The Ledger, every show

“The thing I'm struggling with most this week is I feel more uncertain than I have in the past about what our, like the details of what our product strategy should be. I think that product is a weakness of mine in general and it's something that right now the c…”

“I think it is unavoidable that this is going to happen. I also think it's going to be tremendously beneficial, but we do have to navigate how to get there in a reasonable way.”

“You know, we're definitely not maximum profit seeking, although you could talk to Elon about some of his ventures for that one. And we open source a lot of stuff, we'll open source more in the future, and we're certainly not controlled by Microsoft.”

“This is why I tell people in many ways, it is easier to start a hard company than an easy company.”

“Obviously I think capitalism is great. But I think AGI is sort of an exception to that. In a well-run society, I think even if we rewound the US, you know, 50 plus years, this would absolutely happen by the government.”

“If we just publish the weights of a model on the internet, and then we realize, like there's actually a safety issue here, we can't take that back. It's done. It's like a one-way door. We also cannot put any usage restrictions on it after we open source it.”

“You know, the strong consensus Five, 10 years ago, was that first of all the AI was going to come for the blue-collar jobs. Second of all would be the less sophisticated white-collar jobs. Third of all would be the very high cognitive load white-collar jobs li…”

“I think value investing is not a winning strategy when it comes to being an angel investor most of the time.”

“If there's a company we look at where we think we'd make a lot of money, but it'd be, we think it might be bad for the world, we won't touch it. Which most other investment firms unfortunately have a hard time with.”

“Most investors, I think, make stressful situations worse.”

“I think before YC came along, a lot of seed investors way overplayed their leverage over founders and would break term sheets, renegotiate deals, weak confidential information. And then YC was a powerful enough force to say, you can't do this or there will be …”

“And this is one place that your investors will always give you bad advice. I think, not YC, but all other investors give bad advice here, most do.”

“Another thing that I think is worth hiring earlier that almost no one does, is a full-time fundraiser. Let's say you hire someone like really, really great, and their full-time job is to raise money for the company. You hire them after your B round, and you sa…”

“I think the biggest PR hack you can do is to not hire a PR firm. Just pick three or four journalists that you develop really close relationships with, that like you, that understand you, that you get. And then you contact them yourself. They will cover every s…”

“When should the founders think about hiring a professional CEO? Never. You, if you look at the most successful companies in tech they are run by their founders for a very long time sometimes forever.”

“The data on this is look at the, say, like, 30 most successful software startups of all time, and try to point to a single example where the co-founders were in different locations. It's really, really tough.”

“The better AI gets, the more some businesses that have nothing to do with AI, I think will be harder to compete with because we'll really want these like authentic non-technological experiences, or we'll care more about Sports teams or whatever. So no, not, no…”

“When we got to GBT four, which was back in 20, 23, I think that very quickly after that, there was going to be much more disruption in software business being up for grabs right, right away than turned out to be. And the thing that I think I was wrong about a …”

“The phase that we're in now reminds me of like smartphones before the iPhone. I was like an early adopter. I had like a Palm Trio in, you know, 2003 or four or whatever. You ever had a sidekick? I never had a sidekick. I thought they were super cool. I wanted …”

“Finance what is probably already, or at least rapidly becoming the most expensive infrastructure project in history.”

“I mean, we just got, you know, hammered in the, by like all of the intellectual giants of the field for saying that we were going after AGI. And then when we started really focusing on large language models, we got hammered again saying this is completely ridi…”

“Like, I think this is, I think this will be one of the most important areas, even more important than automation of other tasks that AI can do just to help us understand more things.”

“We're finally at the moment where AI is solving novel math problems. It is discovering other stuff. It is, you know, you can argue about how good or not, I would say not very good, but it is writing poetry.”

“This is why I think, like, the world is, on the whole, not going to be that different. Even with superintelligence, like, people are still going to be very fundamentally wired to care about other people, to want to be around other people to interact with other…”

“Maybe the two big risks that I'm most worried about with AI, which are a little bit in tension. One is like a loss of control where, you know, AI somehow just becomes too powerful in a way that we can't guarantee the control we want. And the other is power get…”

“The way you do things is to put things out into the world, get feedback from real customers, see where they break, see where they don't break. That is the way you make a good product. That is also the way you make a safe product.”

“And we are about to see the greatest boom in people starting smaller businesses that we have ever seen. I think AI is empowering that.”

“Actually, I think we should be more of a platform company than a product company.”

“At every point on the cost curve, cost performance curve, we will be the best.”

“We killed our web browser called Atlas, which, again, I think was a great product, it was the best web browser, but not as important for us to focus on as somewhere else we could put that talent.”

“So if we, you know, ran the clock back to 2000 four and then projected technology forward to 2016 but not anything else about the shape of Startup ecosystem, what it meant to be an entrepreneur, how capital flowed, all of the, you know, who got to run companie…”

“We've talked about the need to pace it as the models get more capable, which I think is in everyone's interest.”

“And then eventually, or maybe pretty soon, we have to build robots that can Automate that process to continue to drive the cost down. The cost of producing electricity, chips, the whole supply chain.”

“Building every vertical application on top of that, trying to go, like, eat every startup, eat every company, no interest in doing that really want to just provide that platform.”

“We were pretty sure, although as you mentioned we underestimated, that as the models got better and better, If we could continue to drive costs down, the demand for AI at a sufficiently high level and a sufficiently low price was basically uncapped.”

“But we also knew that no matter how efficient they got, you know, at some level, what we are about is turning Electricity into useful intelligence, and we were going to need more of that. No matter how good we are at that other layer, given this observation ab…”

“I think probably the biggest return right now is creative software ideas to sort of squeeze more intelligence out of the units of compute that we have. And my sense is there's like orders of magnitude to go there.”

“I think Jalapeno and its successors are going to be a huge competitive advantage for us from that perspective.”

“I would rather people not to steal from us for sure. Maybe I'm feeling too confident right now about our progress and what's like the models that are coming. But this is not in like my top 10 list of worries.”

“AGI is not actually about any single model. It's the model. It's the machinery that makes the models, and from model to model, we actually are learning new things. We're figuring out new science. That stuff is working amazingly well.”

“And for researchers, I suspect that although the current workflow of researcher Is it going to very much be automated? There will be new things in the spirit of research in the same way that there's new things in the spirit of software engineering, even though…”

“Somehow most people seem to still really prefer interacting with a human. And I definitely would like much rather engage with a person than engage with an AI for almost everything.”

“I think the world wants to know about like the person that's going to be responsible for the decisions of a company and who they're going to hold accountable if they make bad ones and they don't really want an AI CEO.”

“I thought it was going to be weirder to live through the singularity than it turns out to be.”

“My kids will never grow up in a world where they were smarter than computers.”

“Josh Kushner. Absolute MVP investor. Unbelievable. Has like worked around the clock for what feels like years to help us. He's the only investor that I could point to that is. Proactively. Incredibly helpful all the time.”

“The kind of, like, cult worship of the machine god states those people believe that, like, more is going to happen quickly than is going to happen. Eventually a lot will happen, but eventually a lot was gonna happen anyway.”

“Compute fleet, you know, like the scale of the compute fleet, the ability to make more compute, I think that's like a very durable advantage.”