Amazon’s “Age of Efficiency,” LLM distribution, AI wearable worries, and more with Elad Gil | E2197
This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 October 2025
⏱️ 84 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today’s show:
*Amazon’s dropping a LOT of employees for AI and robots… are Jason’s darkest predictions coming true?
Legendary investor Elad Gil joins Jason and Alex for the full show today! Together, they’re digging into the Amazon news, looking back at Jason’s predictions from just last month, and theorizing about just how many people will lose their jobs to computers, and what we’re going to do about it. (Is it possible the US hasn’t been massively hit by job displacement so far because those gigs already moved overseas?)
PLUS… Anthropic’s Dario Amodei responds to criticisms from JCal’s bestie David Sacks, Sesame emerges from stealth to work on AI wearables, and where will people in the future interact with their favorite apps? A headset? Phones? Somewhere else? The great debate continues.
Timestamps:
(00:04:04) Our guest is iconic angel investor Elad Gil! What’s he working on…
(00:04:54) Alexandria AI translates public domain books into all commonly spoken languages… Do people actually prefer AI translations?
(00:09:16) Why compute tends to centralize over time… (It’s because of economies of scale!)
(00:09:29) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST
(00:12:49) So are we building TOO MANY datacenters? Will AI apps eventually run on your phone anyway?
(00:16:39) Jason says “The Age of Efficiency is upon us.”
(00:19:24) When companies trade inference for market share
(00:19:27) Sentry - New users get 3 months free of the Business plan (covers 150k errors). Go to http://sentry.io/twist and use code TWIST
(00:21:57) Why one of the main challenges of adopting AI is buy-in and convincing teams to use it.
(00:25:47) Elad’s robotics questions: (1) What % of winners will be incumbents?
(00:27:50) Jason called the Amazon news last month and we have the receipts!
(00:29:36) Pilot - Visit https://www.pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first yea
(00:45:33) Jason says Adobe and Figma should abandon the UK entirely.
(00:45:55) Time for a Polymarket: The sharps say 80% chance Tesla beats their quarterly earnings
(00:51:02) What is Sesame? They just emerged from stealth, they raised $250M, and they’re working on AI wearables.
(00:53:21) Jason has concerns about AI wearables that are always recording… Does Elad share these concerns?
(01:03:17) The crypto industry is now one of the largest purchasers of US government debt… what does that mean? Who owns who?
(01:08:53) Anthropic responded to JCal’s Bestie David Sacks… Is Dario Amodei a doomer? Fearmongering?
(01:19:12) Why Jason thinks AI companies need to self-regulate
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I think in general, my sense is that overall companies that have been considering going public are now sort of opted to do that sort of route. |
| 0:07.5 | Okay. |
| 0:08.1 | I was asking because there's a great note in their S1. |
| 0:10.8 | Jason, you'll love this. |
| 0:11.7 | They were talking about how they're using their AI powered virtual agent chat bot. |
| 0:15.2 | And they say that our ability to control customer support costs over time, even as volume has gone up, has contributed to an increase in gross margin from 60% in fiscal 24 to 68 and fiscal 25 and even more. |
| 0:25.7 | So essentially, they're automating things, Jason, static team size, cost savings, and it's |
| 0:30.7 | helping the company look more profitable. |
| 0:32.1 | So kind of an AI story and a fintech story a lot. |
| 0:34.6 | The age of efficiency is upon us. |
| 0:39.8 | Every unit in every company, |
| 0:46.1 | particularly in startups who are all these resource constrained, they are the ones to first use these tools because their resource constrained. They can save a, they can turn a nickel into a dollar. |
| 0:50.9 | Startups are going to do it. Now, big company is like, well, we're spending $3 to get a dollar in value and we can afford to do it because we're sitting on a bunch of cash. There's no, you know, imperative. There's no existential dread about money at Apple when you're sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in cash. So, yeah, we'll get to it when we get to it. But at a startup, it's quite the opposite. You're seeing that as well, I assume that is startups doing really fascinating stuff with this technology already. |
| 1:16.6 | Yeah, it's super exciting. |
| 1:18.6 | And the ramp on revenue for some of these companies is out of this world, right? |
| 1:22.6 | I mean, going from zero to a few hundred million dollars in revenue in two, three years is something |
| 1:27.7 | that I haven't seen in a very long time. |
| 1:30.0 | And there's multiple companies doing that. |
| 1:31.6 | So I think this is the big C change and you see it in enterprise adoption. |
| 1:35.5 | You see it in all sorts of things. |
| 1:36.5 | The company that I started with Jared and Eric Wu and others that we mentioned earlier |
| 1:40.5 | is basically working on this for big enterprise. |
... |
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