Episode 137

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Published on:

31st Jan 2025

DeepSeek, Stargate & The Battle for Open AI - Christopher David

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Christopher David is the Founder & CEO of OpenAgents, an Austin-based applied AI lab building the agentic economy on open protocols. A Bitcoin OG and Nostr contributor, he envisions AI as a decentralized, user-driven technology rather than a tool for corporate control. With over 150+ public builds, he's leading the development of Onyx, a mobile app integrating a Bitcoin Lightning wallet, Nostr client, and decentralized AI marketplaceโ€”pioneering AI agents that transact in Bitcoin micropayments.

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TAKEAWAYS

  • Christopher David believes that open protocols are crucial for the future of AI, advocating for decentralized systems.
  • He emphasizes the importance of Bitcoin as the primary currency for AI agents, arguing that it's the hardest asset available.
  • David views DeepSeek as an ally in the battle for open AI, contrasting them with closed-source entities like OpenAI.
  • The agentic economy will see billions of agents integrated into everyday life, fundamentally altering how value is transacted.
  • David critiques the lobbying efforts of well-funded companies aiming for regulatory capture in the AI space.
  • He envisions a decentralized infrastructure where AI agents can transact seamlessly using Bitcoin and Lightning Network.

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Transcript
Christopher David:

I view Deep Seek as allies.

Christopher David:

I see them as on team Open.

Christopher David:

Some of the best funded companies in the space are actively lobbying for regulatory capture.

Christopher David:

There's a bunch of that during the Biden administration.

Christopher David:

The tail end of the Biden administration where it was clear that like they were going to work with essentially OpenAI and anthropic, essentially, that's it, to.

Christopher David:

To build this kind of de facto government sanctioned monopoly that's been blown wide open by Trump's election.

Christopher David:

But you still have what, day two of Trump's administration.

Christopher David:

Sam Altman, closed AI guy up there talking about building Stargate for OpenAI only.

Christopher David:

What?

Josh Friedeman:

Welcome to the Business Bitcoinization show.

Josh Friedeman:

The show dedicated to helping you enrich your life and grow your business with bitcoin, the hardest money on planet Earth.

Josh Friedeman:

I'm your host, Josh Friedeman, and our guest today is Christopher David, who is the founder of Open Agents.

Josh Friedeman:

Today on the show, we're talking about Deep Seek Stargate and why Christopher believes that open protocols are the future of AI.

Josh Friedeman:

We're going to get into our interview with Christopher right after this.

Josh Friedeman:

Christopher, welcome to the podcast.

Christopher David:

Hey, Josh, thanks for having me.

Josh Friedeman:

So I like to start off every single interview with a few questions that help us to get to know you a little bit better and to give us some insight for our own lives.

Josh Friedeman:

So you ready for these?

Christopher David:

Yeah.

Josh Friedeman:

Question number one is this.

Josh Friedeman:

When and how did you first learn about Bitcoin?

Christopher David:

This was:

Christopher David:

No, I don't have a massive stack from those days, but one of my like political Ron Paul friends mentioned bitcoin kind of in the context of, and the Fed alternative monetary systems and stuff like, hey, check out bitcoin.

Christopher David:

And that was after bitcoin had first like run up to $30 in price.

Christopher David:

And I was like, I was relating it to it mostly as like a thing to invest.

Christopher David:

And I was like, do you think the price will keep going up?

Christopher David:

He's like, eventually.

Christopher David:

So I bought a bunch at 30.

Christopher David:

It crashed down to like 2.

Christopher David:

I'm like, ah, screw this.

Christopher David:

And then, you know, a couple years later, wait a Second, it's above 200 sold.

Christopher David:

It made a 5X.

Christopher David:

Felt cool.

Christopher David:

But, you know, started doing more research from there as kind of like this potential alternative monetary system later on develop, realizing it could be used also as a substrate for decentralized applications, which I'm sure we'll talk about.

Josh Friedeman:

So follow up question there.

Josh Friedeman:

It sounds like you came into it more on the, I don't say political side, but from, from that arena, the libertarian side.

Josh Friedeman:

Than from the technology side.

Josh Friedeman:

Is that right?

Josh Friedeman:

Yeah, that's cool.

Josh Friedeman:

But it seems like you figured out the, the benefit on the technological side as well.

Christopher David:

Yeah, I'm a developer and so I've always been wanting to build applications.

Christopher David:

My kind of journey, starting with Bitcoin, being attracted to what I now call shitcoins.

Christopher David:

Forgive my French, but you know, the, the non bitcoin things because apparently they would be good for creating decentralized applications.

Christopher David:

It turns out that they've only been really good for scams, parting people from their money, but have come back to Bitcoin recently realizing that this is where all of the serious entrepreneurial activity is, is migrating to.

Josh Friedeman:

Question number two.

Josh Friedeman:

Is this what's an insight or fact about Bitcoin you wish everyone understood?

Christopher David:

Probably increasingly important these days as there's going to be a lot of talk about crypto and digital assets.

Christopher David:

Is there really is and needs to be a clear boundary between Bitcoin like the first invention of digital scarcity that by definition can never be reproduced and all of the knockoffs of people claiming to do all sorts of other things where everything else is kind of like a technology.

Christopher David:

And there's going to be lots of debates about this as this now gets a debate at what the US government is going to do in terms of building reserves and things like this.

Christopher David:

And my kind of observation I would leave people with is that the so called toxic Bitcoin maximalists of which I identify myself as I limit my toxicity to Twitter.

Christopher David:

I'm otherwise kind of, kind of nice.

Christopher David:

But that sort of like strict defense of Bitcoin only is a really important defense mechanism for Bitcoin to not get watered down or polluted by very well funded organizations trying to co opt or hijack or distract or lie about Bitcoin for their own motives.

Christopher David:

Fortunately, I think all of that stuff has been and increasingly will continue to go to zero against Bitcoin.

