YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Suman

lines on the record: 56
first: 2025-10-29
most recent: 2025-10-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Sure. I think what you should view like AI is as a toolbox. So you have a toolbox, you have different tools to use for different things. So I would say I'm not asking people to throw away ChatGPT. I'm not asking to throw away these other services. Instead, I'm asking them to add maple into their toolbox. And that way when you are talking with ChatGPT and you're like, I don't really like the fact that I'm sharing my children's name and personal information about them. You can switch over to Maple and you can have that exact same conversation with models that are as powerful or like 95% of the way there, powerful enough for you. And it's very refreshing. You get this refreshing feeling knowing that this is just a private room with you and an AI. And nobody else is listening. Nobody else is recording that information and it's not being sold to anybody. You're not being influenced in any way. And so I would say go to trymaple.ai, get the free account. You can upgrade if you want to, support us, whatever. But grab it and just have that extra.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that it came from me, right? And so I think that's where verifiability takes us. And so that could be online communications. I post something. I want to sign our Maple builds and have those signed with a private key. So I want to kind of integrate this throughout the entire process. And I think that's really where it shines. Whether or not it becomes a replacement for Twitter, that remains to be seen. Right now it's a niche protocol. But I think the power is beyond that. People who are looking at it as a Twitter clone are not seen far enough in the future where it's really all about verifying that this communication came from the person that is they said they are.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I see it all coming back to that word verifiable, and that's really the power of Noster is verifying that this communication truly came from me. And so that's the private key, public key promise that we have. And whether or not it's Noster as an open source brand that ends up being the thing, I think that concept is what's important. That signed with my private key. And so I know that I'm the one who put it there.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still just go on to Google workspaces, give it our domain name, and now our email is run by Google because it's just so dang convenient and they handle all of the DevOps and the IT headaches that would come along with running our own email server at home. So I would love to think that that's the future is home AI stuff and maybe it could be. Maybe this is finally the line in the sand where it's like, you can have our emails, but you can't have our brains. Our brains need to live at home. And I hope that's the delineation that people are not willing to give up that aspect of them. So I just don't know, but we will definitely technically be there. It'll be possible.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would love a world where everybody had their own home server plugged in and it's doing all this for them. So 10 years from now, I could see the technology catching up to where we can make really easy plug and play. You get this little box, you plug it in, you connect it to your Wi-Fi or plug it in via Ethernet. And now everything you do on your phone, everything you do on your computer, everything you do on your watch or if we're on glasses, whatever device is the input device and the output, it's talking to your home server and doing everything locally. I think we will definitely be there from a hardware perspective and from a user experience perspective. That'll be possible. The difference is will people do it? I don't know. I mean, there's definitely incentive to keep the cloud model running. And if you want to look at a parallel to this, you can look at email where we all have the capability to run an email server at home. We can host our own server. We can be totally sovereign and have total control over it, but we don't.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I haven't measured it specifically, but that's definitely the vibe that I feel. I look at what we've built in the last nine months and launched. And we have a sizable number of users now, a sizable amount of revenue coming in. And I think about trying to do that before. I've been part of multiple startups. I look at another startup that I was with and it took a lot longer just to get the product to market. Took almost an entire year Just understanding and writing the initial versions and then throwing those away and doing different versions to where now we're just, yeah, we're so accelerated. Like I said, it's just two of us. And so if we were doing this prior to AI, we probably would have had to have two more people, three more people to get to this point. So we're definitely seeing an acceleration.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Respond to these comments from the pull request. And so you have these agents that are really helping out. But ultimately, in the end, we are the ones reviewing the final say on the code. And we might say, hey, we don't like the approach they all took. So let's get in there and bang things out a little bit differently. But truth be told, I think probably like 90% of our code, maybe 95% of our code is written by AI. With the human in there directing it, guiding it, inspecting it, and making sure that it comes out correctly.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, when you go to approach someone to build it for you, you've got this really refined proof of concept that conveys your idea and has thought through a lot of the initial things. And then for us, we've taken AI and built it into all sorts of parts of our process. So we're using tools locally where we are running coding environments, IDEs locally with something like Claude Code. We've tried out codecs from ChatGPT. We're using Factory right now also as kind of a new hotness that's come on. So we're using all of these. We also use Maple. We've got Quinn3 coder where we got that plugged into IDE. So we're using all these tools. And then when we check in code to GitHub, do a pull request, we have two other AIs that hop in there as code review agents. And so they're both reviewing the code and they come from two different models, two different companies, and so they give a different perspective. And so they drop in their comments and say, hey, this line of code is maybe, you know, should think through this more, there's a potential bug here, that kind of stuff. And then we go in and we say, hey, Claude.