Token Bill Dwarfs CPU Bill | Ben Pouladian on Meta's Muse, Anthropic S1, and Why All Roads Still Lead to NVIDIA
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I'm joined once again by Ben Pouladian of BEP Research. Ben is a semiconductor autodidact enthusiast. He's been an investor in NVIDIA since 2016. Ben, great to see you again. Welcome back.
Glad to be back with you, Jack. Some exciting things definitely have happened in the space and glad to be here to talk about it and chop it up and share some thoughts about AI and the cycle and the new products that are coming out and where it's being applied and who's winning and who might be losing and where I see things are sort of headed.
Ben, you say who might be winning, who might be losing. A month ago in the public markets, it was clear who was the loser. It would be Meta among the worst performance of publicly traded stocks that could be called AI stocks. That has totally reversed upon the release of Muse, which is a customer facing application that can do lots of different things for people and has currently about 3,000,000 monthly active users. How big of a deal is Muse? What's your take on it? What are the consequences here?
Muse is like the first AI assistant or AI app that I actually gave my wife to use. So I've been deep in the weeds on Claude Code, Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Grok, GrokBOD, Gemini. I'm playing with all of them. Whenever the kids needed help with homework, she would call me over and say, can you use your AI? Because I have all the apps. And then finally, said, you know what, honey? I think this Muse, this is something you could use. And she got on it, and she's like, wow. Look. It connects to my Instagram. It's helping me book appointments. Is this what AI really is? I'm like, yeah. It's useful. So
And Ben, I think that it speaks to a broader point, which is maybe about twenty four months ago, we started hearing about agentic AI agents, agents, agents, and kind of the promise was that AI is gonna make your life easier. In the twenty three months since, there's been tremendous development in AI for enterprise applications, particularly coding. It helps me a lot for researching stuff in finance, but it's actually making the hard work easier and allowing you to do more stuff kind of at the frontier, but it actually has had not, you know, actually saved people's times in terms of, booking ap
Yeah. Mean, people are looking for ways to earn their time back. No one wants to click out of fill out a form for a rebate. I use Muse for my daughter's AYSO emails and updates for soccer practices and things like that. There's just a lot of ways that you could use it. I use Muse to sign me up to wait in line for the DMV appointments. The whole idea, I think the premise goes back to what Amazon did with Prime and deliveries, is consumers will pay to get their time back. So if you can figure out ways to use technology to save time on mundane tasks that people hate doing, you can really create a
Ben, at BEP Research, you've been doing a lot of work on how much Meta is charging, and I've got my own sort of forecast that I just asked Claude to rip up of how much they can make from this. Tell us about the work about how much it's gonna cost Meta to serve Muse in terms of the token costs versus the CPU costs?
The CPU cost is not as much as people think it is because they use like a AMD virtual server, and it's provisioned in a way where people aren't constantly using and hitting these CPUs all the time. I think that's kind of the misnomer that people have with CPU usage. It's not as big as what they think it is, but obviously it's going to cost a lot of tokens because with an agentic workflow, the whole point is that the CPU will orchestrate with the
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