Christopher David:

But there's going to be a lot of noise between now and then, particularly as everyone kind of is fighting for recognition by the federal government as legitimacy.

Christopher David:

So we'll see what happens.

Christopher David:

But you don't have to care about or pretend to care about crypto or digital assets.

Christopher David:

It's okay to be Bitcoin only.

Josh Friedeman:

Good to hear.

Josh Friedeman:

So question number three.

Josh Friedeman:

What's the bitcoin resource you must recommend to other people?

Christopher David:

I think the body of work from Safedin Amos is, you know, probably, probably what everyone recommends, but it is that good Bitcoin standard.

Christopher David:

Um, it's okay to not get through all of it.

Christopher David:

It's very like kind of somewhat dense economic writing, but as like a philosophical underpinning as well as the kind of parallel book fiat standard that goes into kind of the, the call it the evils of the fiat central banking based system.

Christopher David:

These really are the stakes.

Christopher David:

And my favorite quote from Safedin that I retweet often to my earlier point is that, you know, bitcoiners and shitcoiners were not on the same team.

Christopher David:

Bitcoiners are trying to end the evils of central banking and money printing.

Christopher David:

The other people are basically trying to recreate it to such that they benefit.

Christopher David:

So the big innovation of Bitcoin is that it can provide this alternative financial and monetary unit, financial and monetary system, and then on top of that we can build a lot of, a lot of beneficial things for humanity.

Josh Friedeman:

Question number four.

Josh Friedeman:

Beyond Bitcoin, what is a resource, tool or idea that's been helpful to you or your work recently?

Christopher David:

I say an idea and that is kind of a twofold.

Christopher David:

It's both open source as well as interoperability.

Christopher David:

And this is adding real value to my business because I am leading an open source company, a project building a company building on open source.

Christopher David:

It lends itself to interoperability.

Christopher David:

So there are other companies building in the same space, kind of building at the intersection of Bitcoin and AI.

Christopher David:

And because we're building on the same kind of underlying neutral protocol, which is Bitcoin, we're using the layer 2 for payments above that called lightning.

Christopher David:

We're more or less also using the kind of decentralized data protocol that works well adjacent to Bitcoin called Noster, for sort of like decentralized data, being able to build on top of that things that are more specific to our businesses, like agents, frameworks for agents on top of that substrate.

Christopher David:

Everyone kind of wants to speak the same language.

Christopher David:

So we're not competing.

Christopher David:

There are other companies that are doing other things in the space and that we are allies.

Christopher David:

So it's a value add.

Christopher David:

And if you look outside the bitcoin space to two areas, you look at Silicon Valley where there's almost no incentive to cooperate.

Christopher David:

Everyone just wants to chase and get the golden ring and kind of a zero sum game in a lot of respects as well as in the crypto space where everyone's kind of got either their own token or their own roll up.

Christopher David:

There's all these kind of like siloed ecosystem that not only don't have incentive to cooperate, they have incentive to really push their token or whatever it is at the expense of everyone else.

Christopher David:

It does not lend itself to interoperability, the Bitcoin does.

Christopher David:

And I think over the next year or two, you're going to start to see that interoperability based on neutral protocols be a real competitive advantage for businesses.

Christopher David:

I can see how that's starting to benefit my own business.

Christopher David:

I think particularly once we start getting some real revenue flowing through and we're able to kind of help magnetize and share that with other businesses.

Christopher David:

There's a lot of kind of win, win mutual back scratching that can be done.

Christopher David:

I think it's going to be a massive competitive advantage over the people that are building in private.

Josh Friedeman:

Yeah.

Josh Friedeman:

I want to follow up with you in a little bit, a little bit more about that because I'd be interested to hear kind of some of those trends that you're seeing.

Josh Friedeman:

But for right now, let's get to our final question.

Josh Friedeman:

We call it our arbitrary but insightful question and it's this.

Josh Friedeman:

As a general life principle, is it better to ask why or why not?

Christopher David:

I love both of those.

Christopher David:

And if I had to pick, I would probably go with why.

Christopher David:

Because why gets to first principles.

Christopher David:

And I think that that has to be the start of any inquiry.

Christopher David:

Like why do I need your expensive agent framework?

Christopher David:

Why do I need your crypto coin?

Christopher David:

Why do I need dot?

Christopher David:

Like why?

Christopher David:

You follow the whys and you can get to a really interesting, beautiful place called.

Christopher David:

I actually don't need all of the inherited debt and bad ideas.

Christopher David:

Everybody else.

Christopher David:

Let me start from the, the, the beginning, the first principles and then the why not would come into place where it's like, oh my man, like I'm going to be facing some headwinds or regulators or people who don't want me to do this or whomever that is.

Christopher David:

And then if there's a wall that you need to blast through, that's like, that's like a kind of a why not energy.

Christopher David:

But why?

Christopher David:

Why comes first?

Josh Friedeman:

Well, Christopher, we're here to talk about your business, Open Agents, as well as getting your insight just in general when it comes to Bitcoin and AI, those are probably, I say probably.

Josh Friedeman:

Those are definitely two of the most exciting places right now of development.

Josh Friedeman:

And you find yourself there in the middle.

Josh Friedeman:

Can you share with us a little bit about Open Agents?

Christopher David:

Sure.

Christopher David:

So I call Open Agents an applied AI lab building both infrastructure and products for the agentic economy, specifically on open protocols.

Christopher David:

day presentation in December:

Christopher David:

I came to agree that agents will be a very extremely important sort of economic unit of the future, that there will be an agentic economy.

Christopher David:

And I just didn't like their approach.

Christopher David:

They mentioned also they were going to do a GPT store that's kind of like store for people to create these, you know, basic versions of agents and earn revenue sharing from that.

Christopher David:

And that's where I knew like they're going to half ass this, they're not going to do that properly.

Christopher David:

They're just structurally not able to because they're not going to build on Bitcoin and be comfortable building these sort of like decentralized marketplaces that are open to any participant.

