The Exchanges

Q Is there a parallel to a prior time where you can remember this? Whoa, immense uncertainty. I do not know what happens. I'm better to sit out and watch because I don't want to see Monday drop another.

A Yeah. But so March of 2000, uh, almost 26 years ago, tech stocks dropped between 30 and 40% across the board. And then if you missed a quarter, you were down over 50 or 60%. And we lived in that malaise Uh, March through the summer. And by the way, we were still able to get a couple of IPOs out at, but at lower, um, multiples during that time. And we just sat in misery, um, until nine, 11, which what I call was the coup de gras to finish us off. And, uh, the market got destroyed and we were thinking, Hey, you know, we don't do.com investments and insight. We're going to be fine. Cause we knew Then in 99, that there was a bubble and we knew that dot coms were going to blow up. We said, look, it just can't be sustainable. There's not enough commerce. There's not enough people on dial up. You can't do commerce on dial up and there's not enough fiber in the ground. So sure enough, there was a burst. However, the tsunami came in, took out the dot coms and then took out all software. We all went down and we were in misery for years.

AI assessment note: “March of 2000, uh, almost 26 years ago, tech stocks dropped between 30 and 40%”

Q So if you're on the board of OpenRouter and the ten billion dollar acquisition comes through, what do you say?

A You say, fuck yeah, this is great. You know, and, and like a lot of people, you know, you take, you take it, you take the money when you can. And look, credit to OpenRouter, they're there early. Developers didn't see another alternative. They could just go to there, go to the API, and they're willing to pay five percent markup to get their inference. And guess what? Shame on the enterprises for letting them burn all that money. I mean, that's a huge amount of money, by the way. And so I think that, uh, you're gonna see a big disruption in that model in the next three, four, five months. Actually, not just Akinaki, but Venice, Venice IO is doing that. And there's two or three other guys that are now in the process of building exchanges that you can go directly Get the inference you need without paying the five percent markup.

AI assessment note: “You say, fuck yeah, this is great. You know, and, and like a lot of people, you know, you take, you take it, you take the money when you can.”

Q Is there a parallel to a prior time where you can remember this? Whoa, immense uncertainty. I do not know what happens. I'm better to sit out and watch because I don't want to see Monday drop another.

A Yeah. But so March of 2000, uh, almost 26 years ago, tech stocks dropped between 30 and 40% across the board. And then if you missed a quarter, you were down over 50 or 60%. And we lived in that malaise Uh, March through the summer. And by the way, we were still able to get a couple of IPOs out at, but at lower, um, multiples during that time. And we just sat in misery, um, until nine, 11, which what I call was the coup de gras to finish us off. And, uh, the market got destroyed and we were thinking, Hey, you know, we don't do.com investments and insight. We're going to be fine. Cause we knew Then in 99, that there was a bubble and we knew that dot coms were going to blow up. We said, look, it just can't be sustainable. There's not enough commerce. There's not enough people on dial up. You can't do commerce on dial up and there's not enough fiber in the ground. So sure enough, there was a burst. However, the tsunami came in, took out the dot coms and then took out all software. We all went down and we were in misery for years.

AI assessment note: “March of 2000, uh, almost 26 years ago, tech stocks dropped”

Q Dude, you've built a firm that many, and including me, would aspire to. I just want to understand some wisdom. Knowing all you know now, what strategy did you do with Insight, or product did you do with Insight, that with the benefit of hindsight, you maybe wish you hadn't done? What did you learn?

A Oh, that we hadn't done. In the early days of Insight, the, the big mistake, we hired some famous guy to start Insight Europe. And after six months, we shut it down. It was a, it was a mistake and a half. We were not mature enough to do that. And, um, Europe was something, well, you know, we, we loved Europe early on. Fund one had an investment called SLP in Paris. Fund two had a company called MetaQuattro in Spain that went public. That was a big win. We did deals in Portugal. We did deals in the Czech Republic. In the nineties. So we thought, oh, let's do a fund. Big mistake. Too much difference, too much. We needed to stay in New York together. We needed to focus. We needed to learn from each other. Having people in Europe was too challenging. That was a mistake that we made.

