The Ledger, every show

“Frequently, you have to scale first and figure out your unit economics later. In fact, putting off this question is the prudent route for anyone playing in a winner-takes-all market.”

“But unless you have a truly compelling reason, such as staying close to your customers, I believe that you currently have to come to Silicon Valley to scale a tech company.”

“For scale companies, the rule is provide whatever service you can as long as it doesn't slow us down. And that may mean no service.”

“Like, I actually think that within 10 years, we will strongly want a world in which it's only autonomous vehicles on the road and not human beings.”

“I have been known to tell founders to consider shutting their business down rather than take money from this kind of investor. Better to fail now than to do so in three years in a cloud of acrimonious smoke.”

“There's a platform sense in which I think there will be, will have, people will have an agent, maybe a couple, but certainly an agent that's kind of their general front door.”

“With AI, people haven't realized the whole consumer revolution. That's going to come with AI. And I agree with you. And as we know, as we see in Silicon Valley, everyone's talking, well, well, okay, enterprise is where the money is. That was the same thing bac…”

“And if you're going up against blitzscalers, it's very hard to succeed without also blitzscaling because the blitzscaling will set the market. It may blow up, but we'll set the market. If it blows up, it'll probably blow you up with the market.”

“Google search doesn't have network effects from its search engine. It has scale effects. But it's AdWords is where the network of it.”

“No, and that's part of the reason why it's an absolute mistake. I literally correct people that I talk to them and say, oh yeah, I, you know, Claude's my best friend. And I'm like, no, friendship is a bi-directional relationship. Like part of what is actually …”

“If you get a serious, you know, kind of medical concern, if you're not using one or more frontier agents as a second opinion, you're making a desperately bad mistake, right?”

“Like, for example, we obviously run more and more at risk of serious pandemics, whether they're manmade or natural or anything else. AI is the only thing I can really think of as a good defense against that.”

“We have our kind of blind spots, and a classic one for us tends to be well, everything should be done in See us. Everything should be done in software. Everything should be done in bits.”

“Simply doing prediction and getting that prediction right, and by the way, it doesn't have to be right a hundred percent of time, it has to be right, like, one percent of the time, because you can validate the other 99% were it right, and then finding that one…”

“Silicon Valley will classically go, we'll put it all in simulation and that will solve it. Nope, that's not going to work.”

“And so the diagnostic capabilities, these are much better knowledge stores than any human being on the planet.”

“I actually think there will be a position for a doctor, 10 years from now, 20 years from now. It won't be as the knowledge store. It will be as a user of an, as an expert user of the knowledge store, but it's not gonna be, oh, because I went to med school for …”

“I think agency and goals is almost certain. There is a question. I think this is one of the areas where we want to have some clarity and control. That was a little bit like the kind of question of what kind of compute fabric holds it together because you can't…”

“They obsess about the climate change stuff, because actually, in fact, if you apply intelligence at the scale and availability of electricity, you're going to help climate change. You're going to solve grids and appliances and a bunch of other stuff. And just …”

“Now, as you and I know, we are line of sight from a medical assistant that's 24 seven on every smartphone for every person who has a smartphone.”

“A small number of years called three, five. How is assessment going to be done? It's going to be one-on-one oral interviews with AIs.”

“I think the Democratic Party really did alienate a section of Silicon Valley and the tech people, Whether it was attacks on crypto, whether it was, you know, kind of just attacks on big tech, you know, all these things.”

“Well, I think the key thing is getting mass adoption. Like actually, My big worry in the competition with China, look, there's all kind of worries about, like, will we move fast enough? Will we be aggressive enough? Will we, like, where will the right models b…”

“One of the reasons why I very rarely invest in kind of regulated businesses and would be normally very cautious about co-founding them is that regulation always massively slows down innovation.”

“When you think about what AI is going to bring to the transformation of human life and human work, the investments will, I think, seem small. In retrospect”

“This is actually one of the reasons why Silicon Valley tends to create so many of the technology companies that dominate the globe, because if you take an overly kind of classic DCF analysis, business school prof analysis, et cetera, which many, much of the wo…”

“The investment that investors made last year is kind of more of a growth venture round relative to, it doesn't necessarily require a 10 X. I mean, you know, we have trillion dollar companies now, so, you know, trillion dollar companies are definitely within fe…”

“Well, I do think that there will be efforts at foundational models that won't work. And especially I think late entrance like late entrance have a harder, you know, catch up routine and a lot of kind of expense to go to it”

“China and multiple companies within it, because, you know, I haven't evaluated yet. Minimax, which also just came out recently, but will have a number of very strong contenders for this in the world technology landscape.”

“And I do think that the, it's the right thing for the U S to be doing, given that China is generally taking a kind of a mercantilist competitive position. And I think that's something that the U S and other you know, kind of countries Europe and everything els…”

“The basic thought from an inflection standpoint is that the original model wouldn't really work, which is building frontier models for doing a consumer agent that the cost curves to the revenue curves and what you would have to do wouldn't work as a startup.”

“We could make this deal work You know economically by getting this kind of big licensing deal and ability to kind of do a non-exclusive inclusive license of the technology and bring over a set of the team that really wants to continue to be working on the cons…”

“It certainly could be and by the way, inflection, you know, who knows, maybe some year will still be acquired.”

“A hundred percent. One of the party tricks I do is I bring out my phone and put ChatGPT on audio mode to show people. Because part of when we learn to use phones or PCs, we've learned, you know, with GUIs and everything else, we've made it softer, but there's …”

“We're not reaching the upper end of LLM. The next large LLM that's training with a larger computer will still have new magic in it. The scale game is still playing.”

“Now, again, you know, unfortunately, I would predict that they're not going to do that because it's a political third rail and it requires, you know, Courage and other things to go into it.”

“I think it's guaranteed, unfortunately, and given that it is an inevitable, it's a physics process. I worry about that. That's one of the I think likely outcomes of the next administration that will be a serious impact.”

“Data centers, I think, are something like, it's some single digit percentage of all power consumption. Like three, something, so it's not very big. And then AI within data centers is like, you know, a single digit percentage of that. So currently AI is not acc…”

“And by the way, the initial defense of Ukraine would not have worked without Starlink.”

“Is the right wing. Says woke. Is cancel culture. And yet, that's the shit they do. It's of course normalist and destructive.”

“Maybe I can say this as an American, you know, Brexit was a terrible idea.”

“While I expect that the next administration, because they'll say everything the Biden administration did was terrible, we're tearing it all down, that they'll tear it down in words and then keep doing the work, right, would be my hope.”

“It's like, well, actually, in fact, we can create synthetic data, and there's a ton of data that's out there that's not part of the standard internet training corpus. So, the scale game is still playing.”

“I mean, look, I'm an investor and all the rest, and I think Figma is an amazing company that's gonna, gonna, I'm probably going to make substantially more money because the deal was essentially derailed, but there was a bad theory of the case.”

“You can never get all these things in these complicated systems to zero, so the better thing is, make sure that you've got baseline good, and then be improving constantly on those, so you launch anyway.”

“Pre the merger closing you know, Elon is, is saying, oh, I got the CEO of Bill Harris. He's the best ever. That's part of the reason why you should give so much percentage of the company to x.com and the merger, you know, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And then…”

“I basically told them and say, hey, look, it's sustainable for two years, which for you guys means forever, right?”

“And I think there's gonna be a bunch of those kind of coming in, and the bulk of the demand will be on the inference side”