created an instruction tuning framework that teaches LLMs to do symbolic planning, which basically means that the LLMs think about step by step or chain of thought In a smarter way by making them generate explicit state action state chains, and then they trained that model by giving them feedback with an external plan validator, which is effectively Going to be a human or a software tool that says, did this series of steps make sense to do the thing you’re trying to do? If not, here’s what you did wrong, here’s what you should have done better. And they were able to achieve planning accuracy of up to 94% on some standardized benchmarks that are used for chain of thought reasoning and planning. Using LLMs, this is a 66% absolute improvement over baseline models. And so this is pretty substantial. They took LLAMA three, and they were able to increase the performance from 1% to 64%. The outcome of this basically is that this sort of a system can be used to train LLMs to do better reasoning and better chain of thought in such a dramatic way that LLMs will look like they Are starting to reason. And so by training them effectively on the steps in planning on how to reason, the LLMs get better at looking like they’re doing reasoning using this kind of symbolic planning method That they then built a tuning framework around. That sounded a little bit complicated, but I think ultimately what it translates to is they figured out a method to get AI to act in a more reasoned way in developing step-by plans and Execute against those plans. And the results and the benchmarks are incredible. (Time 0:59:31)
  • Architectural Gains Could Enable Edge AI
    • A German paper proposes an attention/memory approach that could cut inference energy massively and enable edge AI.
    • Reported speed and energy improvements suggest large shifts toward local, edge‑deployed models if reproducible. Transcript: David Friedberg The other one, and Nick, maybe you can pull this one up. So this one’s really impressive. Sax, this comes from a team in Germany. This paper was published in the journal Nature Computational Science. These folks took a GPU. And for each token, typically, you’ll have the entire key value chain transferred from high bandwidth memory to cache memory. So this means that you’re moving a lot of data between one type of memory and another type of memory. And what they were able to do is they were actually able to reduce the physical memory size that’s needed to run the attention window. As a result, the energy and the total token cost to run inference went down significantly. I’m trying to simplify this down as best I can, but what matters is the end data that they provided. Their architecture led to a speed up of 7,000x compared to the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, 300x compared with NVIDIA RTX 4090, and then 100x compared to the NVIDIA H100. And the energy was reduced by 40,000x compared to Jetson Nano, 90,000x compared to RTX 4090, and a 70,000x energy reduction for the same outcome over an H100. So I think that this mechanism, if it scales, this new kind of technique can have a pretty dramatic effect on the energy consumption needed to run AI. And importantly, because you need far less memory, you can actually move a lot of AI inference to the edge of the network, meaning you could put, for example, a very high powered LLM model That could be run in a robot, or in a piece of equipment or in a computer or on your phone, that historically, you’d need to run in a data center, because you needed a very high powered GPU Chip stack. And so this architecture, I think, could be one of these big architectural breakthroughs. We’ve spoken with Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, and Sundar, Demis about the big architectural breakthroughs that are coming in AI that could ultimately lead to many orders of magnitude Reduction in the energy cost needed to run inference and to run AI models. Again, if the scales, then all of our assumptions about the data center, about the energy start to kind of be thought about under this new kind of architectural framework, which might Actually result in much, much lower need states. We’ll see. But it was a really, I think, important paper. And folks are going to look up this paper and say, this could be a pivot point in how we think about the energy and infrastructure needs to support AI. (Time 1:03:16)
  • Muted Swear Words Triggered YouTube Restriction
    • YouTube restricted All‑In summit videos because muted curse words still appeared in transcripts.
    • David Friedberg worked with YouTube to restore videos and will return to bleeping to avoid future restrictions. Transcript: David Sacks Hey, Freeberg, what exactly happened with YouTube? Do you have an update on what happened with our episodes from All in Summit that appeared to be shadow banned? Yeah, tell us what happened there. David Friedberg Okay, so thank you to the folks at YouTube. They actually worked all weekend to help us figure out what happened. And there was nothing nefarious. There was no shadow banning going on. What happened was you guys may recall a couple of months ago, we stopped bleeping out curse words in our episodes and we muted them instead. And when we muted them, the YouTube algorithm still thought that we were saying the curse word quietly and it still showed up in the YouTube transcript. When you have a curse word in a video, YouTube marks it as restricted. So it’s kind of not age appropriate. And so that’s why it was getting the restricted mark. When we went back, the episodes that did get restricted all had a curse word in them. And we understand clearly what happened. So going forward, we are going to use the bleeping again instead of just muting. It was very benign, not nefarious. YouTube did a great job supporting us. We went back and fixed all the old episodes. They’re all out of restricted mode. And we started reposting all of our summit videos again. (Time 1:09:01)
  • Past Censorship Raises Future Risks
    • YouTube and other platforms admitted to censoring content during the COVID era under government pressure.