AI assessment note: “we hired some famous guy to start Insight Europe. And after six months, we shut it down.”

Q You mentioned, yeah, utilization of OpenClaw. What do you think is the impact of OpenClaw more broadly that we're maybe not considering enough?

A Ah, great question. Um, look, first thing you got to do is look at open call and look at the community. I mean, uh, the commitment to open source and the number of people developing for it, right? I mean, you can look at huge companies like open AI and you can look at anthropic putting massive resources and super talented, and then you look at open source and you've got sheer numbers of people doing integrations, massive amounts. If that community keeps accelerating and growing, um, We're gonna see agents do incredible things that they don't have today. When I think of an autonomous agent, first of all, we're gonna have to come up with what we call the claw stack, or some form of stack for the autonomous agent. Back in, you may not remember, back in 2003, 2004, you know, we were post nine 11, the world was miserable. People couldn't afford to build websites with, uh, Sun, Sun servers and Oracle databases, which were expensive, but the lamp sack came out, which was Linux, Apache, web server, um, MySQL database and PHP front end development tool. And that led to the explosion in 2004, 2005 of websites and ultimately commerce. Google went public in 2004 and rode that wave brilliantly. And I think in the same thing with autonomous agents that you're going to find the open source community coming out with the stack, right? Right now you've got a reasoning layer that's dominated by C…

AI assessment note: “we're gonna have to come up with what we call the claw stack”

Q Dude, you've built a firm that many, and including me, would aspire to. I just want to understand some wisdom. Knowing all you know now, what strategy did you do with Insight, or product did you do with Insight, that with the benefit of hindsight, you maybe wish you hadn't done? What did you learn?

A Oh, that we hadn't done. In the early days of Insight, the, the big mistake, we hired some famous guy to start Insight Europe. And after six months, we shut it down. It was a, it was a mistake and a half. We were not mature enough to do that. And, um, Europe was something, well, you know, we, we loved Europe early on. Fund one had an investment called SLP in Paris. Fund two had a company called MetaQuattro in Spain that went public. That was a big win. We did deals in Portugal. We did deals in the Czech Republic. In the nineties. So we thought, oh, let's do a fund. Big mistake. Too much difference, too much. We needed to stay in New York together. We needed to focus. We needed to learn from each other. Having people in Europe was too challenging. That was a mistake that we made.

AI assessment note: “we hired some famous guy to start Insight Europe. And after six months, we shut it down.”

Q But I get killed for this. I say publicly triple, triple, double, double. Dad, you remember this? Am I glib and my kid, you are a product of a cycle. Or is this just a new expectation level for venture?

A Uh, you are glib at some times. Not all the time, but right now you are, yeah. Uh, I would argue that general statements don't apply here. You have to be highly specific. Look, if you look at Anthropic, and you look at what they've done, Anthropic and OpenA, it's never been done in the history of the world, it shows the importance of the time. So we are definitely, if we look through the history of venture, in a completely different era, And the frontier model companies have done something extraordinary in the history of the world, right? I mean, this is, this is definitely on the level of inventing fire, uh, you know, the electricity, whatever you want to call it, it's truly extraordinary what the frontier model companies have done. They've, they've lit the match to AI, and the companies that can follow right on top of them and not get killed by them, But can grow and solve more infrastructure problems and help create an ecosystem around the model companies, those guys can, they deserve those economics. Other categories? No way. Like, for example, neoclouds. Uh, no way. I don't buy it. I think some, one or two of those neoclouds are gonna end up dominating, and a lot of them, at least half of them, are gonna go away. And that, and they're gonna, and they're gonna go away with massive amounts of money being burned as part of it.

AI assessment note: “You are glib at some times. Not all the time, but right now you are”

Q Should we just all get used to a lower margin generation of companies, and that is AI sadly, or should we think differently about margin in this generation?