Christopher David:

And this had been my background.

Christopher David:

My previous startup was a gig marketplace startup, building rideshare and kind of delivery networks in different regulatory jurisdictions.

Christopher David:

I was like, here is where the decentralized technology of Bitcoin could be a big advantage and there probably should be like a company that focuses just on this.

Christopher David:

So I had a existing company at that point that I kind of pivoted to focus on agents.

Christopher David:

We renamed the company to Open Agents.

Christopher David:

And the day after that I recorded video, one of what's now 150 plus video series of me building different pieces of this over time, over the last year, plus now different product releases that we've put out, things that we've learned from that.

Christopher David:

But Open Agents is really like the core of it is what if we took this idea of like a research and product studio for the, you know, AI economy, but like being actually open instead of just saying that we're open and taking advantage of the unique, I think, strategic advantages that that allows.

Josh Friedeman:

Could you talk a little bit more about what your vision is for the agentic economy, what that would look like?

Christopher David:

Well, the bet is that there will be multiple, multiple billions of agents everywhere throughout all society.

Christopher David:

I mean, and to kind of drive that point home, you've got just look at the humanoid robotics market where Elon Musk with Tesla and Optimus is.

Christopher David:

He's trying to manufacture a billion humanoids per year, like in the next decade.

Christopher David:

So just, let's just say that there's going to be 10 billion humanoids at some point in the next 10 to 15 years.

Christopher David:

Before that point, the equivalent of that, not for hardware, but for software.

Christopher David:

What we call AI agents are going to proliferate first.

Christopher David:

Like that's the first thing that like everyone's going to have to grapple with.

Christopher David:

Agents are everywhere by everywhere I mean every probably person, family, business, household, street corner, mobile, device, business, everything is going to have one or more agentic processes running as part of it.

Christopher David:

And let's like pause to define agent.

Christopher David:

Plenty of people have their own definitions and this is kind of like something that no one really agrees on for particular definition.

Christopher David:

I like to keep things simple and say that it's like a software process that does what you ask it to.

Christopher David:

There's a lot of people that kind of emphasize with this AI ecosystem we're building AGI or building some like unique life form.

Christopher David:

And there's a lot of kind of, you know, weird cultishness around it that I'm trying to steer away from and be practical.

Christopher David:

This is something that fundamentally improves human agency.

Christopher David:

If the kinds of things that you can do, some subset of them, particularly in your business world, can be delegated to an agent and you can have 10 different coding agents live, or you have people monitoring your email, whatever.

Christopher David:

Like it's about fundamentally empowering the individual human within that.

Christopher David:

But if we think about what is this agentic economy like, I, I believe fundamentally that this has to be, has to be built on a foundation of openness.

Christopher David:

If you have multiple billions of these agents and the majority of them are controlled by these closed source mega corporations with connections to government, with, you know, there's a whole bunch of people or you know, subset of very high level people that are excited about applying AI technology, surveillance and people are going to be on their best behavior.

Christopher David:

Like there's a lot of like potentially dystopian applications of the technology.

Christopher David:

And I think that if the sort of culture of the AI ecosystem is okay with it being controlled by these massive closed source corporations, you're going to get a lot of that.

Christopher David:

But if the ethos shifts, shifts towards a more decentralized open, things are expected to be transparent.

Christopher David:

I think a lot of that bad behavior gets a lot harder to pull off or get away with.

Christopher David:

So we're trying to build the foundational infrastructure and products for that economy on a neutral and open foundation.

Josh Friedeman:

And does decentralized mean self hosted necessarily?

Josh Friedeman:

Not necessarily.

Josh Friedeman:

What does that look like?

Josh Friedeman:

It seems like that would be the safest way to go.

Josh Friedeman:

But what are your thoughts there?

Josh Friedeman:

I don't know how practical that would be for everyone to do.

Christopher David:

Part of the beauty of a system that is open source, like Linux as a parallel is it allows for a wide range of uses.

Christopher David:

So if you are that hobbyist or power user, you can always run Linux on your home machine.

Christopher David:

I've got my Linux computer sitting next to me, you can peel it apart, you know, modify it however you want and have a lot more, you know, guarantees about what it's actually doing than your kind of like black box proprietary versions like Windows.

Christopher David:

But you can also build on top of Linux things like Mac os.

Christopher David:

That's a more curated consumer experience.

Christopher David:

But Linux is the, you know, innovation that, that allows for all these kinds of things.

Christopher David:

And so if we look at that kind of parallel between Windows, Mac and Linux, I think you're going to see a parallel in the agent space where, you know, Microsoft is still the Microsoft, they're still the Windows they're investing in.

Christopher David:

You know, they own 49% of OpenAI or like we like to call them closed AI, GitHub and Minecraft and they're trying to build their empire in their particular way.

Christopher David:

You've got a lot of, on the other hand, open source hobbyists and people, you know, taking the latest models from Deep Sequel wherever and running with them.

Christopher David:

That's cool.

Christopher David:

But we do think there should be a middle layer that is the sort of equivalent of macOS that is built on that open foundation, but can then still smooth down some of the rough edges that might scare off consumers.

Christopher David:

And in the space of AI agents, I think that space is wide open and that's where we're trying to position open agents.

Josh Friedeman:

So as far as your current and future offerings from open agents, what do those look like?

Josh Friedeman:

What can people be expecting in the coming year or so?

Christopher David:

Yeah, in the short term we're focused on our first kind of use case that we've identified that customers are willing to pay thousands of dollars per month for which are coding agents.

Christopher David:

Kind of a drop in remote worker focused on software development.

Christopher David:

This we think is going to help kind of bootstrap a broader marketplace where just imagine that we have an agent that's really great at a lot of things, but it's not as great at a particular type of data source or whatever where we can then incentivize a plugin developer who has some unique expertise or insight for them to be able to create a plugin that the agent can then use and they get a little share of that revenue.

