Welcome to the AI Chat Podcast. I'm your host,
Jaden Schaefer. Every day I cover cutting -edge
AI news and talk with the leaders behind it,
breaking down what it means for your life and
business. I think there's some pros and cons
to this. I actually make AI -generated music,
and I make about $2 ,500 a month from it. So
I want to tell you a little bit about what's
going on with this case. Merendil is signing
a $100 million Google Cloud deal to train self
-improving AI. And Google Maps is turning Ask
Maps, that kind of button that they have in there,
into an agent that orders food. It can book hotels.
It's going to be able to do way more than just
asking Google Maps something with Gemini. AI
moderation is not always perfect, and recently
it has hit Reddit. discord and tumblr on false
positives also a company called naive has just
raised 28 .5 million dollars to let ai agents
spin up and run entire companies i wanted to
do a startup spotlight and they've raised almost
30 million dollars this is an interesting one
on the podcast i talk a lot about different models
that you may not have tried like mistral from
france cohere from canada deep seek from china
and Grok and Perplexity and even Meta's AI, which
just came out with a bunch of new coding features
and a new coding AI. Now, my question to you
is, have you tried all of these different AI
models? Because if you want to, it typically
is going to cost you $20 to get a subscription
to all of those different platforms. And I will
be honest, some of those models are better at
answering specific types of questions than others.
For a lot of what I do, I use Anthropic and I
use OpenAI and I use Google as some of my main
powerhouses, but I use some of the other models
for different tasks. DeepSeek, honestly, for
example, is something that can get things done
very fast and very cheaply if you run out of
your token credits. I would love for you to check
out all of those different models and try them
all and compare them all side by side for your
next project or your next question, just to see
what the results are. If you want to try that,
go check out AIbox .ai, my own startup, where
you can test over 80 different AI models. And
you can also do a bunch of different image, audio,
and video models as well. You can compare all
of the results. side by side and pick what your
favorite one is. If you're working on a new ad
or you need to create a bunch of new Facebook
ads, for example, you can get different video
models to create the same prompt. And I've tried
this and been pretty impressed with different
things like Sora versus Google VO3. And you can
actually run those different ads side by side
against each other in Facebook to see which one
converts the best, but you can also see them
side by side. So if you want to go check it out,
it is $8 and 99 cents to get started on AI box.
It's super cheap and you get access. to over
80 different AI models. I'm going to leave a
link in the description to go try it out. Suno
is now rolling out the new watermarking and they're
doing audio fingerprints for their AI music generator.
This is something that I use all the time. I
love Suno. I've made tons of music there and
actually make $2 ,500 a month from my music catalog.
A ton of it is either AI generated or it's just
AI empowered. So I do a lot of meditation music
is like my niche. I started it in college. And
so I'll still drop albums on there every once
in a while on the weekends. And in order to do
that, I actually just use Suno. to generate the
meditation music in the background. And it's
my voice. I'm talking over top of it. But yeah,
from that, I still make $2 ,500 to $3 ,000 a
month, super, super passively. And it's kind
of a fun side project. But something that is
happening is that a lot of different lawsuits
have been leveled against Suno. And to be fair,
I think they did scrape out a ton of different
people's music that wasn't licensed properly.
Now they're getting sued. I think they made a
settlement with Warm Music Group. And the other
part of this whole settlement is the goal to
try to stop low quality AI songs from flooding
Spotify and Apple Music without disclosure. So
without people knowing that they're AI generated.
Deezer apparently has a tool that can detect
AI generated music and it's removing any AI generated
music from its platform that doesn't get a certain
threshold of streams. So if it's a popular song,
they leave it. But if it's an AI generated song
that has no streams, a bunch of people are just...
posting it, they're actually cleaning it off
the platform, they just don't want it on there.
So in this deal, and what soon is rolling out
right now, downloads are soon going to be restricted
to paying customers, there's going to be a monthly
cap on how many you can download. So I think
people were downloading like 1000s in a month.
And that was causing you know, issues when you
try to upload 1000s a month to Spotify, it was,
you know, very spammy. So there's a monthly cap.
And if I'm being honest, to me, I don't think
this is gonna this doesn't really bother me,
I don't make an insane volume of music. And I
think it tends to be better when you make an
AI generated song, which I'm not against, by
the way, if you make AI generated music, I think
spending a lot of time doing multiple regenerations,
mixing your different bits of the song together,
doing covers of something. So like a lot of times,
I've done stuff where I'll play something, I'll
upload the file of me playing, maybe I'm not
incredibly good pianist, but I might play a little
melody, or I had my son, he made an entire guitar
album. or he he plucked some little tunes on
a ukulele and had it turn into like this relaxing
guitar album that he gets a bunch of streams
from. So I think that's like a great way to go.
But you don't need to do crazy volumes for stuff
like that. So when they're putting this kind
of monthly download cap under it, I'm not super
worried about that. That is all in the terms
of this lawsuit that Suno has settled with Warner.