A Early in a cycle, With new technology, it's always a real estate game, right? I mean, when they wanted to populate Oklahoma with settlers, they just had this giant date, had all these people out there, pulled down the flag, and everyone ran and just put their, put their stake in the ground and said, this is mine. And it didn't matter if it belonged to Native Americans or not, they just did it. And I think in the same way, You've got people doing the exact same thing. They're taking low margins or zero margins, in some cases, just to get the customers, to get the relationship, to get the real estate, and so it's a strategy. If you've got capital, you're going to own the real estate, and then you're going to go back later and get the margins built into the business.

AI assessment note: “They're taking low margins... go back later and get the margins built into the business.”

Q You mentioned, yeah, utilization of OpenClaw. What do you think is the impact of OpenClaw more broadly that we're maybe not considering enough?

A Ah, great question. Um, look, first thing you got to do is look at open call and look at the community. I mean, uh, the commitment to open source and the number of people developing for it, right? I mean, you can look at huge companies like open AI and you can look at anthropic putting massive resources and super talented, and then you look at open source and you've got sheer numbers of people doing integrations, massive amounts. If that community keeps accelerating and growing, um, We're gonna see agents do incredible things that they don't have today. When I think of an autonomous agent, first of all, we're gonna have to come up with what we call the claw stack, or some form of stack for the autonomous agent. Back in, you may not remember, back in 2003, 2004, you know, we were post nine 11, the world was miserable. People couldn't afford to build websites with, uh, Sun, Sun servers and Oracle databases, which were expensive, but the lamp sack came out, which was Linux, Apache, web server, um, MySQL database and PHP front end development tool. And that led to the explosion in 2004, 2005 of websites and ultimately commerce. Google went public in 2004 and rode that wave brilliantly. And I think in the same thing with autonomous agents that you're going to find the open source community coming out with the stack, right? Right now you've got a reasoning layer that's dominated by C…

AI assessment note: “you're going to find the open source community coming out with the stack”

Q Okay, so they have autonomous agents to actually write code. What does that mean for Cursor, a 27 to thirty billion dollar company that's raised a lot of money?

A Yeah, I'll tell you. So for most of the companies I just mentioned, their view, as they've told me, is Cursor is obsolete. That's where the product is today. Now, my view is, yeah, well, but that team is really smart. They've got a lot of money and a lot of customers. They've got time to embrace autonomous agents, which is what I think they'll do. And they've got shots to pivot and figure out what the next direction is. Um, but you know, in the AI business, you've got to be going where things are going to be. You can't be thinking about yesterday. And, um, so I think those guys are going to have to quickly embrace autonomous agents.

AI assessment note: “their view, as they've told me, is Cursor is obsolete.”

Q And so we have agents buying software and we review their decisions. Great. I didn't have to deal with sick leave. I didn't have to deal with entitled millennials. I, I sound incredibly old school, but this is the truth as you know. Um, are you worried about what happens to labor forces given what you said most importantly being the speed of change is so fast?

A You know, I'm glad you brought that up. Um, we're about two and a half years from the next presidential election. I'm here to say that that is going to be a major issue On the next presidential election, it could decide the election. It'll be one of the most important things because there's no easy answer. There's no question that, um, anyone that inputs data into a computer that does scheduling that, you know, like an executive assistant or people doing marketing, those jobs are, are, are probably ultimately going to be better done by autonomous agents, white collar jobs. People have been saying that for years. I mean, this is nothing new. The question is, when was it going to happen? And now with the advent of OpenClaw and NanoClaw and all the other autonomous agents that are coming, there are the direct threats. First of all, not to the people with the job. First of all, to the next person in line, the next junior developer you want to hire, the next executive assistant, the next marketing person. So the first thing you see is people stopping or slowing down Hiring of, of white collar employees that input data and use a computer. That's the first thing. Second thing, depending on the speed at which these autonomous agents evolve, because there's a lot that they need to do. We've proven, they've proven it's exists that they can write code and they can do anything you want fro…

AI assessment note: “those jobs are, are, are probably ultimately going to be better done by autonomous agents”

Q I think limitations is interesting, dude. I, I often reflect on regret. I love being in Europe. I have family. I, I make a lot of money in Europe, which is great, but I never tried to go to Hollywood as the actor, and I'm just wondering if I'll regret that. What, what would you say to me as a wise OG?