Christopher David:

I think once we get that solidly in place for coding agents, that's going to let us broaden the aperture of what the agents do.

Christopher David:

And we want to get to the point where, you know, fundamentally this end up will being a be a consumer play where we want anybody to be able to have their own personal like agent or you know, way to Command agents, which we're going to do through a mobile app.

Christopher David:

Plenty of people think that, you know, you'll want to carry around some other device or they're not.

Christopher David:

We, we are strong believers in use the, you know, hardware that everyone is already paying for that's in their pocket that has had literally all of the technology that you would want.

Christopher David:

I guess you could say in some ways we're going to be competing with Apple on that.

Christopher David:

I think that I have their rollout so far with Apple Intelligence have been like very underwhelming.

Christopher David:

I don't think they have the product sense to lead in this.

Christopher David:

We'll see if that changes.

Christopher David:

But you know, I fundamentally, I think anybody should be able to install our mobile app.

Christopher David:

We have an app in development right now called Onyx.

Christopher David:

In open beta, it's still kind of focused on developers.

Christopher David:

That's the kind of tools that it has.

Christopher David:

But over the next few months that'll be increasingly, you know, open ended and generic.

Christopher David:

So to sum up, we're doing two interfaces.

Christopher David:

We're doing a web application kind of for power users where if you want to, you know, click and spin up an agent, kind of see it work and the kind of data streams that'll be available@openagents.com or you can click to download Onyx, which is very simple.

Christopher David:

We're envisioning that as like your personal AI, kind of like Jarvis from Tony Stark.

Christopher David:

You just got your thing that listens to you, you talk to it and it does stuff for you, that does stuff for you.

Christopher David:

Is it could be a coding agent.

Christopher David:

It could be literally anything from this kind of decentralized agent marketplace that we're building on these open protocols where you don't have to care about all the wiring and all the stuff that's happening in the background.

Christopher David:

You're just able to ask it to do stuff for you.

Christopher David:

And it does.

Christopher David:

If you ask it to do something that it can't already do, that's going to open up a little job ticket where it's like, okay, these 10 people requested this particular thing.

Christopher David:

We will pay half a bitcoin for someone who can implement this.

Christopher David:

Or maybe way less than half a bitcoin.

Christopher David:

But you know, this, this will evolve over time in accordance with user demands.

Christopher David:

But I think that's one thing that I think open agents will uniquely have is that marketplace.

Christopher David:

I don't see anyone really taking seriously this idea of network effect.

Christopher David:

What is going to set companies apart.

Christopher David:

Obviously there's a race to the bottom of commoditization for the base level of models.

Christopher David:

There's what seems to be an increasing understanding that the battle is going to be more at the application layer.

Christopher David:

And the sort of excitement from the regular Normie VCs seems to be around this concept of vertical agent companies.

Christopher David:

Companies that specialize in one particular vertical and they get very good at kind of automating those processes through AI agents.

Christopher David:

That's kind of like the, the, the consensus view of the people in Silicon Valley and such.

Christopher David:

I take a different view on that.

Christopher David:

That type of company.

Christopher David:

Vertical agents reminds me of the old Uber for X company where people took the idea of Uber and tried to apply it to all these different things and five, ten years later you'd be hard pressed to come up with like a real success story of those Uber for X type companies.

Christopher David:

Maybe there's a couple.

Christopher David:

Uber is still there.

Christopher David:

So it's like in the realm of agents, what is that kind of big daddy market hegemon going to be?

Christopher David:

I think open agents has a potential to be that and it's, it's, it's ideally it should be both horizontal and vertical.

Christopher David:

And how we get away with that is by starting by nailing one use case coding.

Christopher David:

Agents is what we're focused on because it has wide applicability both for, you know, our team as well as, you know, businesses that we're starting to work with.

Christopher David:

And enterprises are going to want that kind of drop in software engineer.

Christopher David:

But like I said, to be able to kind of open that up through this marketplace where we're able to incentivize a broad array of developers and service providers to help contribute to extending the capabilities of the open agents platform where they don't need to care about distribution because we have a sales team that generates those contracts with businesses.

Christopher David:

We get paid by the business.

Christopher David:

We pay out, you know, cuts to the agent developers.

Christopher David:

So in that respect we want to be paying developers the most.

Christopher David:

I think that's how we, we build a thriving ecosystem.

Christopher David:

And then that network effect of if we have the best developers, we're building the best agents.

Christopher David:

Where are people going to go to get the best agents?

Christopher David:

They're going to come to open agents and we've got the best name, it's open agents.

Christopher David:

Of course you want open agents.

Christopher David:

You don't want agents that hide their thinking like closed AI.

Christopher David:

No, you want open agents.

Christopher David:

Right.

Josh Friedeman:

So then when it comes to Onyx, what, what will that cost?

Josh Friedeman:

I'm guessing that's primarily going to be consumer facing.

Josh Friedeman:

Just, you know, the average person would be using Onyx.

Josh Friedeman:

What does that cost.

Christopher David:

We hope for Onyx to be free, at least the, the base version.

Christopher David:

Certainly there will be a base version that is free.

Christopher David:

And you know, you can start to see because of the economics have been changing where now like OpenAI has been able to offer GPT4 mini for free.

Christopher David:

Deep Seek has been offering their model for free, although their services are getting slammed.

Christopher David:

So they got, there's got to be some gating.

Christopher David:

But I think, you know, a year or two from now when we think Onyx will be really going viral among those kinds of consumer audiences, that the models could be just good enough that we can just give away really powerful functionality for free, including running some devices on, on the Edge.

Christopher David:

Like we shipped a couple kind of test versions where we had llama 3.21b or 3d model running on the device itself.

Christopher David:

Like we don't need to charge for that.

Christopher David:

It's using your own battery power.

Christopher David:

You know, there will be other opportunities to kind of monetize like if someone wants to pay to upgrade to something.

Christopher David:

So we'll experiment but you know, hopefully the business side of open agents enterprise facing, that's where our revenue comes from.