This all kind of they made this deal last year
and it's starting to roll out now. Udio has another
settlement with Warner Music Group, and they
are ending downloads entirely, which basically
makes Suno's approach, keeping downloads but
gated behind a subscription, a much better outcome
for its business. With Udio, you can't even download
your music anymore. So Suno, you can continue
to use it for generating music. I'm happy that's
the platform I've invested in the most. And then
they're both doing watermarking, which basically
lets distributors like Spotify or Apple track
which ones are AI. generated when they're actually
uploaded right now, there's a there's like a
little personal opt in. So when I'm uploading
stuff, it's like, is this partially AI generated,
completely AI generated, or no AI generation
at all, and you have like a disclosure on there.
And it's kind of voluntary, but you know, there's
nothing that enforces that no one's actually
able to tell. And so this, they're actually going
to be able to do that. I think streaming platforms
right now have started to purge AI tracks that
are just trying to get farmed royalties, there's
a lot of spam and stuff on there. But to be fair,
I think you do Spam in, you know, even even before
all of this came out, the old tactic that the
spammers would do is they would just go find
like random obscure YouTube channels that would
publish good music. Right. Maybe you're like
not very famous on YouTube. They would rip your
stuff and they would upload it like like their
own. It was just on YouTube. It wasn't already.
They try to find something that wasn't already
on like music platforms. And then they would,
you know, you could do there's all sorts of spam
where they would like make it the same name as
an artist that actually exists. or they would
put like keyword stuffing in the title. Like
there's a whole bunch of stuff that those people
would do and try to release thousands of songs
that way. So I don't think like. the spam element
of it and the AI gets a little bad rep for it.
But the spammers are going to spam and they've
been spamming for a long time. Maybe this made
it a little bit easier. But at the end of the
day, I think we also need separate like spam
control tools. And I think the platforms have
been working on that and are working on that.
So hopefully that will continue. Merendil is
a startup that was founded by some. alumni from
Anthropic. They just signed a $100 million, I
actually think it's even more than that, but
about $100 million deal with Google Cloud to
train self -improving AI systems. This deal they
put together is about half the startup's entire
seed funding. So I think they were able to get
$200 million. They gave $100 million of that
straight to Google. And it is a huge bet on compute
hardware to build AI that can iterate, improve
itself, and automate research. Specifically,
think they're going to be working on medicine
and biology. Their software has a bunch of different
stages of AI self -improvement, and it's going
to be basically routing those to whatever chip
works best. So Google's TPUs or NVIDIA's GPUs,
it's going to let the startup kind of optimize
the costs and also potentially resell the orchestration
layer to customers. It's something they're going
to be able to make money from. The co -founders
are Benham Neshaber and Harsh Mehta. Both of
them came from Anthropic, but they're not the
only ones working. on this, their two main competitors
are going to be recursive superintelligence and
recursive intelligence. Both of them are basically
doing the identical thing, this kind of self
-improvement approach. They closed their startup
round in late June at a $1 billion valuation.
So this $100 million compute deal is very aggressive
spending for a company that's brand new. They
just closed a seed round to give half the money
away. Their bet, I think, is showing that recursive
self -improvement is they're trying to move this
from just being this kind of research idea. to
an actual engineering problem and they think
that the real moat is controlling the software
that the orchestration and orchestrating all
of this between expensive hardware and it's probably
not compute that's what they're saying so i'm
curious to see where this goes Google Maps Ask
Maps Assistant can now order food, book hotels,
and buy event tickets directly in the app. I
love this. I think that Google obviously has
some incredible assets and adding AI in a really
thoughtful way makes them much more useful. I've
been excited by how they've added AI into a lot
of the different platforms and tools. I think
they can do better in others, but with Maps in
particular, it's kind of cool because, I mean,
you have so many different businesses on Google
Maps, you know, of like having like hotels and
restaurants and everything, Google Maps really
could turn into like an Airbnb, for example,
where you're like, you're searching how to get
to a certain city. And then all of a sudden,
it's like, well, here are all of the hotels in
that city, and you can go book it there directly.
They're already kind of competing with Expedia,
or you can compete with Expedia in a way like
I've, I've searched and found, you know, depending
on if I'm just in a certain geographic location,
like what's the closest hotels around me, I've
seen them on Google before, or sometimes I'll
Look them up on Expedia and then go look up Google
for different reviews or different things. So
I think they have an incredible asset there.
And now you're actually going to be able to use
their assistant, their Ask Maps, to go and book
all of this stuff. And it's not just hotels.
It's also events. It's also tickets and food
and all this other stuff. Really, really cool.
You won't have to leave the actual Google Maps
website. It also is able to read your Gmail and
your calendar to personalize suggestions. It
can recommend restaurants near your hotel or
it can tell you when. your flight landing time
is. So when you're actually going to book in
a hotel, for example, it can put in the correct
time or give you a good check in time. Food orders
are all going to run through Square, Toast and
Uber Eats. So it's not like, you know, I heard
a lot of people like when they first heard the
students were like, oh, my gosh, is it going
to go kill Uber Eats? I think they do a lot of
partnerships. Now, those partnerships, of course,
are subject to them just deciding one day they
don't want to do that particular partnership.
