The Ledger, every show

“And if I look at the actual craft of software engineering that we're doing right now I think it's literally a fact that it'll be completely different two years from now.”

“It feels like a local maximum in a really obvious way to me, which is you have a bunch of code written by people written in programming languages that were designed to make it easy for people to tell a computer what to do.”

“I have a strong suspicion that if we designed these systems with the role of a software engineer in mind being an operator of a machine rather than the author of the code, we could make the process Much more robust and much more productive.”

“If you're pre-training a foundation model that's the fourth best that's gonna cost you a lot of money, and the return on that investment is, is probably fairly questionable, because why use your fourth best large language model versus a frontier model or an op…”

“I think we have probably have too many people building models right now. There's already been some consolidation actually of companies being folded into Amazon and Microsoft and others. But I do think it will play out a bit like the cloud infrastructure busine…”

“I would have a hard time personally, like, funding a startup that says, I'm gonna do pre-training, you know, it's, ah, it's, I don't really know, like, what's your differentiation in this marketplace, and I think a lot of those companies you're already seeing,…”

“Is I do think that, It will be the delivery mechanism for AGI when it's produced, and not just because of the many researchers at OpenAI, but because of the amazing, like, utility it's become from individuals.”

“I have a completely personal theory that it will benefit deep generalists in a lot of ways, too, because your ability to understand a fair amount in a lot of domains, and leveraging AI knowing where to prompt the AI to go explore and bringing together those do…”

“What I'm excited about in the software industry is not necessarily a large language model with a prompt and a response being The product of AI, but actually end to end closed loose systems that use large language models as pieces of infrastructure. And I actua…”

“Nvidia will probably benefit from all of the investments in AI. I'm not sure I would do that over a 20 year period, just assuming that the infrastructure will shift.”

“At some point, we will be we will no longer be supply constrained in software, but we're not anywhere close to it right now, and you're taking something that has always been the scarce resource, which is software engineers, and you're making it not scarce, and…”

“AI, I think, will change the landscape of software to be tools of productivity that, to agents that actually accomplish tasks, and I think it will Help some companies who, for whom that's a amplifies their existing value proposition and it will really hurt oth…”

“I think it might be a really hard product to build because when you think about all the different services and people you interact with every day, it's kind of everything. So it's not, it has to generalize a lot to be useful to you. And because of the Personal…”

“The combination of, Bureaucracy and inaccurate storytelling I think is the reason why companies sort of die”

“Few great things have been created by committee, you know? And so if engineering is an order taking organization for product you can sometimes make meaningful things, but rarely will you create extremely well-crafted breakthrough products. Those tend to be sma…”

“To go use that metaphor, we're sort of in the jQuery era of agents, not the React era”

“I think the idea that a company can make money sort of pre-training a foundation model is probably not true. It's hard to, you're competing with just you know, unreasonably large capex budgets.”

“Nowadays the tools are changing so rapidly that I'm like not totally skeptical of tool makers, but I just think that open source will broadly win.”

“I think that we're bringing the cost of writing code down to zero. So the fact that we're still writing Python with AI cracks me up just cause it's like literally was designed to be ergonomic to write, not, not safe to run or fast to run.”

“I actually think for every single agentic domain, whether it's customer service or legal or software engineering, that's essentially what the company building those agents is building is like the system through which you express the behaviors you want, esoteri…”

“Prompts are great, but it's not actually a complete specification for anything. It never can be.”

“It seems likely to me that, you know, at first and something that is AGI will be good in digital domains you know, because it's software. So if you think about something like AI discovering a new say like pharmaceutical therapy, the barrier to that is probably…”

“Certainly software engineering will be one of the disciplines most impacted. And I think that it's very, so like, I think if you're in this industry and you define yourself by the tools that you use, like how many characters you can type into Vim every day, th…”

“In 2025, existing digitally will probably mean having a branded AI agent that your customers can interact with to do everything that they can do on your website.”

“I think we are in a bubble.”

“We will look back and laugh at some of the excess, but I'm confident we will have, you know, a brand defining and likely trillion dollar consumer company come out of this. 10 plus enterprise software companies that are enduring, you know, public companies comi…”

“I actually think the AI market commercially will play out like the cloud market did over the past 20 years.”

“And so I think this idea that somehow the way the world wants to buy software will change because these models are really smart. Doesn't resonate with me.”

“I think there's probably some short term professional services spend that reflects the lack of the maturity of the AI applications market right now. You know, and I think that when there are solutions like Sierra and others for specific domains available, you …”

“You know, I think that in that market probably if you need a model like that, you should download llama. That's the answer. It's like, you don't need much of a cheat sheet on that, you know, and or maybe Mr. All, but pick one of the open source models that are…”

“I believe the most responsible way to develop AGI is responsible iterative deployment. And the reason for that is I believe that as you're thinking about things like the societal impact access to this technology and the safety side of AGI as well, that the, Be…”

“In any one of those, you could probably make a very rational intellectual case that we're gonna hit a wall, but then you have the two others. And I don't think you can make the case for all three that they're all coming up on a wall. And I think like any big s…”

“At least my understanding why it has a sort of a goofy name is it was a research preview that turned out to be the most important product of the past decade, you know, and I think that, you know, one of the things I think about is, wow, what an important mecha…”

“Most companies should be applying AI to build solutions and most companies should have relatively modest training costs and most of their costs should be correlated with inference, which should be correlated with revenue and usage of your product.”

“I'm incredibly optimistic that just the cost of running AI will could probably track something like Moore's law.”

“I think we'll see consolidation of companies pre-training their own models you know, and I think that the cost structure of the tools and applications companies are different and perhaps more sustainable.”

“And as a consequence, you know, I think that, you know, if you fast forward four or five years, when you're interacting with any of the consumer brands, you work with your insurance company, your phone company a car rental company, you will probably be having …”

“We like to say like in 1995, the way you existed digitally as a business to have a website in 20, 25, the way you will exist digitally is to have an AI agent.”

“And my thesis is just like touch screens have come to dominate Our experience with computers because of convenience, you can have a conversation in so many different places. You don't need an instruction manual. I think it will be the main way we work with com…”

“So in the short term, my intuition is that the combination of a smartphone with Ray-Ban glasses or AirPods or the like probably, you know, meaning you might need to look at your screen less than you do today. But my intuition is because of the prevalence of sm…”

“Stop putting, you know, AI software in the bucket of computers and that rule set and how you deal with it to try to get to, you know, five nines of repeatability and say, okay, this is actually gonna be, A really creative, really impactful, much lower cost sol…”

“The focus on hardware and models and not enough focus on the applications of AI. I think many of the defining companies in AI will be delivering consumer and business solutions that happen to be powered by AI, not just the models themselves.”

“While investors claim to be long-term, very few have the patience that they extol on their website, you know, and it really requires this relentless focus on the future.”

“My take is the domain of personal agents is probably of the very large consumer companies like Apple and Google and OpenAI and others that have big consumer brands.”

“In 2025, existing digitally will probably mean having a branded AI agent that your customers can interact with.”

“What we found in practice is that broad category of technology investment is woefully insufficient for almost any meaningful customer experience. If you think about, you know, all of the interactions you've had with brands that you care about, what percentage …”

“I think that will probably play out with the frontier models. We'll end up with a relatively small number of companies doing pre-training you know, which is the really capital intensive part of model building not because, you know, there's not, they're the onl…”

“If every time there's a new release of an AI model, somehow it decreases your value, it probably indicates you're not actually a solution. You're, you might be a slight value add on top of the models. I think there's a number of startups that unfortunately sor…”