BYOC (Bring Your Own Compute)

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Happy Friday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is David Ellison announcing Skydance, the newly merged Warner Bros/Paramount company.

Today’s Lineup

U.S. Chief Design Officer Joe Gebbia at 12:00 PM
Dorm Room Fund Partner Molly Fowler at 12:30 PM
Vanity Fair Reporter Tom Dotan at 12:40 PM
General Intuition Co-Founder & CEO Pim de Witte at 12:50 PM
Anorak Ventures Managing Partner Greg Castle at 1:00 PM

Run of Show

BYOC

Bring your own compute, that was the announcement that stuck out to Jordi on OpenAI DevDay. Obviously there’s going to be a war for the personal AI agent, so everyone is focused on the back and forth between dots, Muse, and Instinct (and whatever Google and others ultimately launch there), but we’ve seen these product niche battles play out before.

Bring your own compute, or “bring your subscription” sticks out because it feels like the beginning of a new economic structure across the AI enabled web. Here’s the high level. A user can sign into an app or service (Notion is the best example here) and authorize the app to run OpenAI model requests against their plan, without managing an API key. On Notion, this means drawing from your ChatGPT allowance instead of Notion credits. It makes a lot of sense for bigger companies that have large inference bills and have had to quickly grapple with product tokenomics, but this will also allow leaner teams to offer inference hungry features with way less friction.

Now, it’s worth clarifying that this feature only brings OpenAI tokens along for the ride, you can just draw dollars down from the OpenAI account. So if you create a book publishing company that both uses tokens to generate text and then prints the books on actual paper, you can’t offset the cost of printing using OpenAI credits, but you could have the user spend their OpenAI credits to run the text generation inference.

I’m hoping this goes further though, I’d like to have a front door to AI that can handle the full billing relationship, so if I need to generate a video, I could just add to my tab and the agent can pick a model like Seedance, find a good inference provider, and then settle the bill directly. Between computer use, MCP, and other agentic tricks, this is very close to workout out of the box without direct integration, but consolidating the billing relationship would still wind up speeding things up. There’s still the complex dynamic of app store economics and risks to getting layered by an aggregator, but the end state is so compelling that you have to imagine many companies jumping on to hover up demand and be the tool of choice for models. It’s actually been nearly 3 years since this idea was first pitched, loosely around “GPTs” at the first DevDay. The real question is how much integration is actually necessary in a world where agents can just sign you up for a service with your credit card directly. We’ll debate it on the show today.

Clip Spotlight: Ecolab CEO Christophe Beck thinks desalination isn’t the solution to water scarcity.

"Desalination is not the solution for the future. It requires a lot of power to get it done and needs to be close to the sea."

"The concept of wastewater is just a wrong concept. Nature has never done it that way."

"There's a much simpler solution, which is to do what nature has always done, in a circular way. It's in a lake, it evaporates, it goes to the clouds, it goes down, it gets filtered, it gets used."

"Whether we like it or not, the water that we're drinking today has been through a human a few hundred days prior."