But I think we can be pretty confident for antitrust
reasons that probably won't happen. I remember
when Google Flights came out, a lot of people
were concerned. And to this day, if you go search
Google Flights, you're still going to get recommendations
from a ton of different travel sites below. So
it didn't completely kill that entire industry.
Personal intelligence, which is the Gmail and
calendar feature, is going to ship by default.
It's going to avoid a lot of the friction that
apps have about sharing your personal data or,
you know, going and syncing an MCP or syncing
some sort of API or connection to Google or Gmail
or your calendar. It's all built straight in.
Ask Maps now remembers all of your past conversations.
So if you ask, you know, what activities did
you suggest for my Seattle trip? It's going to
remember whatever you're talking to it about
in the past on Gemini, and it's going to pull.
that up. Maps right now, I think is really shifting
from kind of just a navigation tool that we've
all used for the last number of years into a
transaction engine, they're trying to actually
get you to make transactions on there. And of
course, they can take a little piece of the pie,
they can charge for ads, or they can charge transaction
fees. So this is something that makes a lot of
sense for them. Right now, social media platforms
are aggressively using AI to catch spam and other
things. And they're also getting real results
caught up in this. So some of this wrongful banning,
you could say, is getting thousands of innocent
users. There's also like no way to appeal this
before your account gets completely deleted.
Discord alone locked out 8 ,400 accounts over
the summer because its AI accidentally mistook
chess boards for illegal content, which is a
problem. And Reddit's AI tools removed like...
over 10 year old posts from our ask historians,
the Reddit thread, our ask historians, because
it said that they were linked to a historical
photo site, um, that the system had flagged as
spam. So it's like, look, you you're linking
out to this, or I don't even think it was all
the posts, but sometimes like the comments on
it, they're all linking out to a bunch of historical
photo sites. They review that as spam. And then
they go and delete all of the threads. Some of
these are 10 years old, right? And they're like,
Oh no, these are AI generated threads. And of
course it's old thread. So it's it is not the
case. discords AI was designed to flag content
for human review, there was this kind of bug
in there, I guess, and it let it bypass humans
entirely. And it just auto banned a ton of users.
Some of them were locked out for weeks, which
if it's a tool that you use a lot, this is obviously
not very fun. And it's actually interesting discord
is a platform that my company AI box we use kind
of like instead of slack, we use discord for
all of our developers. And we have like a community
over there. And we do a lot of different stuff
on discord, I can only imagine and like we got
to pay premium, right to run our company through
there. So like we pay for it, but I can only
imagine getting banned and locked out for weeks.
I mean, I really just switched to another platform.
So I think this is quite detrimental for some
of those platforms. Reddit reports that their
systems now block about 2 million fake votes
daily and their enforcement is ramping up. They
say it's on hate content. It's been ramped up
over 200%. They use LLMs to spot any spam patterns
that they can find. And of course, I'm all for
blocking spam. So if they're able to get real
spam and real AI generated junk cut out, I'm
thrilled. But I hate the false positives. And
I think a lot of people are, you know, leaves
bad taste in their mouth. if that happens naive
has just raised 28 .5 million dollars to give
ai agents the power to basically set up and run
an entire company so they're going to have a
startup package it'll do business formation it'll
do payments it'll do accounting it'll do cloud
infrastructure all that is in a single api that
their agent can call So developer can basically
give an AI prompt and then it can have this,
their tool spin up like an LLC. It can make a
bank account. It can make emails. It can make
phone numbers. I think this is really cool. And
personally, I love this because it takes out
a lot of the pain and start in making these startups.
And they've been very successful and popular.
They have about 30 ,000 developers that signed
up as customers when in the first few months
after they launched their annual revenue 10x
over six months to the low double digit millions
with just. full time employees, which is absolutely
phenomenal. They have a bunch of customers that
are AI agencies, faceless content creators, and
they have at least one autonomous rental car
business. An example is a TikTok account uses
them to generate and post AI videos of dancing
cats and dogs. The company is building infrastructure
to cut the cost of running AI agents at scale.
So they have sandboxes, they have a model router
that picks the cheapest AI model for whatever
task you're using. They have a memory layer,
they have a serverless runtime. So customers
only pay when agents are actually working. There's
a lot of really cool features in there. And so
yeah, no surprise that they're able to raise
almost $30 million. I think this is an interesting
company, I definitely am going to keep my eye
on naive. Guys, thank you so much for tuning
into the podcast. If you want to try all of the
different AI models, test them side by side,
compare the results for whatever your latest
project is. And also get Claude and any other
AI model to to integrate with all of those. So
like you get image, audio and video generation
inside of Claude with our connection. go try
AI box .ai. My own startup is $8 .99 to get started.
We also have annual plans that are 20 % off of
that and you can scale up your usage. I'll catch
you guys all in the next episode.