The Ledger, every show

“If you look at it, about half or more than half of all biology research in top journals is not reproducible.”

“So the internet was 80% startup value. It was Google, it was Amazon, you know, it was all these companies we now know and love. Meta, you know and then mobile, the mobile revolution was probably 80% incumbent value, or 90%, right? And so that was, mobile searc…”

“So I think that that is part of what really helped lock in this oligopoly structure early is you had enormous capital scale going to a handful of the best players through these cloud providers. And so the venture capitalists would put hundreds of millions of d…”

“If you actually look at crash data, Real data, and people have now reproduced this across multiple countries, multiple time periods, it's the age of two. So for six extra years, we keep people in booster seats and car seats, at least against the data, right?”

“Most incumbent companies don't care about startups, and startups have five, six years before an incumbent wakes up and realizes it's a big deal, and then tries to crush them.”

“Often the CEO will promote the person who's their compliment as the next CEO, instead of finding somebody like them who can innovate and push on people and drive new products and new changes. And so often you see companies have a golden age under a founder and…”

“For very early companies, the best companies I know are almost a hundred percent in person.”

“If you look at AI, it's like, 80 to 90% of the market cap is all in the Bay Area.”

“Google was a good example of a organization that would always hire well, but couldn't fire well. It took them a really long time to clean people out. Years, like literally years. Facebook, on the other hand, was kind of known for a more mixed early talent pool…”

“My sense is everybody thinks that they were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on compute leading up to this. And so from that perspective, it wasn't really novel.”

“First, the foundation model market should at least partially consolidate. And it may be in the sort of ancillary areas. So that's image gen, video, voice, you know, a few other areas like that. Maybe some secondary LLMs or foundation models will also consolida…”

“For higher risk forest needing prescribed burns, it takes an average of 4.7 years to get through environmental reviews for simple projects and seven and a half years or so for longer. For more complex projects.”

“If you got rid of all of cancer and all of heart disease, I think you add something like five to seven years”

“Somebody on my team actually went back and asked what are all, There are common schools that all the founders of the biggest companies went to, or the last decade, for example, right? And there's basically three schools that are like a huge chunk of the overal…”

“There'd be like three eras of mankind in terms of, or three eras of intelligence, right? And the first era is basically people. And the second era is some hybrid era where it's a you know, if you look at the number of intelligence units or whatever you want to…”

“The things that I'm bullish on are where you own a workflow for a vertical. And so everybody in that vertical is using that workflow. And so if you upgrade the model, it just makes that workflow better. And so it doesn't matter what the model is.”

“Also I feel that some form of religious upbringing is useful if only to protect them from fake religions sort of coming in or modern religions.”

“Google released a model, I think two years ago called MedPalm too, where if you compare the answers from that model relative to physician experts, it outperformed them. In other words, if you use physicians to train the model will get worse.”

“You know, there's a CEO of a well-known AI company who actually, this is like his dinner question where he'll just ask people around the table, what proportion do you think that your kids will at least at one point in their life date an AI bot or have them as …”

“The venture capital industry is just too small to actually be able to support the next round for these companies.”

“Where they do a lot of the work that you mentioned in terms of iterating on copy, iterating on the imagery, doing it by different format for, is it TikTok versus TV versus whatever. That is all very automatable with AI. And so I'm very excited about that area.…”

“And so the big wave of enterprise adoption hasn't even happened yet, right? It's very early days. So all the impact is in the future.”

“I feel, it feels like we're a couple of years away from that though, right? Like there's some things that we can become dramatically more cost efficient on, but you know, at least the existing coding co-pilots and other things give you some efficiency, but not…”

“And I think from that is this under overhyped perspective, one could argue this is very under hyped in part because there's been so little true enterprise adoption. But despite that, you're seeing these massive waves of revenue and usage and everything else, a…”

“I think the M&A environment is going to be constrained due to our current FTC slash the more global regulatory viewpoint on whether they want M&A to happen or big tech to get bigger.”