A You know, there's a great British actor I had lunch with once named Kenneth Branagh, and he was reflecting on exactly that question. He said, He's made the Hollywood movies, he, but he's done a lot in theater, a lot with Shakespeare, and he said, you know, I could have been more like Olivier that went to Hollywood and did Hollywood films late in life, but I didn't. I chose a different path, and for Branagh, I think he was very happy he didn't move to Hollywood. He could have had that career, and he's 6566 now looking back, and he's saying, yeah, I could have been that, but you know what, I'm, I'm, I'm really, Happy I didn't do that. So maybe you're like Kenneth Branagh. You're going to be happy you didn't do the Hollywood. I didn't, we started in New York. I've never left Aspen. I lived in New York part time. I never moved away from Aspen. Jeff and I found an insight in New York city and I cover the west coast because it was a lot quicker for me, but Jeff and I just lived on airplanes for the first. 10 years, you know, and that's how we handled it back in the day. That was pretty revolutionary. Remember? Silicon Valley was all about people walking down the street. There was VCs that said, I don't invest in anything more than five miles from my office.

AI assessment note: “So maybe you're like Kenneth Branagh. You're going to be happy you didn't”

Q What do people not know about having money that they should know?

A Very, very easy answer. Money does not come with instructions. Just remember that. Well, everything else you buy, you get, you know, you got a Rivian comes with instructions. You get an iPhone. It comes with instructions. Money doesn't come with instructions. So you need to learn to respect it. It's energy. Money is the equivalent of energy and you need to respect it. You know, you don't just, uh, leave the lights on at home and the air conditioner on your home all day long, where you're gone. You respect energy. You treat it with respect and you use it for good and you use it to make things happen. And you don't. Waste it foolishly being an idiot. You know, you don't want to go to Las Vegas and hand out a hundred dollar bills to just random people. Take that energy and do something great. I mean, I don't know, as Larry Page has said, if he had extra money, he'd just give it to Elon to let him build things to change the world. Um, you know, um, I, I think that, that if you've got money, you've got energy, you can give it to entrepreneurs. They'll do amazing things.

AI assessment note: “Money does not come with instructions.”

Q Okay, so they have autonomous agents to actually write code. What does that mean for Cursor, a 27 to thirty billion dollar company that's raised a lot of money?

A Yeah, I'll tell you. So for most of the companies I just mentioned, their view, as they've told me, is Cursor is obsolete. That's where the product is today. Now, my view is, yeah, well, but that team is really smart. They've got a lot of money and a lot of customers. They've got time to embrace autonomous agents, which is what I think they'll do. And they've got shots to pivot and figure out what the next direction is. Um, but you know, in the AI business, you've got to be going where things are going to be. You can't be thinking about yesterday. And, um, so I think those guys are going to have to quickly embrace autonomous agents.

AI assessment note: “their view, as they've told me, is Cursor is obsolete.”

Q What do people not know about having money that they should know?

A Very, very easy answer. Money does not come with instructions. Just remember that. Well, everything else you buy, you get, you know, you got a Rivian comes with instructions. You get an iPhone. It comes with instructions. Money doesn't come with instructions. So you need to learn to respect it. It's energy. Money is the equivalent of energy and you need to respect it. You know, you don't just, uh, leave the lights on at home and the air conditioner on your home all day long, where you're gone. You respect energy. You treat it with respect and you use it for good and you use it to make things happen. And you don't. Waste it foolishly being an idiot. You know, you don't want to go to Las Vegas and hand out a hundred dollar bills to just random people. Take that energy and do something great. I mean, I don't know, as Larry Page has said, if he had extra money, he'd just give it to Elon to let him build things to change the world. Um, you know, um, I, I think that, that if you've got money, you've got energy, you can give it to entrepreneurs. They'll do amazing things.

AI assessment note: “Money does not come with instructions. Just remember that.”

Q Is Apple's AI strategy unforgivable mistakes, or is it genius patience waiting to see how a developing ecosystem plays out?