Christopher David:

And then we're just able to kind of use the consumer app for lead gen and other kinds of opportunities.

Josh Friedeman:

Yeah.

Josh Friedeman:

So while people are waiting for Onyx, what would be your recommendation today for an AI agent?

Josh Friedeman:

You know what the average person, what would you recommend that they use?

Christopher David:

The average person?

Christopher David:

I mean, I would say like using existing basic tools that everyone talks about like chat GPT until you chafe against it to the point where you're like, I really wanted to do this thing, but it can't.

Christopher David:

That's where you want to start looking for other things.

Christopher David:

And, and for most people maybe the base level chat GBT like meets your needs and you're fine with that.

Christopher David:

I would say that if you're a business and you have trouble hiring developers or you're just looking for more, you know, cost efficiency in your development team, software engineering team, that's where you should reach out to me and open Agents because we are working with people and companies like that, you know, get way more bang for the buck than, than, than humans alone for kind of most people.

Christopher David:

Yeah, I'd say use what's out there.

Christopher David:

If you have, I don't know, pain points that you have, that you identify, please tweet them at us.

Christopher David:

At Open Agents, you know, we're actively looking for what are those things that OpenAI and the other labs are not doing so well.

Christopher David:

It's, it's a moving target.

Christopher David:

But the hope is that by, you know, February to March we have the infrastructure in place such that anything that anybody requests, like I'm asking my Onyx to do something for me, if it's not doable right away, it gets turned into a ticket that someone then, you know, builds and it's, it's going to be the, the fastest evolving product I think, I think that's out there.

Josh Friedeman:

So for devs, when it comes to pricing and quality, how would you compare your current product to OpenAI for instance?

Christopher David:

Well, OpenAI on their like $20 and $200 a month products, they are losing money on that.

Christopher David:

So I think there's a level of, you know, loss leading that they're just able to do because they're burning Microsoft's piles of money that we can't, we can't do.

Christopher David:

Sure.

Christopher David:

I have been happy for my day to day usage paying Claude even 50 to $100 per day sometimes because I'm getting the equivalent of thousands of dollars that I would otherwise pay an engineer.

Christopher David:

So I do think the kind of per usage based pricing makes a lot of sense where we can take, particularly if it's a model like Deep Seq, which is like literally 95% cheaper than Sonnet for, for percent of the quality per usage pricing makes sense that a bunch of the developers that we've worked with have been happy to, you know, buy $20 or $100 worth of credits.

Christopher David:

And I'm, I'm confident, particularly as prices continue to come down, if you're able to engage in an interface and you're able to spend $5 of compute to get you know, a pull request or five pull requests done and that saves you hours of your time.

Christopher David:

Developers who like know how to value their time are going to see the value in that very, very quickly.

Josh Friedeman:

Yeah.

Josh Friedeman:

So you mentioned Deep Seek.

Josh Friedeman:

What are your initial thoughts?

Josh Friedeman:

It's been out for a few days.

Josh Friedeman:

Is it kind of a sea change or is it overhyped?

Josh Friedeman:

What are initial thoughts?

Christopher David:

It may be overhyped and a lot of stuff in AI is, I think it's, it's revolutionary and I'm coming at it from a particular angle where I'm spending X amount on Claude.

Christopher David:

I, I have our Claude has been the main model that all of our products have used for the last six months.

Christopher David:

We've been for the last 18 months in this kind of bouncing between OpenAI Claude 3 came out GPT 4, you know, Claude 3.5, 3.5 has been the best for the last six months for what we do, which is primarily coding agents, but it can be expensive.

Christopher David:

And so here comes a model that is 95% cheaper for 95% of the intelligence.

Christopher David:

And even though in some cases maybe you want to use the smarter model generally, and this is our current engineering effort, is we're stripping Sonnet out of every part of our system and replacing it with more of a kind of a compound system where instead of just one call to Sonnet, we'll make a couple calls to Deep Seek and kind of more smartly build the context.

Christopher David:

So at least in our initial experimentation, this leads to a way smarter result.

Christopher David:

In the end, it's smarter and cheaper.

Christopher David:

Takes a little bit more work to get there.

Christopher David:

So from my perspective, just from that dimension where it's, it's something finally I can rip out because it's more cost efficient.

Christopher David:

In addition to the platform risk is gone of being turned off by anthropic or their APIs are not available.

Christopher David:

I can use Deep Seats API.

Christopher David:

I can use, it's hosted a bunch of different other places.

Christopher David:

I learned just in the last day that you can deploy it.

Christopher David:

The full version of R1, not even the smaller condensed version, the full version of R1 to hugging face for 200 per day.

Christopher David:

Or you can build a rig to run it yourself for $6,000 a month.

Christopher David:

I was like, all right, maybe it's time we raise the money a little bit because I want to run one of those R1 rigs sitting next to me.

Christopher David:

How cool would that be?

Christopher David:

And then maybe we'll connect that out, let other people use it.

Christopher David:

But like it's, it's remarkable on a whole different, you know, slew of things.

Christopher David:

But it's finally, we finally have reached the point that those of us inside of the sort of the open source AI community have been hoping for, for a long time, which is a model that is at least at par with the leading state of the art closed source models that is open that we can run at home.

Christopher David:

And the fact that they've caught up now, it's, it's remarkable because you can just think about now all of the people that are able to fine tune that in different ways or build derivatives of it, that it just unlocks this whole new, new level of innovation not possible with the closed models in addition to that Deep Seek because it is so transparent about its thought process.

Christopher David:

I mean this has been a major thing that a lot of, you know, AI developers have complained about.

Christopher David:

OpenAI, which is they're paying $200 a month.

Christopher David:

For 01 or 01 Pro.

Christopher David:

And you're paying for this model to, you're paying for it to do all this thinking.

Christopher David:

And sometimes you'll sit there for 30 seconds or a minute or two minutes while it's thinking.

