The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Sivulka: Fine-tuned models will never catch up to inference scaling
“And so you saw the idea of, ah, of post training or kind of like this refined, verticalized model creation, ah, just always would lose to scaling laws. And maybe we're at the end of scaling laws at training, but I actually think, you know, Hebbia and now OpenA…”
Sivulka: 90% of enterprise AI is vapor and usage stats are fake
“I think, like, 90% of enterprise AI right now is almost like this vapor where, hey, we swear it works, like, look at this amazing demo where we ask, What does the CEO say about the investment? And the minute that they actually go to, you know, try to use it in…”
Sivulka: AI model layer will commoditize as value accrues to applications and hardware
“I, you know, I think that ultimately the model layer, and I think this is not a hot take anymore. I've been saying it for a few years, but I think it will become commoditized. I think that a lot of value will accrue at the hardware layer especially And we coul…”
Sivulka: AI will increase financial firms' AUM and drive employment
“I think that it will change the way that people do work, but I genuinely believe that, ah, it'll actually increase the AUM of the firms that use it. I think it will actually drive more employment.”
Sivulka: CTOs know the least about business workflows for AI
“The CTO or the IT folks are actually the people that know the least about the business. The people that, that actually understand how to use AI in a business context are those that are closest to the business.”
Sivulka: 90% of enterprise AI queries require computation beyond RAG search
“And so all of these questions, it was actually almost 90% of the questions that people were asking these systems weren't answerable by search through the documents. But rather they had to be work done on top of the documents and then answered.”
Sivulka: Capable AI agents turn user interface into a management problem
“The better agents are, the more work that they do, the more important it will be that they are easily understood by humans. The idea would be, okay, let's say we have a bunch of employees, 10,000 employees, or 10,000 AI agents drop at a company. They're all ex…”
Sivulka: Chat is not the long-term primary interface for AI
“Ultimately, do not think so. I think that chat was always a useful feature. It's an, it's a useful interface, but again, it's like a single cell in Excel. It's like asking if the TI-eighty-four was the right interface for computers, or the terminal was the rig…”
Sivulka: AI inference costs dropped 7 orders of magnitude in 4 years
“I think that since Hebbia started, the cost of inference over a fixed number of parameters has decreased by, like, seven orders of magnitude in four years.”
Sivulka: 90% of AI market remains in experimental budget phase
“I think that 90% of the market is still in experimental budget phase, but we're starting to see early promises of Actual value.”
Sivulka: Hebbia was first to productionize RAG in 2020
“We end up building a product studio, which is the first to productionize RAG, Retrieval Augmented Generation, also in 2020.”
Hebbia raised pre-seed from Peter Thiel and Floodgate before Index seed
“We raised a pre-seed from Peter Thiel, and Floodgate, and then our seed from Mike Volpe at Index”
Hebbia hit $1M revenue before raising a $30M Series A from Index
“We ended up going from zero to a million dollars of revenue sometime in 2021 or 2022, and raise our series A also from Index, from Micon Index, which is thirty million bucks.”
Peter Thiel gave George Sivulka his first offer from a venture investor
“We ended up talking for, I think, like, four or five hours about Not only the company and all of the flaws that I had in my business model, but then also math and deep esoteric philosophy and like just the world. And he said, you know, I'm not investing at the…”
Sivulka rented a master closet in East Palo Alto starting Hebbia
“I asked my friends who were renting out a house in East Palo Alto to let me rent a room, the cheapest room they could possibly find, and they were all fully booked, and it was like, I think, over a thousand dollars of rent, and they said, I think it was actual…”