A The answer to that is something that it's going to be hard to know. We'd have to go sit down with Tim Cook now that he's retired. Maybe he'd tell us, um, what is the culture around AI at Apple? How are they thinking about it? What are they doing in there? You know, I know they're using Claude Code, huge, massive Claude Code customer, but how are they thinking about it? Did they have anything innovative to say? Have they been intelligent, watchful observers? Or are they just dumb consumers? If they're consuming, sorry, they're in big trouble. They, they're gonna suffer. But if they're watchful observers and they've got something up their sleeve, then we could be surprised by them.

AI assessment note: “The answer to that is something that it's going to be hard to know.”

Q on the show. You had Lynn on the show, amazing founder, where she said that actually specialized intelligence would be the future and that the majority of companies would have their own models trained on their own data and that would be very important. Do you think we have a world of millions of specialized models in this way and a couple of frontier providers? How do you see that?

A Well, on two things in the big, in the big overall view, if we say that models are there to provide intelligence and we look at the world and you've got seven billion people, how many intelligent people do we have in the world? I mean, in some ways you're going to see that models are going to replicate humans in this sense of being specialized and being able to do a specific task in a specific way. You know, someone who's cutting a gem has a certain intelligence about how to do that work. That's pretty specialized. And I think, I think you're going to see intelligence is in early days of these models. It's all going to be about specialization and the ability to customize. What's happening is, is that you can't customize, uh, anthropic models or, or open AI models right now. Not the, not the, not the big frontier models. You're not allowed to do that. Um, so that's just giving an opening, I think, for, for, Um, open source models to be tuned. As I mentioned on our last call, I thought that that open source models and ASIC chips were going to kind of be part of a tsunami of their own. And if you're looking at a Frontier model with double dollar digit cost per token, and you're looking at an open source model that's 10, 11 cents per token, while all tokens aren't created equal, it's still enough of a difference that there's going to be a massive adoption Of, and, and by the way, i…

AI assessment note: “It's all going to be about specialization and the ability to customize.”

Q And so we have agents buying software and we review their decisions. Great. I didn't have to deal with sick leave. I didn't have to deal with entitled millennials. I, I sound incredibly old school, but this is the truth as you know. Um, are you worried about what happens to labor forces given what you said most importantly being the speed of change is so fast?

A You know, I'm glad you brought that up. Um, we're about two and a half years from the next presidential election. I'm here to say that that is going to be a major issue On the next presidential election, it could decide the election. It'll be one of the most important things because there's no easy answer. There's no question that, um, anyone that inputs data into a computer that does scheduling that, you know, like an executive assistant or people doing marketing, those jobs are, are, are probably ultimately going to be better done by autonomous agents, white collar jobs. People have been saying that for years. I mean, this is nothing new. The question is, when was it going to happen? And now with the advent of OpenClaw and NanoClaw and all the other autonomous agents that are coming, there are the direct threats. First of all, not to the people with the job. First of all, to the next person in line, the next junior developer you want to hire, the next executive assistant, the next marketing person. So the first thing you see is people stopping or slowing down Hiring of, of white collar employees that input data and use a computer. That's the first thing. Second thing, depending on the speed at which these autonomous agents evolve, because there's a lot that they need to do. We've proven, they've proven it's exists that they can write code and they can do anything you want fro…

AI assessment note: “I'm here to say that that is going to be a major issue”

Q We've spoken a lot about autonomous agents. When you have autonomous agents, do they make your systems of record valueless? Or do they make them much more valuable because they have existing distribution, which they can incorporate those agents into and leverage? Which one?

A Well, it depends, you know, um, I'm an investor in Carta and have been for a long, long time, and that's a system of record of sorts for, for stocks, and it has a lot of potential. Um, and I believe they're doing the right thing on all fronts, but If, um, tokenization of stocks come and they use Carta, then Carta is going to be infinitely more valuable, right? So, cause they have the cap table, they can help manage the tokenization. However, if tokenization comes and they bypass Carta and a new system of records get built, then there's not much to say that that system of record is going to be worth much in the future. So it depends on execution of the Carta management team and their ability to To go capture the trends that are coming forward.

AI assessment note: “Well, it depends... So it depends on execution of the Carta management team”

Q When you think about that, Challenge of Frontier versus Open. Alex Karp has said, the biggest enterprise customers in the world don't want to work with Frontier model providers. They're scared that they're going to eat their lunch, move into that business. Is that true? Or is that Alex rather self-servingly then saying, and Palantir will help implement a full infrastructure that's not that?

A Well, look, Alex has a bunch of customers that That have, that of course are very worried about that. All the, all the CIA and all the intelligence organizations, of course, they, they, they, they, they're paranoid about that. So he's, he's one, got a huge customer base that that's exactly the way those people think. But two, look, there's two issues, right? One is the data, you know, and yes, they've been giving their, I mean, Anthropic's been getting all this data and open AI already for years. So in some ways the cat's out of the bag, right? I mean, look, If you, if you, if you worry about from a security perspective, I mean, look, I mean, Apple could already rob my bank tomorrow. They have all my passwords. Apple has everything on me, right? If they wanted to, uh, I think Amazon has a lot of data too. Maybe not the prize data, but they have a lot of data. Microsoft, Satya Nadella himself come out and said, look, we've got a lot of the data around the communication, how communication works inside an organization. So look, enterprises have already given up. A lot of their secret sauce to the ears, and they should be cautious. I agree with Alex that Open, that, that enterprises need to be smart about just continuously shoving their data up into anthropic and open AI. They need to practice discernment, and they need to think about what they want to keep behind the firewall, and…

AI assessment note: “I agree with Alex that Open, that, that enterprises need to be smart”

Q Do you think the public markets over rotate when it comes to price responsiveness on these updates? You saw Cloudflare and CrowdStrike hit like 10% on the back of an Antropic security. Is that an overreaction?

A Look, you know, the answer to your question is about the market. So they over rotate. If you go to wall street, you'll see the giant bull that's there in the statue. It's because of a herd mentality. And yeah, I think, and I think investors are like, Hey, I'm not a technologist. I'm just going to sit back and watch this. Someone panicked. Maybe the others are just sitting on the sidelines. What you're seeing is, is less about panic selling, uh, because it'd be down a hell of a lot more than it is. And what you're seeing is. Is cautious on the sidelines buyers that are saying, Hey, I don't see a deal here. I'm not sure I have enough information to jump back into CrowdStrike and bring the stock price up. So is it an over rotation or is it just a pause where a lot of investors are sitting back saying, Hey, let's, let's get more information about, you know, who's going to be the winners and who's going to be the losers. That's the way I see it.

AI assessment note: “What you're seeing is, is less about panic selling”

Q What does that mean a minimum viable income UBI?

A It means that, that, you know what, you're going to go and get a, get effectively, you know, a certain amount of money guaranteed to you every month. And so that you, if you're a white collar person, they'll, they'll change the unemployment program because no administration's going to want to sit there and say, yeah, I've presided over 10, 15% of the country unemployed. What they'll do is you have an option to put them into a program and retrain people to do something different, maybe to have a better quality of life. If you take the optimistic view, people living, you know, you know, those jobs that are going to be going away are not going to be jobs that gets you a vacation in Brazil anytime soon. They're the jobs that are, you're suffering at every day, making a living and you're struggling as to whether you can pay your health care or not. And so maybe those people say, I'm going to move out of the city, move out of the suburb, and maybe I'm going to move back to the country and, and grow food. You know, I'm going to get this grant to do so. Um, there's already innovative businesses in Wyoming where they're taking veterans and giving them, uh, branches to lease because now with technology, one or two people can run a massive branch instead of eight people. And so there's new things like that happening. Everywhere.

AI assessment note: “a certain amount of money guaranteed to you every month”

Q So I always say the product that we sell our LPs is the quality of our investment decisions and that reduces with remote decision making. Do you agree or do you think that today remote decisions work just as well?

A That's a function of the team. That's a function of who's involved and then a function of experience, you know. Overall, If I were to invest in a company, I would be very suspicious of remote management because human beings today need it. As we move to autonomous agents and human beings, that's a good question. You know, that's a very good question. I don't know how the feature is going to play out, but in the past, uh, remotely managed situation, I know for me, cause I didn't live in New York. As a co-founder, it was really hard on my team for me to fly in, fly out, fly in, fly out. And you, cause you have to make decisions remotely. You have to sit with an entrepreneur here in San Francisco and you have to commit now. And you've got a whole team in New York. You know, it's really tough being that remote guy. You know, if you're all local and you're all sitting in the same office, you got to make a decision tomorrow. It's a lot easier. So I would argue that remote. Decision making is very difficult.

AI assessment note: “So I would argue that remote. Decision making is very difficult.”

Q I'm a little bit stuck here, because our job is to ascribe where we see value, and where we think there will be more value. And the things where we used to ascribe value, revenue, growth rate, margin, have become transient slash questionable. So in that time, how do you think about where you ascribe value?

A You know, it, it, it depends on what the timeframe is. If, if you look at most software companies that are out there, um, normally when a new technology comes, it sort of expands the market before it contracts, because people are already in their momentum. They're doing what they're doing. I wouldn't expect to see normal software companies to see software just fall off the, the, the, you know, off the radar. That's not gonna happen. I think what, what happens is, is that people get fearful And prices change, and then the underlying quality of the business changes based on how well the management team adapts to the situation. Um, you can imagine some companies that have system of records that have great context could actually increase value if they're able to put that context to work on, you know, with agents, with autonomous agents. And then you have other people that Oh, they don't really adjust fast enough. They don't really understand what the new market's like, and then their system of record or their software declines because they haven't really moved fast enough. What we have with the tsunami happening is a wake-up call to move to higher ground. Don't get caught on the beach when the damn thing hits the beach. Move to higher ground. And that kind of adapting of your business, some people will do it, some people won't.

AI assessment note: “how well the management team adapts to the situation”

Q Do you think the public markets over rotate when it comes to price responsiveness on these updates? You saw Cloudflare and CrowdStrike hit like 10% on the back of an Antropic security. Is that an overreaction?

A Look, you know, the answer to your question is about the market. So they over rotate. If you go to wall street, you'll see the giant bull that's there in the statue. It's because of a herd mentality. And yeah, I think, and I think investors are like, Hey, I'm not a technologist. I'm just going to sit back and watch this. Someone panicked. Maybe the others are just sitting on the sidelines. What you're seeing is, is less about panic selling, uh, because it'd be down a hell of a lot more than it is. And what you're seeing is. Is cautious on the sidelines buyers that are saying, Hey, I don't see a deal here. I'm not sure I have enough information to jump back into CrowdStrike and bring the stock price up. So is it an over rotation or is it just a pause where a lot of investors are sitting back saying, Hey, let's, let's get more information about, you know, who's going to be the winners and who's going to be the losers. That's the way I see it.

AI assessment note: “is it an over rotation or is it just a pause where a lot of”

Q he always says, the thing I love about Harry is the statement, that's great, Jerry, but what about me? Uh, which I specialize in as a venture capitalist. I have a shitload of NVIDIA. And I'm thinking through as I listen to you, can you just play out for me that migration from Jensen chips to Asics chips and, and just like how that actually plays out in reality? Right.

A Well, it's the thing that wasn't mentioned as to why he bought Grok. He needs that capability so that he can handle, uh, Asics chips eventually, right? I mean, cause Grok is, is those guys know how to put, you know, memory right on the chip. And so that's automatically, you know, an ASICS chip today, right? And so I think Grok is not just about, you know, handling different types of workloads and getting memory on the chip. It's about making sure that CUDA can also support ASICS chips, and they're going to have to go out and make sure that they can get, you know, they know what's coming. They absolutely know what's coming. And so they're, I think the Grok acquisition is going to help them Uh, make sure that CUDA is viable for the A-Six explosion that's coming.

AI assessment note: “It's about making sure that CUDA can also support ASICS chips”

Q So like I have the CEO of monday.com on the show tomorrow. When you think about the question, I'm not picking on Monday, but I'm saying the question of will enterprise software and will software just be entirely vibe coded, personalized, customized. How do you think about that? Because that is the kind of eradication of a lot of their market caps.

A Well, first of all, um, Autonomous agents, and it may take a year or longer for most enterprises to actually enable, um, and get committed to autonomous agents, but they're going to write software faster, cheaper than any human being on the planet. And they already are. And so again, it's this thing of like, if you're making your software for autonomous agents, And they have a reason to use it and it's valuable. Great. You're going to do fine. But if you're not making your software for autonomous agents today, you're going to be challenged in the future. Maybe it's six months, maybe a year, maybe 18 months, but you're going to be severely challenged if you still think human beings are going to buy your software.

AI assessment note: “they're going to write software faster, cheaper than any human being on the planet”

Q What would you say to me? Play the game on the field, Bill Gurley style. Be mindful. Don't spunk cash into Neo Labs at a billion dollars pre for one person out of OpenAI. What would you say to me?

A Well, I think Bill, Bill's on the board of the Santa Fe Institute with me. I mean, his, his guidance is pretty smart. He's pretty much on, on point with a lot of things with venture capital. What I would suggest is you look for impact. You, you look for people that are gonna be just, they're just, they're just way different than anyone else. And you look at them and you realize it's not that they want to build this business. It's that they have to build this business. And if you find that in a person and you've, and you recognize that, that they have the commitment to it, because the commitment to it is all in. There's no other option. And look for that and look for the fact that what they're gonna do has impact if they do it.

AI assessment note: “What I would suggest is you look for impact. You, you look for people”

Q What does that mean a minimum viable income UBI?

A It means that, that, you know what, you're going to go and get a, get effectively, you know, a certain amount of money guaranteed to you every month. And so that you, if you're a white collar person, they'll, they'll change the unemployment program because no administration's going to want to sit there and say, yeah, I've presided over 10, 15% of the country unemployed. What they'll do is you have an option to put them into a program and retrain people to do something different, maybe to have a better quality of life. If you take the optimistic view, people living, you know, you know, those jobs that are going to be going away are not going to be jobs that gets you a vacation in Brazil anytime soon. They're the jobs that are, you're suffering at every day, making a living and you're struggling as to whether you can pay your health care or not. And so maybe those people say, I'm going to move out of the city, move out of the suburb, and maybe I'm going to move back to the country and, and grow food. You know, I'm going to get this grant to do so. Um, there's already innovative businesses in Wyoming where they're taking veterans and giving them, uh, branches to lease because now with technology, one or two people can run a massive branch instead of eight people. And so there's new things like that happening. Everywhere.

AI assessment note: “a certain amount of money guaranteed to you every month”

Q Totally get you on cost efficiency of open source compared to frontier models. But what everyone says is you're seeing the token traffic go towards Open models, and you're seeing the dollar traffic, the revenue, go towards frontier models. Is that how you expect it to continue, and will frontier just be paid a lot more for harder problems, and open source take the majority of easy?

A That's a great question. Um, I'm going to give an answer, but I want to caveat it this way, and that there's opportunity in the answer for short-term disruptions that last From three months to a year where economics appear to have leveled out. As long as the frontier model companies, and I'm convinced they're, they have goals for continuous learning, um, and, and, and ultimately lifelong learning in these models. And, and so as they, if they can execute against those goals over the next decade, the demand for those models will never cease. And so they'll just continue to grow. But because The global demand is so massive. I mean, I just, I'd assume that we're probably in single digit demand fulfillment today. Single digits, low single digits, and I suspect that open source has a long way to go to, um, fill in the need, and of course it's going to be low cost, and of course most of the dollars are going to go to the people that, that, uh, can afford to pay for them, right? I mean, um, Tesla's were really expensive at the beginning, uh, and only wealthy people could afford a Tesla at the beginning, and now that's changed, and so I think that's the way it's going to work. Only the wealthiest companies and people can afford these models and, and, uh, in the early days and open source is going to be suffering from a very, uh, a big catch up game in terms of, in terms of revenue. Um, …

AI assessment note: “open source is going to be suffering from a very, uh, a big catch up game in terms of revenue.”