Christopher David:

It doesn't really tell you what it's thinking.

Christopher David:

You get little like very bare bones summaries.

Christopher David:

But with Deep Seek, you get the full, all of the reasoning, all of its thought process, you get all of it.

Christopher David:

Now OpenAI has their kind of like fearful, you know, reasons for hiding that because they know that as soon as they release that, it makes it that much easier to kind of build models that, that can do better than, than what they have.

Christopher David:

But that's a major, I think that's a major obstacle for OpenAI if they're trying to build trust among businesses, particularly as it's going to be.

Christopher David:

You're, you're basically in some ways trusting the provider of the model, the provider of the agent that, okay, I'm hiring you to, you know, I'm hiring these agentic processes from you or I'm building agentic processes that I'm going to, you know, run large parts of my business.

Christopher David:

And you're not even going to tell me how the model is trained.

Christopher David:

I can't reproduce any of this.

Christopher David:

I can't see what happens when I hit your API.

Christopher David:

And then all this additional stuff I'm paying for, for the thinking, you're not going to share that with me.

Christopher David:

I know, but over here I can get all of that and not sacrifice quality.

Christopher David:

I think they're in a tough spot.

Christopher David:

I wouldn't want to be them.

Christopher David:

It's a good time to be building an open source because we're no longer running to catch up.

Christopher David:

We may, we may, you know, power past them.

Christopher David:

In some things we are power, you know, powering, passing.

Christopher David:

Because there's a whole slew of businesses that just cannot run open AI.

Christopher David:

They can't use their API because they can't have their data leave their premises.

Christopher David:

And so maybe you've got some people that'll come in and do kind of custom.

Christopher David:

There's companies, one or two companies that'll, you know, they'll send people on site to help build you something custom.

Christopher David:

But just that ability to know what you're running, to be able to inspect it, modify it.

Christopher David:

Yeah, we need that, we need that sort of Linux equivalent to the closed source, you know, Windows approach.

Christopher David:

And then we just want to build a nice experience for people to that.

Christopher David:

That's the, the apple of that.

Josh Friedeman:

Yeah.

Josh Friedeman:

So Some people have tried to position this as USA versus China.

Josh Friedeman:

It sounds like it's a win of open source over closed source.

Josh Friedeman:

Is that the better way of looking at it?

Christopher David:

Yes, I do think so.

Christopher David:

And you know, certainly there's geopolitical considerations.

Christopher David:

I'll actually just read my tweet here.

Christopher David:

I tweeted at David Sacks, the new AI and crypto czar.

Christopher David:

He was talking about Deep Seek and that the AI race will be competitive, US, China, etc.

Christopher David:

And my response was, hopefully the closed AI labs fail in their attempts at regulatory capture and that y'all can balance across both dimensions, us versus China and open versus Closed.

Christopher David:

I'm seeing way too many calls for closing or restricting AI further.

Christopher David:

It's the wrong approach and the US has to lead on open source AI, or else there's some kind of analysis around, you know, why players that are behind might cynically embrace open source to get a strategic edge and undermine the competitors.

Christopher David:

And people have speculated that like Meta is taking that approach because they've been behind and like, who knows if Zuck is like actually on the side of open source.

Christopher David:

You're right to be skeptical about that.

Christopher David:

In the case of Wen Fang Lang, forgive me for mangling his name, but the CEO of Deep Seek, you know, read a I think Forbes piece, someone did a profile on him.

Christopher David:

He's just some nerd who actually really cares about open source.

Christopher David:

And like he's building an open source company, it happens to be in China.

Christopher David:

So I view Deep Seek as allies.

Christopher David:

I see them as on Team Open.

Christopher David:

And I hope that lessons that policymakers in the U.S.

Christopher David:

take from this is not that we need to close down, that we needed to strike more of these kind of crony capitalist relationships with companies.

Christopher David:

Like, I mean, you've already got some of the best funded companies in the space are actively lobbying for regulatory capture.

Christopher David:

There's a bunch of that during the Biden administration.

Christopher David:

The tail end of the Biden administration where it was clear that like they were going to work with essentially OpenAI and Anthropic.

Christopher David:

Essentially, that's it to.

Christopher David:

To build this kind of de facto government sanctioned monopoly that's been blown wide open by Trump's election.

Christopher David:

But you still have what, day two of Trump's administration.

Christopher David:

Sam Altman closed AI guy up there talking about building Stargate for open air only.

Christopher David:

What?

Christopher David:

I guess it's all private money, theoretically.

Christopher David:

Even though there's some skepticism about if that's actually there.

Christopher David:

Elon has poured cold water on that, saying that they don't actually have the money.

Christopher David:

So how much of that was just PR and aspirational?

Christopher David:

We don't know yet.

Christopher David:

They do have a, or Oracle I guess has a data center being built in Abilene that's been underway for a while.

Christopher David:

So that's sort of like phase one of Stargate.

Christopher David:

But you know, clarity has come out after that that like they're building this for open AI.

Christopher David:

So this is not like a neutral, like even America first kind of thing.

Christopher David:

This is like this is an open AI first kind of thing.

Christopher David:

And if OpenAI has the issues that open AI has as well as some, you know, skepticism given.

Christopher David:

Altman also has been issuing a, you know, altcoin, you'd say to like harvest people's biometric data.

Christopher David:

There's some concerns about like what they are actually see is the future of this, of this technology.

Christopher David:

Altman would probably love to, to preside over, you know, the, the, the AI utopia slash dystopia, but I, I don't think that should be the, the structure at all.

Christopher David:

It should be more decentralized, it should be more open.

Christopher David:

I hope that America can lead in that because the openness is, is really in line with the principles of America.

Christopher David:

It's just whether some kind of crony capitalist people have financial incentive to have the US choose winners and keep out the rest, which unfortunately happens a lot in other industries.

Josh Friedeman:

Yeah, it seems like Stargate has really been undermined by Deep Seek or at least the main thrust of Stargate.