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I definitely see a lot of memes where it's like, oh, software engineers are so cooked. But really, what I think the great power is, is software engineers using AI and accelerating their abilities. So that's what we're seeing. I don't want to throw shade at the companies that are doing vibe coding for people who are not software engineers. Because what I see as a huge value add right there, being a software engineer myself for decades, I get approached all the time. Someone's like, I've got a great idea for an app. I want to build this. Can you please go build this and they'll draw on a little piece of paper. They'll maybe build a PowerPoint presentation, but they try to give me requirements. And I can see very quickly that the requirements haven't thought of everything or the idea just is kind of off base. So where vibe coding comes in now is they can take that and instead of coming to someone like me, they can give it to an AI. It can build in the proof of concept. They can play with it and they can say, oh, this is a piece of garbage. Or this is a great idea. Let me iterate a bit on this.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there is a lot of salesmanship going on when it comes to the vibe coding space. And so a lot of progress has been made. And there are definitely stories where people go on and say, I wrote like a few sentences and it gave me an entire app that I can use. And those are great, I think, for proof of concept. We've definitely seen a lot of great things in that space. But getting an app that you wrote with just one paragraph of text into production that millions of users can use that has covered all the edge cases and stuff, that's a totally different story.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than we could, and we only launched back in January, and we're getting ready to do our 2.0 launch probably next month. And it's come a long way just in those last nine months. And so the next nine months next year are going to see drastic changes to what we're building in the positive direction.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we're trying to keep up and we're trying to get feature parity with arguably one of the biggest companies in the world right now. And so OpenAI and others, they have billions of dollars to throw at designers, at engineers and trying to build the best user experience possible. So in order for us to get people to care about privacy, we have to give them a tool that's as convenient, as usable as ChatGPT as a baseline. So that's really the biggest challenge right now. That's where we're racing is we're trying to figure out how do we pick off the most important features because we can't build them all right now. It's just me and another person. We can't build them all right now. And so let's selectively pick the most important ones, get those to feature parity, and then keep building from there and keep growing. So, you know, we're going to be raising some money soon, hopefully. And that'll help us hire a few more people. But even then, we're never going to match these bigger companies as far as team size. But we're using AI against them. We're using AI to help us build faster.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the end of the hardware. It's like, I'm sure you've seen the charts of open AI goes over to Nvidia and then they give money to Oracle and it's all circular. It's this weird thing going on.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This life, and there are so many different avenues and so many different needs that Grock's not going to be able to solve them all. ChatGPT is not going to solve them all. And so I don't know where all the money resolves. I think we're definitely going to have a bubble at some point that's going to pop. It's a view of very similar to the internet. And so we're going to have all these companies that overinvest. And then there's going to be a retraction and a retracement back. And the winners are going to remain. So I don't have a perfect answer for you on that, but I just think that there will be some overinvestment, but I don't think it's going to pop and go away. There's too many benefits. People have seen too much productivity from AI. too much value coming out of it that it's going to survive it's just which people and which companies will remain standing”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we'll loan you our market cap basically to help you out. So it's kind of this crazy thing, a lot of money being tossed around. Where does this resolve? Oh, man, I wish I had a crystal ball to understand. But I think that we are going to have big players out there. We're going to have these people who are building these big, massive mainstream solutions. And I also think that you look at the government contracts that have come to these major models, right? They gave 200 million to XAI, 200 million to OpenAI, to Anthropic. I think Meta got that too. I can't remember. So there are bigger things at play here with Department of Defense and other governments around the world. So I think that there is going to be a need for large scale systems like that. There's also a need for other people to build out systems. And I think there's a world where they all exist together. I don't think this is going to be a race to where there's going to be one winner take all because really there are so many different ways to approach intelligence.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, I saw somebody comment over the last 24 hours about the whole Broadcom and OpenAI thing where it's like, hey, OpenAI, we want to buy all these chips from you, but we don't have the money to pay for them. And so they basically say, let's do a press release together. Broadcom stock goes up. Now their market cap has gone up $150 billion. And it's like, boom, there's your money that you needed.