    • That admission tightened public scrutiny and raises risks for new laws that could institutionalize censorship. Transcript: David Sacks It. And speaking of YouTube, there was a really important report out this week, where I think we kind of knew this, but YouTube acknowledged that during the Biden administration, I think This was like roughly 2019 to 2022, that timeframe that they censored, I think something like a million videos at the behest of the Biden administration. I guess that would have started in 2021. And they admitted that they were pressured by the administration. Zuckerberg had said the same thing about Meta, and the Twitter files informed us about the same thing. But now YouTube has finally acknowledged that. And there’s a big release on that. David Friedberg I’ll tell you my view on this. I think that the censorship that happened during that era is very important to have happened, because it has brought a light to it in a way that now there’s a hypersensitivity to it not Happening again. And I actually think that that’s very good. So the fact that it happened has now created a real sense that going forward, the policy limits, the boundaries are now more clear than they ever were. It’s not just about the Trump admin, which I think a lot of mainstream media tries to make it about, but it really is about the importance of free speech and censorship and who decides What’s objective truth or not. I mean, going back to all of the COVID era discussions, not allowing people to have discussions clearly is a problem. And speaking of this topic, I don’t know if you saw this, but there is this kind of hate speech bill that passed out of the Assembly and the Senate in California that’s now on Gavin Newsom’s Desk to sign, which basically would fine social networks that allow content to show up on their social network that the state of California deems to be hate speech. So whatever language or terms the state of California calls hate speech, and you could see how this could become a very slippery slope very fast, they can now fine a social media company Millions of dollars, which in and of itself could actually propagate a whole new censorship regime, where people that are using certain terms that in that era are considered bad terms Or hate speech terms, they’re afraid that they don’t want to get fined tens of millions of dollars. So they block all that content. And I do think that if this gets signed by Governor Newsom, it could trigger a whole new kind of censorship battle in the months and years ahead. We’ll see. David Sacks Well, I think that’s exactly right. I think the bill you’re referring to is SB 771. And it is an EU suppression of quote-unquote hate speech on social networks. The problem is that there is no definition of hate speech. That’s not a category that exists. It’s just whatever the people in power say it is. That’s right. And so there is no constitutional exception for hate speech under the First Amendment. David Friedberg They reference in the bill, the California bill, because I read it, civil rights statutes, which speak to certain types of discrimination, certain types of hate speech. But to your point, those words are not defined. (Time 1:12:52)
  • Require Clarity Before Regulating Speech
    • Oppose vaguely defined ‘hate speech’ mandates because they enable broad administrative penalties and overblocking.
    • Demand precise legal definitions and creator transparency dashboards before conceding enforcement power to regulators. Transcript: David Sacks I think that’s exactly right. I think the bill you’re referring to is SB 771. And it is an EU suppression of quote-unquote hate speech on social networks. The problem is that there is no definition of hate speech. That’s not a category that exists. It’s just whatever the people in power say it is. That’s right. And so there is no constitutional exception for hate speech under the First Amendment. David Friedberg They reference in the bill, the California bill, because I read it, civil rights statutes, which speak to certain types of discrimination, certain types of hate speech. But to your point, those words are not defined. And so what ends up happening is you could say, well, using that word is discriminatory to this group in some way, or using that word is hateful because it offends another group. And suddenly you start to blur the line between what the average person might call hate speech and what perhaps some people in an administrative body are calling hate speech. And suddenly it becomes more like, hey, is this really a civil rights violation? Or is it just offensive content? And it’s a very slippery slope that offensive content suddenly can get wrapped up and be called hate speech. And then the government starts to tell us all what we are and aren’t allowed to say. And we’re obviously seeing the repercussions of that in the UK right now where the police are knocking down doors to arrest people for putting stuff on on Twitter. David Sacks The direction I thought you were going in a minute ago was that it sounded like you were saying that it’s good that we’ve learned all these lessons from this COVID period where YouTube Jason Calacanis And Reddit- That’s right. You haven’t even changed