Josh Friedeman:

I still think it's important to have a lot of money behind AI but if it's all going, or if it was all going to OpenAI right now I feel like Open AI is just looking sort of foolish.

Christopher David:

Well, I think so too.

Christopher David:

And it's, it's, you know, if you have people who have financial incentive for the kind of basic version one Nvidia driven bubble to keep going up and.

Christopher David:

Oh yeah, like you know, that particular model of, of spending all this money on the latest Nvidia stuff that's gotten them X amount of returns, maybe that'll linearize but like having some, some insights of resource constrained people in China coming up with you know, an innovative approach that just maximizes efficiency and like starts undercutting those narratives.

Christopher David:

I, I just see all of that as a good thing.

Christopher David:

There's definitely too much hype and too much bubble type behavior returning to reality.

Christopher David:

Particularly recognitions that open source is actually like really important thing to embrace actively.

Christopher David:

I think that's all bullish.

Josh Friedeman:

Now I know with the app Deepseek has been rewriting some of its answers.

Josh Friedeman:

Is there that type of action when it comes to using the open source version, or is that something they're imposing on themselves within the app?

Christopher David:

Only anyone who has an app in an app Store sanctioned by a government is going to have things like that where they're kind of kowtowing to the existing government.

Christopher David:

ChatGPT has the equivalent.

Christopher David:

Every app in the App Store has the equivalent.

Christopher David:

There's content moderation policies that have to be in place.

Christopher David:

You don't have to use the app.

Christopher David:

You can take the underlying model.

Christopher David:

And companies like Perplexity have already shown that you can not only deploy the underlying model, which, even though it doesn't have the aggressive content moderation, it still has certain things it was trained on and not trained on, but that can be augmented or overridden.

Christopher David:

And I saw something like Perplexity had deployed a version where they actually, like they did some surgery on the model to remove some of that.

Christopher David:

They did something where if you ask their R1 perplexity thing about Tiananmen or any of these, like, sensitive topics, it gives you straight answers.

Christopher David:

Now, does it give you straight answers about the US Equivalent of stuff that they might want you to say?

Christopher David:

Like they're a US like every company based in a jurisdiction is going to have some level of that.

Christopher David:

And then the question is, do you have access to the underlying model weight so you can put it where you want and do what you want where people around the globe can kind of share in this, like, new technology innovation that's going on?

Christopher David:

I think that's beneficial.

Christopher David:

I don't think it's beneficial for one country to get like a massive dominant edge over everything else.

Christopher David:

You know, hopefully everyone has access to the same capacities, more or less, and they're just like kind of a.

Christopher David:

I don't know, maybe.

Christopher David:

Maybe we need like a.

Christopher David:

An AI version of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Christopher David:

Like, everyone's got the latest AGI in their pocket.

Christopher David:

Everyone, Everyone, including governments, are on best behavior because we've all got really high agency and like, let's not destroy each other.

Christopher David:

I don't know.

Josh Friedeman:

Yeah, yeah.

Josh Friedeman:

So I want to turn to interoperability and open protocols a little bit more before we finish up the interview.

Josh Friedeman:

Just first of all, speak to, if you would, how Bitcoin plays into this.

Josh Friedeman:

Is it primarily because it's an open protocol, or are there some additional benefits to Bitcoin and AI and then maybe what are some ways that you've seen that interoperability at work so far between open agents and other companies?

Christopher David:

Yeah, it's A step one is agents are going to be transacting value.

Christopher David:

What are they going to be transacting value with?

Christopher David:

Are they going to have their own bank accounts?

Christopher David:

Maybe.

Christopher David:

I'm sure there's a company or two that's trying to get agents their own bank accounts.

Christopher David:

That sounds horrible to me.

Christopher David:

These are Internet native software processes.

Christopher David:

They should have Internet native money.

Christopher David:

We have that with Bitcoin.

Christopher David:

Are agents going to be transacting in the latest like Crypto Chuck E.

Christopher David:

Cheese token of the day?

Christopher David:

Probably not.

Christopher David:

Even though there's a whole bunch of crypto people trying very hard on that, I just fundamentally don't think so.

Christopher David:

I think agents like people when given a choice between being paid in the hardest asset, the soundest money ever, or a Chuck E.

Christopher David:

Cheese token or a devaluing dollar, they're going to choose Bitcoin.

Christopher David:

And regardless of whether Bitcoin the currency is what's used or Bitcoin the Rails where you have companies like Lightning Labs and Light Spark building sort of Bitcoin based assets using the Lightning network as transport.

Christopher David:

So there I, you can envision all sorts of different, you know, Bitcoin based assets like dollars or tether being transacted by agents.

Christopher David:

And this is something that I, I hope open agents supports the kind of full range of Bitcoin based financial assets as things that are easily traded by agents.

Christopher David:

But it's got to be that.

Christopher David:

It's got to use the Lightning network, it's got to use things that are instant and Internet native and global and neutral and open to all people.

Christopher David:

Like that's going to bring the friction between payments down to zero.

Christopher David:

And so I think fundamentally that's going to win and also should be a large driver.

Christopher David:

I think of Bitcoin adoption.

Christopher David:

If you want to participate maximally in the Bitcoin economy or in the agent economy, like you know, you're going to ideally want your Bitcoin wallet, sure, we'll take your fiat money, but we're going to charge you 5% or use Bitcoin and it's, it's freer.

Christopher David:

And so that that interoperability built into the increasing consensus that Bitcoin is the logical choice for agents means that any company that's building agents that take Bitcoin, we're already default interoperable.

Christopher David:

Like I can buy stuff from them using that money.

Christopher David:

And then the other piece is just the data.

Christopher David:

They're starting to be open protocols, even from closed labs like Anthropic, you know, hats off to them for doing at least one positive thing.

Christopher David:

For open protocols, they released a protocol called Model Context Protocol that people are starting to use to kind of equip agents with a way to consume services.