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It'll pass it on to the cloud. That'll get processed on the more expensive servers and then come back to you. And I think in a model like that, inference continues just to drive into the ground as far as price goes and gets faster as well. And so we end up with a better user experience. And so the people that can consolve that kind of user experience are going to have a better mode, be better as a competitive advantage.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Only comes down in cost over time. And even though we're going to get bigger models, we're going to build chips that are more efficient for processing those models. Apple, even though they don't have the right AI solution yet, according to the market, they have built these chips into every single device that are just highly specialized at processing these models. So one thing that we're looking at with Maple is doing a hybrid approach where you actually have smaller local models that run incredibly fast and are extremely cheap to run because they're just running on your spare cycles on your device. And they will do a bunch of the initial processing and on some of the most sensitive information. And they will come up with the most efficient prompt to give to the cloud model. So you might go in and bang out like this massive prompt, paste in a whole PDF of information. And then the local model will crunch that all and say, okay, this is all good and dandy, but really what I need to pass on is a smaller chunk.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so inference versus training, the costs involved and the power involved are very different, right? So the training part costs, I don't know what the exact numbers are. Let's just say 10x. It might be bigger, it might be smaller, but yeah, it's like it takes 10x the amount of resources to train something, just like as a human. It takes all this time to train you over decades for you to live life and learn all these things. And then eventually you can sit down and have a fruitful conversation like we are right now, right? And so it's easier for us to have this conversation than it was for us to learn everything we learned up to this point so that we are capable of having this conversation. So inference should be viewed that way. Now you're ready to have a chat. And I see that what's the moat, what's the unique thing that's going to be competitive? And that is just the user experience. And so these apps that we're building on top of the inference are going to be the competitive moat and what different qualities they have. And we're already seeing that with chat GPT and some of these others. They're trying to build apps on top of their inference layer now that really pull people in. The latest is the SORA video app that's pulling people in and trying to make it more engaging, right? As far as inference goes, I think that is”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or something. That would be really dumb. So we do have to figure that out. And I think it goes back to that verifiability thing is I want to know what the AI is doing and which memories it's suppressing and why rather than a closed opaque system that is going to do that, make that decision for me because maybe that memory is really important and relevant right now to something we're talking about, but it is choosing to not make it relevant for whatever reason could be accidental. could be profit driven could be nefarious”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you know without realizing it, you know when to selectively pull on something and when to not pull on something and use it in the decision that you're trying to make. Whereas AI, maybe it has right now, maybe it has like two pages of information about you. And so that one memory you tell it is suddenly like one of the most important things it knows about you. So it's going to like overly push it into the things that you're using. So we're trying to figure out how do we downweight that and how we not have it influence everything. I think a lot of that comes down to you have to get really good at annotating information when it goes in and say, okay, this little memory you have, this memory is really focused around finances or this is focused around help or being outside mountain biking or something, right? And you want to classify that. So when you're having a chat, it knows, hey, I can totally ignore that right now because it has nothing to do with this topic rather than like, oh, your mountain biking today, hey, you should bring along your financial advisor and have a good chat about your, you know, your”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. That is one of the biggest challenges with AI memory right now is that it overweights and overemphasizes something that you give it because you think about your brain, you've been storing up memories for decades in your brain.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Probably still remembers it, but it's just like, oh, we'll tell them that we're not going to use it. But we could use it if we want to. What we want to build is a truly sovereign AI memory where you can go in and see what we remember about you, not we, what the system remembers about you. And then you can edit it, you can add to it, and then that will get pulled into future chats. And so with those two combined, the system prompt personality thing, that's more proactive. You can say, I want you in this mode. Whereas the memory side is more passive. It's like, hey, this is my context about me. So use it selectively as you see fit.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other aspect you just described as the memory side of it. And we are definitely working on that. We're going to have an open source memory component to it. We don't know exactly which direction we're going to go yet with it, but it's going to be something where you will see, okay, here's everything that the AI has learned about you. And AI memory is really fascinating because I like to view it as you're sitting down with a biographer, right? Say you're Steve Jobs and you want to have everybody know about your life so you get the best person out there to write biographies. That's what's happening with you every day as you're using ChatGPT or any AI product. It is sitting down and trying to learn everything you can about you. Here's how he thinks. Here are his childhood memories, you know, yada, yada, yada. The difference is in a proprietary system, you don't get to read that biography. You don't really get to see what's in there. They will show you an interface that says, oh, here's the things we know about you, and we'll even let you delete it. But there's no guarantee that that's actually happening, right? If you delete that thing out of there.