“I also think honestly as an incumbent you have a couple years to figure it out because you tend to have so much distribution that you can launch four years later and still You know, when, as it were”

“And in the internet wave, you could argue 80 or 90% of the value went to startups. And in mobile, it was the other way around. Almost all the value went to incumbents, and in part it was because it was an extension of access and UI.”

“And if you just look at the headcount resident in those services, legal and accounting and certain types of sales and nursing, and you just kind of go through it all. And you add up just the payroll. For those areas, it's about three and a half to five trillio…”

“I started getting into defense tech when Google shut down Maven because I was like, oh my gosh, if Google isn't doing it, what a great startup opportunity, you know? So I started looking for defense companies and then I met Anduril and I was like, oh my God, t…”

“People say that these things are just wrappers on GPT in some cases, and you're like, well, SaaS is just a wrapper in a SQL database, and that worked out just fine for lots of people.”

“And so one could argue that in the long run, that's where those types of models should go is the inference platforms probably provide things that are more in that range. And then the hyperscalers and their partners, you know, a handful of them will be at the f…”

“I think on the foundation model side, from a venture capital or angel investor perspective I think we're going to see fewer new language models But we should see models in a lot of other areas and, you know, we have new things happening in music. We talked a l…”

“Eventually the entire UI will go away once agents get good enough, right? And so I think this is kind of the intermediary step of human in the loop. And eventually as agents get smarter and smarter, and that's going to be through breakthroughs in the base mode…”

“But at least for the next few years, it seems like where we're going to see that Really huge market cap incremental add maybe companies like OpenAI and some of the model companies, but also it seems like increasingly it's just going to be existing companies ad…”

“And if anything, I think OpenAI kind of emerges more stable through this in ways that people didn't expect simply because there's going to be more stability at the board level in a way that people didn't understand perhaps that there could have been instabilit…”

“Really what you're doing is you're taking services revenue, which is very people intensive and low margin, and you're converting it into higher margin software revenue, but less of it. So maybe you take that five trillion and you turn it into two trillion, But…”

“I feel like they're in general, people are viewing AI as this continuum where it's like, it's a CNN, RNN, and now we have transformers and it's just a straight line. And instead, obviously it's a big discontinuity in terms of capabilities. And I think most peo…”

“In the latter part of an industry, when things have matured and sort of saturated, that's when you do the hard stuff. But in the early days of a new market, you just want to do the easy stuff, because that's very tractable, it's faster, it's easier, you know, …”

“In order to 10 X or even a hundred X use cases and usages for AI outside of that, there's things that could just be done on existing models today. So you don't need to wait for GPT seven or whatever. You could start with GPT four or GPT 3.5 and add these thing…”

“They trained a model specifically on medical data, and the output from the model tended to be more correct than human physician experts.”

“And so I think people are really underestimating what happens once we have self, self-evolving neural nets, which I think is coming quite soon.”

“A lot of the emphasis right now from a regulatory pathway for drugs is, oh, you need a mechanism of function, or you need a proven pathway, and all these things that create hurdles that don't necessarily help with drug efficacy.”

“I think if I were to sort of divvy up that pie of those companies, sort of mid to late stage private tech companies, not in AI, and what's going to happen to them next year and in 20, 25, I think a third of them are just going to go under, or a third of, I sho…”

“I think there's a lot of companies where part of their defensibility is the fact that you basically had to munch specialized data or integrations, you know, that would be the SAPs of the world or different ERP systems, Workday, et cetera. Like a lot of these t…”

“This feels to me like the first time that maybe Salesforce is vulnerable or certain ERP vendors are vulnerable or others where you have a lot of very dense interconnected software.”

“And it feels like in this wave, it's probably eighty-twenty again, right? It's probably, Google will probably become a player, right? OpenAI is closely aligned with Microsoft. And then, you know Salesforce with AI is probably Salesforce, right? It probably isn…”

“Travel is decimated. Restaurants are decimated. And yet the stock markets are slightly down. And so I think all that's going to be reconciled.”

“My belief is that we're going to see a second wave of COVID in the fall, and there will be a subset of states that will lock down and a subset of countries that will again.”