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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David George: Anthropic and OpenAI combined run rate could hit $200B
“And I wouldn't be surprised if the combination of those two companies is doing two hundred billion of revenue run rate.”
George: Top AI IPOs will individually exceed all recent VC IPOs combined
“We actually did a similar analysis where we looked at all of the VC backed IPOs that happened over the last six years. And if you sum all of them up, they're A little over a trillion dollars. Like that's probably gonna be smaller than any of the three of the l…”
George predicts AI wave will create over $25T in new market cap
“The last cycle created 25 trillion in market cap, new market cap, and a bunch of that went to the incumbents. But a lot of it went to startups and the new startups, and, you know, each one of these subsequent waves gets bigger than the prior one, and so, you k…”
George predicts consumer AI's final form will be proactive agents, not chatbots
“The end use case for consumers is not going to be a chatbot interface. Like that's the skeuomorphic version. We're going to have a native version. It's going to be proactive. It's going to do work on our behalf.”
George predicts robotics will surpass language AI categories within ten years
“We are nowhere on robotics, but I think robotics is going to be bigger than the language stuff. And I think it's going to happen in the next 10 years.”
The AI Market Will Be Non-Zero-Sum Across Labs, Open Source, and Apps
“Like, this is not an or thing. It's an and thing, right? Like, this is an and thing. Frontier's gonna work really well. Like, N minus one models are gonna work really well. Open source is gonna work really well. There's gonna be a bunch of application companie…”
AI Compute Capacity Will Remain Massively Undersupplied Through 2028
“So it seems more likely than given that fact pattern, if you go back to just the sort of macro situation that we're in, that we're, we under build on the supply side. For like through 28. And by the way, like there's no capacity available with all the forecast…”
George: AI market will remain supply-constrained rather than bubble
“But I think it's more likely we remain supply constrained for the next three years than then we end up in bubble territory.”
David George: AI will be the biggest model buster of his career
“Most importantly, we think that AI is going to be, you know, the biggest model buster that I've seen in my career, certainly.”
George: Oracle will be cash flow negative for years due to CapEx
“They're going to go cashflow negative for many years to come.”
David George: AI model companies will add 75-80% of public software's net revenue in 2026
“And I think if you were to do that same comparison for 2026, all of the entire public software industry, I mean, SAP, this is not just SaaS, like including SAP and older software companies. I think the AI companies, the model companies will be something like 7…”
George: AI CapEx payback will occur between 2030 and 2040
“I think the payback of this probably happens, you know, over a longer period of time, like, you know, between 2030 and 20 40 as well.”
a16z View: AI will become a ubiquitous utility like electricity or Wi-Fi
“Our house view now is that AI is going to end up like, You know, electricity or wifi. Like if you're getting, if you're accessing, you know, electricity at somebody's house, you're not like, Hey, let me chip in, you know, a few pennies for, you know, sitting i…”
AI infrastructure will be utilized more predictably than early internet broadband
“That is heartening to me that the supply build out will be utilized. Maybe in a more predictable way than, you know, broadband in the early internet build out days just cause it, you know, it's built on the back of the previous infrastructure stuff.”
George: Enterprises will not vibe code their own Salesforce replacements
“I don't think that like companies are going to vibe code up like their salesforce.com. That's just not worth it.”
George: a16z expects a 3x to 4x return on Databricks investment
“I happen to think that the return profile of that recent one in Databricks is, is very attractive. But, you know, we don't want an entire portfolio of things that we think are like pretty safe two X's, you know, where I think the question is, can we make five …”
George: AI business models will adopt freemium over simple subscriptions
“And so, you know, I think there's a question of how it will play out. Will it just be a simple subscription or is there gonna be something more You know, freemium that comes along. I would bet on the latter. I would bet on the latter.”
George: AI market value will accrue primarily to applications and chips
“We're very high conviction that at the application layer you will have tremendous value and at the chip layer you will have tremendous value.”
All Incremental Global Internet Capacity Will Come From Space
“And any incremental internet capacity, like, is not going to be built in a traditional sense on, it's going to come from space.”
George: Long-time private mega-unicorns will IPO in next 18 months
“I think we're gonna have a really, really interesting 18 months where we're gonna have some of the big kind of private for a very long time companies that go public.”
George: AI market value creation will exceed mobile and cloud's $10T
“And I think AI is going to be much larger because I think the impact on the economy is going to be much larger.”
David George: AI Freemium Models Will Monetize Via Affiliate Advertising
“Probably end up with freemium products where they monetize through some form of advertising. It's hard to speculate now on what that would look like. I think it's probably some form of like an affiliate type thing that has like a dirty connotation because that…”
George: Three Mile Island nuclear plant will be powered back up
“I think Three Mile Island's gonna get powered back up.”
George: Energy will be the primary AI bottleneck for five years
“I think energy ultimately in the next call it five years will probably be the bottleneck, and that's why we're so excited about nuclear and making investments in that area.”
Software pricing models will not be radically overhauled within five years
“I'm low conviction that we end up, you know, five years from now with all the software companies monetizing in a completely different way.”
George: Top a16z growth investments target 5x upside and 2x downside
“Where, you know, we have some, you know, absolute champion companies that we think actually have, like, a lot of room still to run where on the downside we think we would, if things really go poorly, like, we'd still probably make two times our money, and on t…”
George: Web transactions will soon occur without navigating through Google
“We're getting pretty close to the point where you can actually conduct business activity on the Internet without having to go through Google.”
George predicts companies staying private longer will not reverse
“Our asset class is five to six trillion dollars of value, and the dynamics around companies staying private longer, They're not going to reverse.”
George: Corporate AI adoption will cause a five-year market reckoning
“So, you know, I think there's gonna be a sort of reckoning over the next five years of who can actually embrace change, push through change management, you know, adopt all the best products and those that don't.”
David George: AI revenue will surpass CapEx much faster than Azure did
“It took 10 years for Azure revenue to surpass their capex. And I think it's, I think that sort of ratio or equation is going to happen much faster with AI.”