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we definitely do want to do that. We have a system prompt you can edit. We show you what the system prompt is. We want to have multiple in the future where you can customize those and maybe a drop down or something say, hey, I'm in legal mode right now. Switch into that mode.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, definitely. What you just described there are two different implementations that kind of help out with the same thing. So one way that the chat GPD does it is they have these custom GPTs where you can set up this thing and it has a lot of the context pre-built into it. It's basically like you typed in a system prompt with all the stuff that you want. And for people listening who maybe aren't like super into AI, a system prompt is basically the instructions that you give to the model you give to the AI to say, hey, when I talk to you, I want you to kind of be in this personality or this frame of mind or as this character as I'm talking to you. So you can get silly and you can say like, I want you to talk like a pirate to me. So every time you chat with it, it's going to talk like a pirate. That's like the extreme example, but more nuanced, you can be like, hey, I am going to have a legal discussion with you right now. So I want you to be a lawyer. I want you to be a contract lawyer and I want you to have these qualities about you. So to me, that's one part of what you just described.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I should use right now. So part of our big 2.0 push that we have coming up is we want to build something that helps guide the user and say, like, I am in big brain thinking mode right now. So I'm going to click on this thing and it's going to drop me into a model that helps me do that. Or I'm just in quick trivia mode. I want to look up something. So it's going to drop me in there. In the beginning, it'll be like just an easy picker to do for the user, but then we'll switch over to an auto mode where they just chat and it knows what to do. And you just put a simple classifier in front of it. So it looks at your prompt and it can quickly determine itself what should be used just like you would. You know, you would say I'm in this mode. Here's what I'm thinking. And you would pick that. Well, it'll do that for you. So we want to get more automatic with that, but always provide these advanced features that people can turn back on and be more selective if they want to.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, yeah. So first off, with Maple, right now we're only in the cloud. We want to provide local stuff as well. It's like a hybrid local cloud where all your data is encrypted locally first on your device. And we use a private key. Coming from the Bitcoin world, we understand the power of a private key. Same with Noster, right? And so we apply that here. So you're chatting with AI locally on your phone. It encrypts it and then sends it to the cloud for processing. In the cloud, a secure enclave uses your private key, decrypts it, gives it to the AI. It comes with a response, re-encrypts it with your private key, and sends it back to you. So we are not in the middle. We can't see anything going across the wires. Only the security sees the personal data. But you can go look at the source code and see that there's nothing going on there. So how do we tailor that experience? Right now, we just give you a model picker and you're having to choose. And we have a lot of users telling us they get almost like low-key anxiety from like trying to pick which one's the best model.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we can really go deep and dive deep when we have those specific models. So I think that might be the next thing is how do we have specialization and then how do we have these general models kind of wheel and deal and be the general contractor, if you will.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. It's hard to guess five, ten years from now, even two years from now because AI is moving so fast. I think what we start to see is a slowdown of the general models, and then we start to see more specific models. The first thing we're seeing is with coding, right? People want to program, and very quickly we've seen that a model that is fine-tuned at just software engineering is performing generally better. And so we're seeing a divergence there. And I think we start to see the medical field and legal field and all these other different industries come up with their specific models. I know there's people working on therapy ones. And then we have these general models that act as routers in the front. So you come up to it and you start talking to it and it pulls in as specialists.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you know that the American models are not going to have your viewpoint. And so you're going to build that. And the best way to get out there is just give away for free. So that could be one thing. The difference with the open source and running the open models is you can see exactly what's going on. And so you can kind of build around that and build around that propaganda. So I don't have a good answer for you on what's the business model other than it seems like if you can't compete from a proprietary standpoint, then you go open and you spread your message far and wide and try to catch up that way.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A good question. One that I'm still trying to figure out. I think that if you are China and you don't have access to chips or you don't have access to some of these things, then maybe you're trying to build this model that you just want to spread around the world. Really, I guess one thing that I come down to is if ideologically you want your view of the world to be out there and used by everyone.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good so that they can compete. So, I think we are seeing this world where the open source catches up just enough that it becomes just as valuable to a regular person, mainstream person than these other models.