AI Industry

“I think the AI industry has done a terrible PR job in general.”

“To me, the central reason why I just cannot think it's not marketing is because it's, if this truly were the case, I don't how, understand how we as a society would not only do everything in our power to try to restrict these companies, I certainly would not i…”

“Despite the, like the sort of scary concept of this, like, you know, supremely intelligent model, that's totally proprietary to one company. The, so far the kind of industry trends haven't played that way at all.”

“Like, we have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people What the benefits are, and how the downsides can be mitigated, and we certainly have not done a good job.”

“We are going to be able to squeeze so much more out of smaller models than I think we had imagined in the industry. Because yes, there's intelligence and larger models are more intelligent. Like no doubt about it. We should continue to scale up. But the behavi…”

“In the next couple of years, as AI is getting more and more into production, there will be a lot of focus. In getting that clarity and getting that discipline out. The token maxing is just a thing in time, but we're quickly moving to ROI maxing, which is about…”

“The cost structure that we're currently seeing from whether it's from how much we spend on model training and development to employees to where we're at that phase of the bubble where it's like, you know, like the, all the opulence in the companies is what peo…”

“We're kind of trapped in this local attractor state of chatbots and coding agents and like turn taking in batches. And this is absolutely not how humans interact with each other.”

“And we're going to see seven hundred billion dollars in capital expenditures this year”

“The conversation around moving towards deep seek and adding it into your agentic process or adding Chinese models did not exist in any conversation I was in 12 months ago and now is in almost every conversation, at least as an option, because cost has become s…”

“So AI as a whole is getting a hundred billion in revenue and spending seven hundred billion a year. That's not a great business.”

“I mean, I think generally the AI world has An issue around, like, expectations versus delivery of the I think when we have these very dramatic statements about white collar go work going away or you know, we will see, we will have AGI by 20 and 27. Like, I thi…”

“The reality is value accrual is a time dependent phenomenon. So like, it's not like there is one person who steady state gets all of the value. That's not how it works.”

“We're going to be stuck with somewhere between one and three companies, maybe two, there'll be an AI monopoly or duopoly, and they're going to decide along with some new government agency, which will be a revolving door. To their companies, who has access to w…”

“I think the thing, you know, that could cut against that, if the regulation gets extremely difficult and mundane and expensive, that could actually lead to more oligopoly. And I think some of the players know that and are begging for regulation.”

“Writing software with AI really in the last six months has suddenly found product market fit. And suddenly everyone is You know, using 10 times more capacity, more compute than they thought they were going to use at the beginning of the year. And the tech indu…”

“Now, what I think we underestimated perhaps is the real world complexity. Of deploying these so that they actually deliver the value in the real world, right?”

“But I think it's more likely we remain supply constrained for the next three years than then we end up in bubble territory.”

“The user experience is light years away from being easy enough for anybody that doesn't understand at a deeply technical level what's going on. And I think that's why you see only single digit millions people using things like cloud code and codex and, you kno…”

“The AI hatred narrative is partially just what it is. It's also, let's be honest, it's because Sam Altman in particular, but everyone leaned into it as marketing. This is so scary. This is so powerful. This is going to be like, it was a very explicit strategy …”

“And what I guess I'm saying is if anything goes wrong in the revenue execution path over the next 18 months and the retail is left holding the bag, it's going to be double hate. And that's very bad.”

“Five years from now, when we're talking about AI, I think we're talking about more companies, not fewer.”

“And the people who are utter morons at AI but brilliant at politics are going to have us for lunch. That's the movie in the next three years. They're going to have Sam for lunch because he's lied to them as far as they're concerned, and they're going to have t…”

“I don't think it's necessarily exponential in the way everyone is looking at it right now. And the way these deals are being done, and the way people are chasing it, and again, when it benefits both parties involved, I do think that It can be more of a linear …”

“AI is going to become a lot like Costco where you pay for the membership, right? And that gets you in the store. And that's actually the part of Costco's business that is, you know, the highest margin. And then you have, you know, everything you're buying in t…”

“Elon went out of his way to say, Everyone kind of does this. It's like an open secret in the industry, which I think is like, also kind of true, but that doesn't make it, there's like, it's fraught, I guess is what I would say.”

“It's just kind of depressing to see these groups like fighting in this way. When we have so much bigger problem, like we have so many bigger problems as an industry, right? The big problem being like public perception of AI is like already so bad. Like people,…”

“If you're in the game and you're a leading player and what you're doing is working, you can influence people in, who are also in the game to take the right actions. And so that is like the core of it. Like if we just pack up and go home, you have no influence …”

“And I think that we will see even this year, how everyone who is participating is going to be compute strapped.”

