Traditional shopping often rewards whoever pays the most for ads. Agentic commerce is merit-based and shows products that best match what customers are looking for, says @harleyf. "Agentic commerce is merit-based. It's not based on who is supplying the most amount of ad dollars. It is a much better shopping experience and I still think it could get better." "75% of all AI-attributed purchases in Q2 on Shopify are from outside our top 100 categories. [Agentic shopping] is not, 'I want yoga pants.' It's, 'I want reef-safe sunscreen that doesn't leave a white cast on my black leather.'" "AI-referred sessions land on product pages 2.5x more than simply organic search, where they just go to the general page and they're perusing and browsing. That's not how it works with agentic."

Jordi: I just don't think Google as a company was sufficiently AI pilled enough. They started selling compute. A lot of researchers, I'm sure, were frustrated with that. And that could have led to some of the historical exits. John: If you believe you're in the foothills of the singularity, you will want to scale your compute. If you're seeing traction in the products that you're making, you want to be GPU rich. You don't want to be selling TPUs to other companies. There's gotta be some tension. Jordi: The DeepMind organization has made some real contributions to the space, but has been lagging. They've always felt behind, even though they created so much of the fundamental research that has gone into this entire chapter.

Shopify President @harleyf says small businesses are benefiting the most from agentic commerce. "The merchants that seem to be benefiting the most from agentic commerce are not the big-box stores. It is the long tail of these specialized independent businesses." "On agentic alone, AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores was up 3x, orders were up 3x, and conversion from our Shopify catalog was 2x more than general AI scraping." "The volume in agentic commerce is small relative to the $116B [in Q2 merchant sales], but the trend and growth is real."

FCC Chairman @BrendanCarrFCC on adding new foreign-made humanoid robots and other advanced robotics to the FCC's Covered List: "We need a safe domestic supply chain." "If you look to the future, those advanced robotics are going to be key to our economic and national security." "We're not going to take anything out of your hands right now. You can still buy, quote-unquote, new versions of existing models, but it's a way of signaling to the market that it's time to adjust." "We've done this before with drones. For instance, at the end of last year, we added all foreign-produced drones."

BREAKING: The Ninth Circuit just ruled in favor of Perplexity in a legal battle with Amazon over AI shopping agents. @jbqlaw, Founding Partner of the firm representing Perplexity, gave us the scoop on the show today. He breaks it down:

Cognition President @russelljkaplan says the pace of progress in AI far exceeds enterprise adoption. Even if you froze AI capabilities today, he says, "you'd still have a decade of crazy progress in the enterprise world."

"When the tide goes out, you see who's wearing the swim trunks." Allocate CEO @samirkaji says AI private market valuations are due for a pullback as early as next year. "One of the most dangerous things to say in the investing world is 'This time's different.' Rarely is it completely different..." "The challenge is when you have a new technology of this size and scale — especially moving this fast — the supply and demand for those companies change." "Things do not go right when you plug so much capital with such speed." "I don't know when gravity comes back in the private markets... But I would be willing to bet that within the next few years, we're going to see some kind of pullback."

Intelligence cofounder @grx_xce wants to build an intelligence marketplace for AI capabilities, not just a leaderboard that tells you which model is best. Today, Design Arena users submit creative tasks and have multiple AI models attempt it. The company then collects users' preference about which result was best, which gives Intelligence data about which models perform well for particular kinds of work. Grace thinks that in the future, it will become way easier for companies and individuals to customize models for one narrow purpose and sell access to it on a marketplace. She explains:

Happy Tuesday. On today's show: - @jbqlaw (Quinn Emanuel) - @russelljkaplan (Cognition) - @artlevy (Cognition) - @BrendanCarrFCC (FCC) - @grx_xce (Intelligence) - @Samirkaji (Allocate) - @bignikhilreddy (Kaizen) See you on the stream.

Beau Gaston, founder of @satyressrobots, knows his robotic centaur with a goat's head that can use a chain saw might be a bit scary. That's the point. He says its appearance functions as “caution tape,” warning people to keep a healthy distance from a powerful machine. He argues humanoid robots can be more deceptively dangerous because their familiar appearance hides how much power is underneath: “Imagine if someone hooked 20 drill presses up, series-parallel, all together, and then used basically some arcane knowledge of machine learning to make it balance and walk. This is pretty much what a humanoid robot actually is.” “A humanoid itself looks tame, but in reality, it’s potentially incredibly dangerous to be around.”

.@isaiah_p_taylor says Valar Atomics ultimately wants to use its own low-cost electricity to make steel, aluminum, and other products. "Our long-term vision is to actually have the cheapest energy on earth and to use it for our own things." "We see a vision of the world where steel is just way cheaper than it is today. Aluminum is way cheaper than it is today. The manipulation of matter is a lot cheaper because you have robotics hooked up to AI that's doing matter manipulation and vision. All these things take energy." "It'll be interesting to see where we decide to play in the stack. I think we want to be in the business of turning on thousands of reactors, but there will be a couple of massive markets that we attach to."

Valar Atomics CEO @isaiah_p_taylor says he doesn't need a technical edge to win. "We want this reactor to be as simple as possible. If we could just staple this thing together from Ikea, then this would be a trillion-dollar company much faster." "There are two philosophies that we use in building the reactors. We either try to buy things that are completely off the shelf or we make it ourselves." "We're trying to go 100x faster than the nuclear industry has ever gone before. So if we're plugging too deeply into the existing network, it's not going to work that well. We want to use off-the-shelf things and make things ourselves when we can't buy something off the shelf." "The nuclear industry is full of very smart people. It's full of physics people, PhDs, and people who have spent their life doing complex analysis, and they actually want something that is a little bit complicated. It's an ego thing to design something that is complicated and looks very sophisticated... It's our preference that [our reactors] are so simple that somebody with a nuclear PhD looks at it and says, 'That's like a toy,' and it's great because people make toys in the millions."