my mind. David Sacks Yeah, and I think that’s exactly right. I don’t see any evidence that I’d say, especially the political left, has learned its lesson. You got Gavin Newsom now trying to ban hate speech in California. By the way, he also signed that bill, was it like a year ago, banning parody. Remember that? Parody videos? David Friedberg I do remember that. Yeah. Political AI. It was like political AI videos. Yeah. Yeah. David Sacks Because it was in the wake of a humorous fake advertisement for Kamala Harris. Then you’ve got these folks who on the left are already saying that Sinclair and Nextel need to be punished for not putting Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. So in other words, the same people who were saying a week ago that the Trump administration jawboned ABC Disney, that that was fascism. But if they jawboned Nextel and Sinclair, that Yeah. Democracy. I mean, it’s completely hypocritical. I’m not convinced anyone’s learned a lesson from this. And just to be clear, I don’t think Jimmy Kimmel should be taken off the air or censored or whatever. I’m pretty sure that his show is not going to be back next year because it’s got such low ratings. I don’t think there’s really a need to censor him. It is true that there is a public interest requirement for using public spectrum, but nobody seems to agree anymore on what’s in the public interest. David Friedberg I completely agree with what you said last time. We just got to auction off that spectrum. We don’t need that spectrum. We have the thing called the internet now. And so we no longer need broadcast television. And there shouldn’t be a government regulated broadcast television system where they’re deciding what is and isn’t appropriate content and in the public interest. That just doesn’t make sense for the government to do in a market that’s supposed to fully support free speech. And I agree. I agree. I think the Jimmy Kimmel issue should be up to the people that are spending their money to put Jimmy Kimmel on the air and they can decide what they want to do with, you know, if no one watches It, they’ll take them off. And if people watch it, they’ll keep them on. That’s, that’s their decision. We shouldn’t, you know, I don’t think that it makes sense to quote, cancel or ban someone for saying something that’s offensive. And I think that if you do it on one side, eventually it’ll happen on the other side. But that’s a tried and true point in free speech advocacy, obviously. Yeah. David Sacks I mean, look, you could definitely argue that throughout history, both the right and the left have sought to censor inconvenient speech when they’ve been in power. But again, I just think this is one of those issues where just because both sides have done it throughout history doesn’t mean that in the present day, one side isn’t a lot more guilty Of it than the other. And you see this with whether it’s Scott Wiener and Elizabeth Warren jawboning Sinclair and Nextel to keep Jimmy Kimmel on the air, or whether it’s Gavin Newsom possibly signing this Bill to ban hate speech in California. David Friedberg Well, do you think he’ll sign it? David Sacks I don’t know. David Friedberg If he does not sign it, if he vetoes it, will you give him credit? David Sacks Yeah, for sure. That’d be a good sign. Yeah. David Friedberg Like when he vetoed that AI bill, I thought that was fantastic. And I give him a lot of credit for that. I think he’s, look, he’s not a completely unreasonable person. There’s points when he realizes things have crossed the line. Yeah. Which, by the way, is scary, because then I think about who’s the next governor. You know, these things pass out of the Senate and the Assembly, and he’s the only thing standing in the way. It’s scary. David Sacks Gavin Newsom isn’t even the craziest person on the left. I think we can all agree on that. Yeah. I’m not a fan, but they’re way crazier people. But let’s see, I suspect he will sign it, because I think the left very much likes this sort of thing. You see it in Europe. You saw it in the Twitter files. You see it in these acknowledgments that YouTube has just made. You see it in what Zuckerberg told Rogan about the censorship that Meta was pressured to do. I think there is a clamoring on the part of the left to silence speech that they don’t agree with. And they do call it hate speech. It’s speech they hate. And the right, in a fit of pique, when they’re angry about the assassination of one of their heroes, are they capable of saying that Jimmy Kimmel should be taken off the air? Yeah. But is that something that’s been broadly acted upon on the part of the right? No, it’s not. The left is the one that’s engaged in massive amounts of speech suppression over the last few years. It’s not a both sides problem. So I hope Newsom will veto that bill, but let’s see what happens. David Friedberg I hope he vetoes it. I think it would be an incredible statement if he did. But if he doesn’t, I could see why this creates effectively a free option for him, for the Democrats, for whoever’s in charge with administering California statute, giving themselves Basically a free option on whether or not to enforce it and how to enforce it. It creates a mechanism. (Time 1:15:12)