“If government Defines us all. We'll probably screw it up. So you guys help us define what this transition looks like. Look at the training or reskilling, whatever tool we want to call it, but you also got to help pay for it because the costs of this are going …”

“I think it would be helpful for the industry to refocus some messaging on not AI is going to cure cancer, but human humanity is going to use AI to cure cancer and do a number of other things. Right. And so the bar is not just like one shotting it with a prompt…”

“I don't think that the bubble is brewing. I think there's, like, what I think is a very different part, as I compare it to other cycles, I think there's a clear value, clear revenue numbers for a lot of the companies.”

“Nvidia basically captures and did for a while more than 100% of the profits from the AI boom, because so many of the other companies in the AI space were losing money.”

“It's a horse race, and I think we're probably missing 90% of the picture of how it's gonna play out.”

“I've said openly, publicly, not for the first time that I'm at least somewhat uncomfortable with the amount of concentration of power that's happening here. I would say almost overnight, almost by accident.”

“So we're, so we only have PMF for coding agents, like, in the industry overall, I would say, right? And then there's some, like, very narrow, narrow other use cases like customer support, et cetera.”

“And so I think we're seeing more kind of founder movement, you know, as a fraction of founders than we've ever seen. I mean, maybe since, like, I don't know, the time of like Shockley and the Traitorous Eight or something like that way back in the beginning of…”

“I think the industry could hit a hundred billion ARR by the end of this year, like 45, 50 for open AI, like 35, 40 for anthropic.”

“The only thing is we are running out of is really benchmarks. So the improvement on benchmarks, it's kind of like harder to measure.”

“I tend to think the AI industry is going to be structured a lot like the computer industry ended up getting structured, which is you're going to have a small handful of basically the equivalent of supercomputers, which are these like giant, you know, kind of w…”

“Five-year strategic planning is not a useful exercise right now.”

“I think if one thing happened this year, I think more and more folks coming over to team products that models aren't going to solve everything.”

“Otherwise, this thing is going to build and you'll see crazier and crazier versions of this Bernie Sanders video.”

“Well then to the point is there's no lock-in, right? It's like, it's always, the only thing that changes it, which is, was the original pitch, was that we're so close to this, like, game over nuclear style outcome that someone will get to first, and then there…”

“I think we're definitely due for some kind of shakeout. Again, regular listeners will know I'm very bullish. I work in the AI industry. I am, I'm very bullish on generative AI, large language models as a whole. The way everything's like, you know, played out o…”

“And the only way it pays off, unless I'm wrong. Now, George Gilder would scream at me. He goes, every technology has created more jobs. This is the only technology at this level of spend. You have to be taking jobs. Jobs have to go away.”

“Whenever there's a trillion dollars of spend going on, there is a de facto backstop.”

“I think one of the biggest challenges, the fact that it's very hard to have predictability, right? Everyone wants to know when are we going to hit the breakthrough? Everyone wants to know how many GPUs do I actually need? Everyone wants to know, like, what's t…”

“One of the things that is very different between crypto and AI that we've noticed is that on the crypto front, everybody just wanted rules and the industry was relatively unified.”

“And I think circularity ultimately will be tested by demand. Because all this will work as long as there is demand for the final output of it. And up to now, that has been the case.”

“And I think that's particularly important in this era of AI where everyone's kind of locking themselves in walled gardens and trying to capture parts of the platform that are emerging.”

“I, I'm kind of bearish on, on, on true AGI breakthrough because what we built is so useful and economically valuable.”

“Everyone has perverse incentives, so someone who's in the AI industry is going to tell us how AI is the best thing since sliced bread”

“The hundreds of billions of dollars that companies are investing in AI now account for an astonishing 40% share of the U.S. GDP growth this year. 40%. AI companies have accounted for 80% of gains in the U.S. Stocks so far in 2025, This is helping fund U.S. Gro…”

“My take on this would be ads will be part of it, but it has to be substantially more than ads. They have to end up automating a good chunk of white collar work to make the valuations work.”

“Which is that in the next two or three years, given the right feedback loops, given the right compute, given the right, you know, elbow grease and this kind of stuff, we think that we as the AI industry are all on track to create something that is at least as …”

“No one has tried to pretend that there's a clear revenue growth path to meet this. So it has to be from funding of some sort, and maybe people will keep plowing money into it, but it certainly, none of it adds up in a simple way.”

“I don't think so. Mainly because exactly as you said a moment ago, it's still a concentrated group of companies that have benefited so far. So the actual unwind would still be within those companies. There's already been plenty of companies that have been, you…”

“35 companies or 36 companies are responsible for 99% of the revenue or at least the token spend in AI right now.”

“It's actually not about the dollars and cents. It's literally about this, like, meta power game of thrones.”