Jonathan Ross

“AI is really good at using AI. And that's really what agentic is, right? So humans benefit from using AI. So does AI. Just like you would do research about me before I show up on your show, AI is going to kick off a job doing research on different tools it's g…”

“Yeah, I think it's still early, and one of the limiters is payments aren't really built for this yet, but if you can make micropayments, the number of payments is going to skyrocket.”

“Yeah, and this also goes towards a shift of going, people are moving from being ICs or individual contributors to all being leaders, but leaders of AI.”

“When I hire people, I hire very autonomous people who often go off and execute on their own, and they would be terrible in most corporate environments.”

“The first thing that you have to do as a founder is you have to go from the technical thing that you know how to do and that you can add value with to learning how to manage people. And for me, that probably cost Grok three to four years.”

“And the basic idea in intentional leadership is if I ask someone, should I do something? Oh, they have opinions. Most people will be pessimistic and give you negative opinions. On the other hand, if you express intentional leadership, you say, I intend to do t…”

“80% of the employees participated. And I think about half went to the statutory minimum salary by law. And remember, engineers get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. These folks like cut their salary down to like 50, 60,000 dollars, whatever the statutory …”

“The biggest flip in my hiring was when I went from looking for positives, which is what you do when you're trying to grow talent, to looking for negatives, which is what you do when you're trying to select talent.”

“What I'm seeing is that code is becoming almost free. It's, it, the marginal cost is approaching zero.”

“When you create homework or a test for kids, if they can look up the answer online, or if they can ask AI to solve it, you haven't taught them what they need for the next stage. But if you give them a problem where they have to ask the questions and get AI to …”

“He reached out to Jonathan Ross literally just weeks ago, and the deal closed for twenty billion within two weeks. And he told his whole team, I want it done before Christmas, and it was done ahead of time.”

“That's how the hyperscalers feel. So of course they're going to be spending like drunken sailors because the alternative is that they're completely locked out of their business. So it's not a purely economical framework that they're using. It's a, do we get to…”

“If you're not a member of the mag seven, You're not going to be able to get anywhere near the valuation. And so what do you do to stay there? You spend. And it's worth it because the stock value stays up because you're in the top seven or 10.”

“I have no doubt that OpenAI will be able to build its own chips. I have no doubt that eventually, Anthropic will be building their own chips, that every hyperscaler will build their own chip.”

“The thing is, Nvidia effectively has a monopsony on HBM.”

“If Nvidia wanted to, they could build fifty million of those GPU die, Per year. But they're going to build about 5.5 million GPUs this year.”

“You could have a model that is 10 times smarter than OpenAI's model. And if you have 10 times the compute, OpenAI's model's gonna be better.”

“I believe that AI is going to cause massive labor shortages. Yeah, I don't think we're gonna have enough people to fill all the jobs that are gonna be created.”

“And what that means is people will need to work less. And that's gonna lead you to number two, which is people are gonna opt out of the economy more. They're gonna work fewer hours, they're gonna work fewer days a week, and they're gonna work fewer years. They…”

“And coding is gonna become the same thing. For you to be in marketing, you're gonna have to be able to code. For you to be in customer service, you're gonna have to be code be able to code.”

“The real reason why you need higher margins is volatility, because if you have a razor thin margin and the market moves, you may not be able to raise more money, you may not be able to get a loan, and so what a margin does is it gives you stability and staying…”

“I want my margin to be as low as I possibly can make it while keeping my business stable, and I'm going to make my cash flow by increasing the volume.”

“Right now the biggest problem I see in AI is if you see a good engineer, one that you would have hired before, they can go out and they can raise 10, twenty, hundred million, a billion dollars, and then rather than contributing to one of the other AI startups,…”

“In terms of whether or not the economy is overheated, I think one of the best predictors of that is, is the economy getting in the way of the success of the companies. If it's not getting in the way, then I don't think it's overheated.”

“It's definitely much more aggressive than it's ever been in history but only in tech.”

“I'd want to invest in both. They're both undervalued. Highly undervalued.”

“So we raised seven hundred fifty million. ... Yeah, almost seven billion.”

“Yeah, but I don't sell shares, so. ... Never.”

“We're now at 13 data centers. We have data centers in the United States, in Canada, in Europe in the Middle East.”

“I think over time, we're gonna realize that LLMs are the telescope of the mind. That right now, they're making us feel really, really small. But in a hundred years, we're gonna realize that intelligence is more vast than we could have ever imagined, and we're …”

“If your job is to get better at multiplying numbers, and I tell you that I want you to be able to do it with fewer steps, more intuitively, for you to be able to multiply three-digit numbers versus two-digit, you need 10 x the data, and you need 10 x the examp…”

“It is the compute. It is the data. It is the algorithms. It's all three of them.”

“Compute has been more of a less of a bottleneck and more of a sort of a, you know, soft neck or something, right? Where, when you provide even more compute, you can sort of overpower the lack of data, the lack of improvement in algorithms. So it's not a hard b…”

“There was an algorithmic improvement on that. And the algorithmic improvement, as I explained, you know, is this seemingly silly thing where they just wrote the answer in a box and then they knew what to look for rather than having to have a human being check …”

“If you're competing, it means that you haven't found an unsolved customer problem, because if you're competing, someone else has already solved the problem.”

“More than five x lower. Just the memory alone in the latest GPUs costs more than our fully loaded CapEx per chip deployed.”

“So we use about a third of the energy per token. About over a three-year period, one-third of our cost is the OpEx, which is mostly energy and data center rent, and two-thirds is the CapEx, which means that since we're one-third of the energy, the cost to run …”

“Anywhere from, depending on the deal we do get some on the back side, but up front it's about 20%.”

“So the deals that we do the partner will off, because we don't deploy, we don't spend money for our own capex. The partner will put up the money for us to deploy. We pay back with a, you know, decent IRR, and, but we split, and most of it goes to the partner, …”

“I can guarantee you that a huge amount of money will be incinerated. But I also bet that in total more money will be made than will be put in.”

“And so we have this sort of financial diabetes as a society, and I think it's going to get worse with AI.”

“I'm anti-founder mode. I believe in delegation. I think when you are telling people how to do their job, that is an indication that it's not a, not necessarily a problem with you. It could just be that that person is not right for that job.”

“Everyone at Grok carries this twenty five million token per second challenge coin. And what this is, is it tells everyone what we're doing.”

“I would have probably said instead of whatever he said about nine billion, I would have said, yeah, I'm going to take Twitter public at 420 dollars a share.”

“Belief is that if it is possible to significantly slow or stop aging, I think that you will have a Manjaro moment in maybe the next 10 years.”

“Actually, I don't think it's enough spending.”

“At Google, we always ended up spending 10 to 20 times as much on the inference as training back when I was there.”

“I think, 95%.”

“There needs to be some sort of Automated response of like, if you do this, we will respond. If you subsidize this industry, we will automatically subsidize the equivalent industry. Just automatic. So don't do it because there's no benefit to you.”

“Model is it's a piece of machinery. It's an engine, but what is the car? What is the experience?”

“And so what's really happening is every time one of these models gets cheaper, we see our developer count just skyrocket. It just like goes up and then it comes back down a little bit, but the slope is higher than when it started.”

“I don't know that Nvidia will ever see it this way, but I do think that those of us focusing on inference and building stuff specifically for that are probably the best thing that's ever happened for Nvidia stock because we'll take on the low margin, high volu…”

“And so what you're going to see now is because it's so easy to come up with something that just kind of works. It's a little embarrassing, but it kind of works. People are really going to value well-crafted, high quality, products.”