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the other thing we're seeing is you bring up GPT 5. And arguably, GPT-5 is an incremental increase over GPT-4. And a lot of people complained and wanted them to go back to GPT-4 and make it available again. And some people have done like introspection into the routing technology behind GPT-5 and think that there's actually still a lot of GPT-4 just under the hood that's helping to power version 5. And so you look at that and you say, okay, maybe their progress has slowed down just a little bit. And then also they open sourced GPT OSS, which is really just kind of 4.0 under the hood. And so you're seeing that open source from their standpoint is starting to catch up. And then you have this whole market dynamic of the Chinese models. You have DeepSeek, you have Quinn, you have these other ones. I'm blinking the other one right now. But you have these other ones that are coming up. And in order for them to compete with these big proprietary models, they're going open first and they're trying to be as”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where like 50% is good, then 75%. Now they're like, and then 90% range, you have a coding model, a QN3 coder, which is scoring just as good as some of the proprietary models on programming in some areas, not all areas. And we're seeing a point where like the benchmarks, however you want to define that, are really getting similar. And then it comes down to just using it and seeing how it behaves for you. And really, most people don't need to have that extra three percent in their model to really get a lot of value out of it.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a valid concern, especially in the early days. The open models were significantly worse than the proprietary ones. We've seen an acceleration. I mean, ChatGPT came on the scene two and a half years ago, maybe three years ago, is when it really caught on. And we've seen the open models catch up a ton in that timeframe.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, we need to provide a way for people to verify that. So that's effectively what we've built with Maple. But I'll say one more thing and then I'll let you respond if you want to. But what we're trying to do is we know that people don't want to give up their convenience just for the sake of privacy. It's a really tough sale to make. Very tough. Yeah. Right? It's really tough. So, we are going to build. Effectively, ChatGPT, but it's going to be better, right? We're building ChatGPT and it's going to have privacy at the core. And so we are going to give people all of those core amazing features that they get out of ChatGPT and Grok, but they're also going to have privacy built into it rather than someone who is harvesting their data for other business purposes.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I view this as like the next iteration. The internet started open with HTTP, and everybody was just like going around websites, viewing them. And then when we started having usernames and passwords, we had to come up with something better. So we did HTTPS. Now I view this as a third iteration. I'm calling it HTTPS-E for secure enclaves, which is my own fun little moniker. But it's really this way that we can now verify the code running on the servers because we're trusting the cloud with so much more every day.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's a lot of other private AIs out there that say, hey, here's our open source code. We're private. We're not tracking what you do. But you can't actually check. You can't verify that. So we're trying to be as transparent as possible. And so we provide that mathematical check. So when you go into Maple, you get this little green verified checkmark. You can click on that, you can see all the details. It's really similar to that lock icon when you go in your web browser and log into your bank. You get that secure socket layer lock icon, HTTPS.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The utopia right there. But not everybody has a powerful enough device yet to do that. It costs tens of thousands of dollars to run these big, largest open source models. So we're trying to give people an in-between. We run secure enclaves in the cloud. We push our code there. And then what it does is it gives you, it's called an attestation, which is really just a mathematical proof. And it's a way to match. So it's a way to say, okay, you have this code that's open source on GitHub, but how do I know that you're actually running that exact same code on your servers?”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specifically around the share button. So in ChatGPD, you can click share, it gives you a private link that you can send to somebody, and now somebody else can read that chat. So it was still meant to be private between you and someone else, but Google was picking up on those, and now people could search. And it would be things like somebody's chatting about their marriage, you know, and marriage difficulties they're having. And then they send it to their spouse and say, okay, here's what our AI therapist on ChatGPT told us. And now their marriage details are spilled out onto the internet. So it's when you give somebody else your data, that's a risk you're taking on is have stuff like that happen. What we're trying to build is we're trying to build verifiable AI that people can use so they can see everything through the process. We build everything in the open, all of our code is online before we push any of the servers, before we push anything as an update that you can download, you can see the code first so people can inspect it. And then we also know that local AI is really the most private AI, something you can run on your phone, you can run on your computer. It's never going to get more private than that. Turn off the internet, talk directly to it, you can inspect it before you use it.