Scale AI

“We're kind of hitting this wall where we've leveraged all the publicly available data. And so one of the hallmarks of this next phase is actually going to be data production.”

“Much, much fewer of the POCs have made it to production than I think than I think the industry overall expected, and I think a lot of enterprises are looking at it now, and, you know, the doomsday that they thought might have happened hasn't really happened.”

“The reason that you are a good founder CEO is because you make very good decisions over and over and over again over an extended period of time. And to pull yourself out of those decision making loops is, you know, would be kind of crazy.”

“For the past two-ish years or the past maybe three, four three years, let's say three years it's almost been more about execution than anything. It's a lot of just engineering, like how do you actually have large scale training work well. How do you make sure …”

“I think this almost always results in ruin. I think that this isn't to say that you can't hire executives from the outside, but I think what you need to do when you hire executives from the outside is you really like, you like, they really get steeped in how t…”

“Yeah, so MEI, we basically rolled out this idea of merit, excellence, and intelligence and the basic idea is in every role we're gonna hire the best possible person regardless of their demographics and we're not going to do any sort of you know quota-based opt…”

“I think we're entering a phase where the research is going to start mattering a lot more. Like, I think there will be a lot more divergence between a lot of the labs in terms of what research directions they choose to explore and which ones ultimately have bre…”

“So over the past few years we've Basically kept our headcount flat. I mean, we've grown it very slightly as the business grown, but the business itself is, you know, five X, well, six X, like, you know, the business has grown dramatically.”

“Agents has been the buzzword for the past two years and basically no agent really works. Well, you know, it turns out there's just no agent data on the internet.”

“Lack of pricing power, let's say, on the pure model layer certainly indicates that renting models out on their own may or may not be the best long-term business. I think it's likely to be a relatively mediocre long-term business.”

“What we're moving in AI is that we're not trying to replace software. We're trying to augment or automate human work.”

“I think that's the key thing is you want to become a system of record system of work and eventually become a system of intelligence where you actually do the work.”

“I think it's like a factory for founders, whether or not it's in the product role or it's in the Ford deployed engineering role or AI role, because these are people that are just doing customer discovery while they're building, which is like what being a found…”

“Sitting with the customer, you know, flying to six hours away and saying, I'm going to spend three days with you is invaluable. Speeds you up three weeks.”

“If you're not selling to enterprises, it's difficult to think about this as a scalable business model.”

“And I would say it was probably like an 18 month lag between what you see on Twitter and what's the state of the art and what is actually working in enterprises.”

“There's been an enterprise team at scale for a long time, but really just in the past 12 to 18 months has really taken off as something that's found kind of product market fit.”

“That's because the industry is changing a lot. Every day, ah, it changes, you know, GPT-V comes out, and it's different than, you know, it was three months ago, and so what we need to actually build in product changes, and so we've just said, you know what, th…”

“The other half of our business is the application business”

“At scale, we break down the forward deployed role, not just a forward deployed engineers, which, you know, Palantir made famous, but we also have forward deployed product. That's the team that I lead and forward deployed machine learning engineers or an applie…”

“Oftentimes the big customers want to retain the IP. We're very happy to allow them to retain that IP because, you know, it's core to their business.”

“What does the end-to-end solution look like? Which only 30% of it might involve AI, and the rest is that schlep that you just have to do to have an impact.”

“Like your job is not to build a product. Your job is to solve a problem. And that is what enterprises are going to expect. That is what's going to unlock 10 X bigger contracts with them.”

“And the key is that it should be the customization and a wedge into installing your software that is durable over time. It's not worth just doing this as, you know, there may be great consulting businesses to build, but that's not, you know, the pot of gold.”

“And what we're seeing now with this platform shift is enterprises still need all of that customization. They need all of the feature set, but it doesn't exist in the software and doesn't exist anywhere. And so that's the value of this forward deployed motion i…”

“Really the mandate of the forward deployed engineer is to do that. You do need to say, okay, we have 60% out of the box, but that last 40%, maybe it's a data integration, it's a visualization, it's an agent that we haven't built yet. You do need to do that wor…”

“That's like very hard to work with, but they're a 10 X engineer. Those people should be on your platform team and not on your forward deploy team.”

“I think the smaller the company and the smaller the customer, the more that you need to retain all of the IP and build it back into the platform.”

“One is I think you just have to be very honest and very sober about your revenue when you do that. And you say, Hey, like we were able to chart, get to ten million dollars in revenue, but it's, Consulting-ish revenue. Our repeatable aspect is two million, and …”

“We have contributors, you know, a 100,000 plus contributors around the world That do these tasks.”

“A bunch of the perplexity team was there. Dennis, Dennis was on the feed team with me. Johnny Ho Jerry Ma. And then Alexander, the scale, you know, like was there. He was there between high school and college.”