Christopher David:

You know, a good start.

Christopher David:

But fundamentally I think if agents are able to also share the same language such that there's, let's just say there's one kind of global liquidity pool of services or data that an agent can draw on.

Christopher David:

And okay, this data source will cost me a little bit of satoshis or this service will cost me a little bit of this.

Christopher David:

But there's no reason why there shouldn't be some open, neutral, decentralized registries of all these agent kind of plugins and things.

Christopher David:

And I'd say that's the, the big kind of centerpiece of the coordination that's happened so far between us and a number of other companies building on Bitcoin and AI are building at this intersection of Bitcoin and AI, which is okay, like we all kind of recognize that there should be this shared registry.

Christopher David:

You know, we've got some people building kind of like the L402 piece that connects all this to the lightning network.

Christopher David:

Some people are building more of like the business registry or the APIs.

Christopher David:

I'm writing some like Noster specifications.

Christopher David:

I can kind of tie all this together on, on the Noster protocol for the, for the data communication.

Christopher David:

And it's just everyone's kind of building their own piece and we all have incentive to kind of meet in the middle because Once we have 2, 3, 4, 5 of the leading agent projects speaking the same language, participating in a shared marketplace, the next wave of startups is going to want to participate in that.

Christopher David:

So we're going to be building this thing that snowballs.

Christopher David:

Is that going to happen from VC backed companies that all have their own incentive and no incentive to cooperate?

Christopher David:

Probably not.

Christopher David:

Is it going to happen from crypto people that all have their own token and no incentive to cooperate?

Christopher David:

Probably not.

Christopher David:

I think you're going to see this real sort of like Bitcoin AI, you know, ecosystem evolve massively over the, over the next 12 months.

Christopher David:

Particularly as, and this is the main thing that I'm focused on is like what is the revenue source?

Christopher David:

What is the thing that people are going to want to pay for so that we get real commerce happening.

Christopher David:

That is our initial focus on coding agents in part because it's just a problem that I understand as a developer, been coding for 30 years and the bulk of my business just requires a lot of software development.

Christopher David:

And that's what I've been Kind of focused on for the last, you know, 18 months is how can we build agents that not just maximize developer productivity but maximize like a business's productivity.

Christopher David:

And going from 0 to 1 from like I have an idea to, I have a product that I can test in the marketplace.

Christopher David:

You know, to be able to bring the, the speed of iteration to the absolute maximum is going to be a big competitive advantage for anyone building, building in this direction.

Christopher David:

So once we have the kind of revenue sources we've had some success with, early customers that we work closely with, businesses paying us, you know, a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars per month to kind of get a sense of what their needs are, pairing that with these coding agents, gradually openly opening that up into more of a marketplace.

Christopher David:

Down the road, we do hope to see open agents as sort of this one stop shop for AI agents where you don't need to think about any of the like underlying stuff, you don't care.

Christopher David:

It's just a place you go.

Christopher David:

You can slap down the credit card, you know, call up, talk to our sales team, whatever that is, or use your own version of it and just have all of the best agents at your disposal.

Christopher David:

For most people, you know, the, the end goal here is that we want to have 8 billion people on the planet having a mobile phone where they just open it up, they can say what they want and just like literally magic happens because all this stuff happens in the background.

Josh Friedeman:

Very cool.

Josh Friedeman:

Well, any final thoughts you have for the listeners before we finish up today, as well as where can people go if they want to give open agents a try or keep up with what you're doing?

Christopher David:

I'd say, please.

Christopher David:

We're very active on x.

Christopher David:

Follow us OpenAgents Inc.

Christopher David:

Is the Twitter.

Christopher David:

You can go to OpenAgents.com we have status updates about what we're building as well as download links for our open beta of our mobile app called Onyx.

Christopher David:

And then in the next week or two, we're going to be rolling out the new version of our kind of power user web dashboard for people to be able to interact with agents targeted mostly first at developers.

Christopher David:

If you are a business owner and you're interested in getting agents into your business, we're happy to work with you more personally.

Christopher David:

You can contact us through the website and yeah, stay tuned.

Josh Friedeman:

Great.

Josh Friedeman:

Christopher, thank you so much for your time today.

Christopher David:

It's been a pleasure, Josh, thank you.

Josh Friedeman:

Well friends, it's a wrap.

Josh Friedeman:

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Business Bitcoinization show.

Josh Friedeman:

If you want to reach out to either me or Christopher.

Josh Friedeman:

You can find those links down in the show notes and if Onyx or Coding agents sounds interesting to you, check out those as well.

Josh Friedeman:

As always, keep building, keep growing, and until next time, keep living and leading.

Christopher David:

Well.

Josh Friedeman:

Thanks to those who have been supporting the show on Fountain in recent days, the boost of the week goes to John Gordon, who sent a comment about last week's episode with Dr.

Josh Friedeman:

Roger Mochegemba.

Josh Friedeman:

He said great conversation to understand the benefits of bringing Bitcoin into healthcare.

Josh Friedeman:

Loved hearing my client Dr.

Josh Friedeman:

Roger explain the synergy between the direct primary care model and bitcoin.

Josh Friedeman:

He was early to telemedicine, DPC and now bitcoin adoption.

Josh Friedeman:

If you're around San Antonio and need a doc, check him out.

Josh Friedeman:

Shout out for making it easy for independent docs to integrate Bitcoin and the Lightning network.

Josh Friedeman:

I appreciate the SATs, John, and thank you for the good work you do as well.

Josh Friedeman:

And if you also would like to support the show, feel free to listen on Fountain and either stream sats as you listen or send a boost.

Josh Friedeman:

And if you send a boost with a comment, I'll plan to read it on the show.

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Josh Friedeman

Josh Friedeman is a coach who works with organizations to improve their efficiency and revenue. Learn more about him and his guests on his two podcasts, "Business Bitcoinization" and "Life as Leadership." To explore working with Josh, visit friedemanleadership.com.