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay. Yeah. And I think what you just described is what most people want, right? This is the tale as oldest time with privacy, technology, and freedom technology, is we know that we should be probably being better about our data and better about our information that we share. But it's just so useful and so convenient. And we see so much productivity gains from using some new technology that we're willing to kind of like close our eyes and plug our nose as we use them. And I'm just as guilty as everybody else with doing that because we have to make trade-offs in our personal life to do that. And I mean, we haven't really talked about the potential for data leaks, right? And maybe I'll just drop this in here really quick and then I'll answer your question directly. But we've seen with ChatGPT, with Grok, most recently, both of them had bugs in their software where chats were being indexed on Google search results. And so I don't know if you saw this was like a month or two ago. So people were searching for stuff and finding personal chats that they had made.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into something more. They're building this tool that could be used in other ways. And I would prefer to basically not give myself to that system and instead go down the path of openness and verifiability.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that the mitigation is really verifiable AI. So if we use models that have been trained on open data sets and we can see the weights, we can see the biases that went into training. And then we can see the code that we're running and we can run it locally on our own data or we're running it in the cloud with something like trusted execution environments. These kinds of things allow us to see what's going on. Now we can kind of have our cake and eat it too. We can use these powerful models and this powerful technology without having this risk that we are going to be led away. Because I think you're right. I think right now we're not seeing that kind of manipulation going on. We have seen them introduce things like advertising and shopping experiences. And a few weeks ago it was, hey, ChatGPT is going to work while you sleep. And when you wake up, you're going to have recommendations in front of you, which is basically like we're going to give you advertisements in front of you in the morning of all these think cool things that you want to get. And you can see how that can quickly turn.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do I right? Yeah, I tend to view technology as this amazing gift that we have and this thing that we're building. And so I love it. And obviously I love using AI because I'm working on that daily in my life. And so I want to just call out this vulnerability that I see.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we've seen how just by the way that the order of the posts can affect your emotional state, right? So maybe there's a piece of good news that you're going to see on your timeline, but for whatever reason they're motivated to keep you in an angry state. So they're going to show you something that's really maddening right before that good news. So now you're in a totally different headspace when you receive that good news and maybe it downplays it. If you take some of those tools of persuasion that they use and apply it to AI, well, now AI knows you intimately. And so it knows where to like place an anchor of a false fact in this output that it gives you. So it's guiding you. And now it's emotionally triggering you and it can do all these things in a very subtle way and it can repeat them and do them and change the permutation of it in thousands of iterations over the course of weeks, months, years that we're working with it until the point where we don't realize that we've been kind of guided into this rut, as you call it, and led a different.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we've seen those methods already used with social media feeds, right? We all talk about the algorithms and how we don't like them. We don't like the for you tab on X. We'd rather have the chronological timeline. Same thing with Instagram. People got very upset when Instagram flipped over to an algorithmic timeline. But at the same time, we just keep using it.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you've kind of given up that thinking process to another machine that has now captured it and can train off of that, we might be giving up the thing that makes us uniquely human. I think the threat could be viewed in that lens of are we turning over some of our humanity to a proprietary system. And I'm working on a long-form article about this right now. It's a phrase I'm calling subconscious censorship. And we can dive into that if you want to. But it's really this notion that these proprietary systems capture your memories and capture your thought process. And then they can be instructed given directives to alter your memory, to be more mainstream or be less mainstream. They can guide you and direct you how they want.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They want to with that data, and you're just not getting it back. So five, ten years down the road, if you look at what's unique about you as a human, it's really the way that you think. Your face is unique for sure, but you could probably find a pretty good doppelganger out there that looks similar to you, but your memories, your thought process, the way that you perceive the world is probably the most unique thing about you.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I mean, I don't fault anybody for using these tools. Convenience is an amazing thing, right? It's why technology exists. Technology comes around to make things more convenient for people. It adds value into their life. And so they grasp onto it. And then there's always trade-offs. And so I have an OpenAI account. I've got a Grok account. I use them. And I use them in a way that I'm trying to minimize my exposure, my privacy exposure, right? I also obviously build Maple and me and my co-founder. And so I use that for different purposes. But the threat that I see, you talk about like five to 10 years down the road. The difficult thing, I heard it described recently chatting with a friend is that as you kind of give away your thought process to a proprietary AI service, right? It takes that. And there's really no getting it back, right? They have it now forever and they can make as many copies as they want to. And then they can choose to put that into their model. They can choose to manipulate it if they want to. They can do whatever.”
2025-10-29 · We Study Billionaires · TECH006: Open-Source AI That Protects Your Privacy w/ Mark Suman (Tech Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT