Opinion
Aidan Gomez: Becoming dependent on cloud providers is dangerous for AI startups
“It's really dangerous when you make yourself a subsidiary of your cloud provider.”
Opinion
Gomez: OpenAI's AGI effort is taking a backseat to consumer products
“At least like lately, or in the new OpenAI they're like a product company. They're like hardcore building a consumer product. That is their objective, and it's working. People love that product. It's, you know, a household name at this point. So I think in the…”
Insight
Aidan Gomez: AI agent developers are disadvantaged without owning model architecture
“If you're not able to actually transform the model to be better at the thing that you care about, if you're not the one building the model, if you're just a consumer of the model you're structurally disadvantaged to build that product.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Aidan Gomez: AI Will Not Cause Mass Unemployment
“The fears around displacement and replacement, both on the consumer side, where we're all gonna get addicted to chatting to these chatbots, and on the workplace, the end of work, you know, there's gonna be mass unemployment. I can't see that happening.”
Opinion
Gomez: In-person work provides an unquantifiable productivity lift over remote
“In-person is just so much better. It's just, you can't even quantify the productivity lift from in-person work.”
Assertion Contradicted
Aidan Gomez: There is no market for last year's AI models
“The reality of the matter is there's no market for last year's model.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Aug 2029
Aidan Gomez: AI ecosystem will feature both vertical and horizontal models
“I think we'll continuously exist in a world of multiple models, some focused and verticalized, others completely horizontal.”
Assertion Partly supported
Aidan Gomez: Curriculum learning has failed in machine learning
“What's funny is that curriculum learning has actually failed in machine learning. We don't really do curriculum learning. It's just throw the hardest material and the easiest material all at the same time and let the model figure it out.”
Assertion Partly supported
Gomez: 13-billion-parameter models now outperform original 1.7-trillion GPT-4
“GPT-IV, if it's true what they say, and it's 1.7 trillion parameters, this big MOE, we have models that are better than that model that are like, thirteen billion parameters.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gomez: AI requires exponential compute scaling for linear intelligence gains long-term
“Yeah, I mean, I think it certainly requires exponential input. You know, you need to continuously be doubling your compute in order to sustain linear gains in, in intelligence. But I think that probably goes on for a very, very, very long time.”
Opinion
Gomez: Pure compute scaling requires becoming a tech giant subsidiary
“If you're just doing the scaling project, you have to be one of those, or you have to be an effective subsidiary of one of those companies.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gomez: Data improvements drive nearly all open-source AI model gains
“Pretty much all of the major gains that we've seen in the open source space have come from data improvements.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gomez: Current LLM API market is dominated by synthetic data generation
“The current LLM API market is dominated by synthetic data.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gomez: Selling Standalone AI Models Will Become a Zero-Margin Business
“If you're only selling models, it's going to be difficult because it's going to be like a zero margin business because there's so much price dumping.”
Insight
Gomez: AI Value Currently Accrues at the Chip and Application Layers
“Value is accruing beneath, like at the chip layer, because everyone is spending insane amounts of money on chips to build these models in the first place, and then above, at the application layer, where you see stuff like let's say ChatGPT, which is charged on…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gomez: Choice in the AI chip market will expand faster than expected
“Right now, chips are just exceptionally high margin, and there's very, very little choice in the market. That's changing. I think it's gonna change faster than other people think. But yeah, I, I'm very confident.”
Assertion Supported
Gomez: Google TPUs are now viable for super large-scale AI training
“You can definitely train big models on TPUs. Those are actually now a usable platform for super large scale model training, and I think Google has proven that quite convincingly.”
Insight
Gomez: Non-experts cannot perceive improvements between frontier AI model generations
“Because these models are getting smarter, humanity's ability to distinguish between them, or not humanity, but each individual's ability to distinguish between them becomes way harder. You can't tell the difference between generations, because you're not enoug…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gomez: Cohere avoids the hyper-inflated valuations of AI comparables
“We are actually in a dramatically better position than a lot of our comparables. Because our valuation is not at the crazy state that a lot of others are.”
Insight
Gomez: Software companies shouldn't fear AI margin compression as costs plunge
“For folks like Canva who are keeping the same price I mean, I think it's a good bet. They want to grow their user base. They want to expand their user set. Just give them the most useful product possible. At the moment, don't worry about margins because the co…”
Assertion Contradicted
Gomez: Financial services firms are pulling back from cloud to build data centers
“When I speak to folks, It's super conflicted in financial services. Yeah. People are pulling away from cloud. They're pulling away from cloud. They're building out their own data center capacity. Everywhere else still seems to be, we need to migrate to cloud.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gomez: AI hallucination rates are falling fast, but will never reach zero
“The models definitely do hallucinate. The hallucination rates have been dropping dramatically, but they'll, they'll always have some chance of making stuff up or getting something wrong.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gomez: Microsoft Copilot will not achieve complete enterprise workforce augmentation
“I think Copilot is great, and it's like the right idea of augmenting a workforce with a, with an assistant but it's siloed, again, within an ecosystem, so it's, it plugs into Office and, you know, the Microsoft suite of products, but enterprises don't just use…”
Assertion Supported
Gomez: Google Brain Trained Language Models Two Weeks After Transformer Paper
“Well, they weren't in the sense that, like, two weeks after we released the Transformer paper, we started training language models. So we, like, technologically and research-wise Google brain was certainly not behind.”
Aidan Gomez