It's a nice segue.

It's a nice segue.

Yeah.

We, we've been talking mostly about usage inside of the enterprise, but important to talk about consumer, given obviously that's the place where we've had some of the largest outcomes and where we spend a lot of our times.

No, we think it's still pretty early.

There was a recent survey that showed that only just over two percent of US households actually have a paying subscription for AI.

You know, maybe subscription is not gonna be the best place to monetize the majority of households, but it, it has been so far.

It's very good.

trying to say with that or what you get from that little detail? Because it comes back so

much.

And I feel like this is also one of the scenes and moments things I wanted to bring up in the novel.

So I'm glad you did.

Because I think this is so much about like all the different things that language can do.

And this is one of them, which is when language is used as a weapon against you, you know, calling her house on a landline, because this was you know, back when people had landlines and you would have to answer.

This is such an intrusion into her space, you know, into her home.

What, um, what role did he serve in your reading and understanding of the

Um, but if, if there was any, you know, actual TV shows that had inspired you.

Well, to answer your first question about Fanny's face, I, of course, there was one early bit of research that I encountered.

Um, it was maybe the first instance of a woman who had been disfigured because she had not only been botched but botched herself.

It was this Korean former beauty pageant queen, and she's older now.

Her early pictures of modeling really looked like late '80s or something like that, but I, I can't really exactly pinpoint an era.

However, um, she was beautiful, and she started getting cosmetic procedures, and this is at a time when it's not ubiquitous like it is today.

This is a long time ago.

And that's, that's part of why Fanny's, you know, she says some- I think at like a certain point like, "Well, if I was going to Beverly Hills, I wouldn't look like this." And I was thinking, I was curious about what you or how you think about like the intersection of economics and aesthetics.

What did you want your readers to consider when reading about these women taking these great risks to pursue a certain aesthetic?

At the heart of this novel, it's always about the immigrant story and all the concerns of meritocracy, of reinvention in America so that you can prosper, so that you can have a new and better life.

All of those kind of immigrant concerns are embedded within the plastic surgery and reality TV plots.

We live in an aspirational society, and that's what capitalism is based upon.

And then for a character like Ami, who is a young undocumented immigrant who works at an illicit med spa in the book, I think she says something like, she wanted a high-class nose so that she could marry a high-class husband.

And this is the idea of kind of plastic surgery as meritocracy.

If you work hard enough on your looks to get a new nose-

It's like you put all this labor into your face, and then the face will unlock all of the doors for you.

Yeah.

Um, Anthropic, if they haven't started, you know, felt it, certainly given the success of their products, they may start to feel that soon.

And they're real- I think there's real trade-offs, right? It's like how many...

When you think about GPUs, that's a limited resource.

Where do you allocate the GPUs? Is it towards the product? Is it toward new re- research, right? Is it to- or long-term research? Is it toward, um, you know, near to mid-term research? And so, um, in a case where you're resource-constrained, um, of course, there's this fundraising game you can play, right? But the fun- the market was very different back in 2023, too.

Um, I think the best researchers in the world have this dilemma of, "Okay, I want to go all in on AGI," but it's the product usage revenue flywheel that keeps the revenue in the house to power all the GPUs to get to AGI.

And so it does make, um...

So far, yeah, yeah.

Yeah

... and I think a lot of the big-- I think, you know, OpenAI is feeling that.

Um, Anthropic, if they haven't start, you know, felt it, certainly given the success of their products, they may start to feel that soon.

And they're real-- I think there's real trade-offs, right? It's like how many...

When you think about GPUs, that's a limited resource.

Where do you allocate the GPUs? Is it toward the product? Is it toward new re-research, right? Is it to- or long-term research? Is it toward, um, n- you know, near to mid-term research? And so, um, in a case where you're resource constrained, um, of course, there's this fundraising game you can play, right? But the fun- the market was very different back in 2023 too.

Um, I think the best researchers in the world have this dilemma of, "Okay, I wanna go all in on AGI," but it's the product usage revenue flywheel that keeps the revenue in the house to power all the GPUs to get to AGI.

Yeah, yeah.