The Ledger, every show

“It is financially, if you look at it like with a Wall Street hat on, nonsense. Right? At a 1.75 trillion dollar valuation.”

“Harnesses are stupid. Like, no one's gonna make money on a harness business, right?”

“And if the trailer is sick, then like, that means you have good taste, that means you have a story people are gonna care about, like, it means all the good things. And if your story is boring, or there's no good trailer, then your company's gonna suck.”

“The number one winning company right now in AI, I think, is Anthropic. And they're actually shockingly focused, right? Like, it's cloud code. Very pure play.”

“The AI hatred narrative is partially just what it is. It's also, let's be honest, it's because Sam Altman in particular, but everyone leaned into it as marketing. This is so scary. This is so powerful. This is going to be like, it was a very explicit strategy …”

“The anthropic engineers will go to middle America and they're going to need a large security force.”

“Anthropic passed open AI.”

“The infrastructure is worth not zero. It is infrastructure like you're on something in it. Right. But like it is it's a commodity business. Right. And it's a great one. I really enjoy it, but it's definitely like commodity business with tech multiples.”

“This conversion of being like, oh, we're just doing a research project. Don't worry, we're scraping the entire internet, but it's just for good. It's just for a research project. And then flipping that into, oh, no, actually it isn't. I just think it was like …”

“The second cataclysm of AI is gonna be, you're just gonna, like, have all these agents running around doing crazy shit, and including things they have no idea what they're doing, and they'll check the APIs, be like, yeah, that thing works, and it sort of will,…”

“I mean, like they're just, I just, this is like a ridiculous, this is just ridiculous. I mean, it's like, whatever, it doesn't like, if you want to buy 20 cents of infrastructure per dollar in a thing with like increasing competition where it turns out the sto…”

“It's like whoever has cheap energy eventually wins as a commodity business with no defensibility.”

“I actually think that Silicon Valley, and at least, you know, let's call it your average PM slash engineer in Silicon Valley, hilariously did just completely disrupt themselves. You no longer have a stranglehold on anything in building, and the building is goi…”

“It's just like basically like for every hundred software engineering jobs, there's going to be one master of bots job created, right? It'll be, you know, a hundred x downshift.”

“If OpenClaw went away tomorrow, it would disrupt nothing. Right. It would just be like, fine. You just use nano cloud. Like there's no cost of switching at all.”

“Something would have to change in a dramatic fashion for Claude to not cross OpenAI in the next two months. Like, something weird would have to happen.”

“There's just general intelligence, it's low margin, it's, I mean, it's great, I'm, like, literally building stuff as we talk, I'm, like, into it, but I think it's a terrible business.”

“That customer discovery, YC style, like blah, blah, blah, is just so wrong for the moment in terms of how to build a business. Because just because like bill in sales has some CRM shim problem, it doesn't matter. Like you can't build it and give it to him and …”

“To admit that you are worried about software taking your job as a software builder is to effectively say that you are a bad software engineer, right?”

“This is basically all gonna back to energy at some level. There's not gonna be that very much margin in it. And like, low cost intelligence production is going to be the key.”

“The, you know, the original narrative was someone would get to AGI and then that would be the end of the game is not how this is playing out. Everyone's gonna get to the same shit. It's all commodity. It's all getting a price to the cost of energy. And it's al…”

“Being hard is not a moat anymore. Software is not a moat anymore.”

“AI is only going to accelerate that because people's sense of meaning goes away. So the market draws us towards cults and community, right? In these extremes and weird shit in order to like create a sense of purpose and meaning.”

“The latter is gone and the value doesn't get shared, which is how you're going to end up with revolutions”

“I actually think of anything like a lot of people who like had a skill that was valuable, and allowed them to a lot of comfort and like to feel like they had a role economically or whatever are just going to get eviscerated. And it's very possible it gets repl…”

“200,000.”

“You also can't make any money as a company who sells tokens or intelligence.”

“This is not good for open AI... The heavy brute force of LLMs is not a winner take all, it's not going to be an erase the AGI... The interesting game becomes on the edge and things like open claw are the decentralized version of it. So it becomes kind of irrel…”

“There's like 10 wizards in the world. And then everything else is done by machines. And then consumers are now just like writing software for themselves that happened to be communally updating it, but they're not developers anymore. They're just like participa…”

“I personally think that all this stuff just gets washed away, right? If you take out all the way, and they don't come back because there is no P-fifty job anymore. Like there's a P-ninety-nine job. If you truly the best in the world at something, you'll be fin…”

“What's going to happen at some point is someone's going to come out with one that's great. Right. And it's open and whatever, and it's free. And then you're going to be, and it's going to be totally controlled by like some hacker network that's going to do ter…”

“I actually do kind of trust Anthropic, but not as much. I definitely don't trust, you know, OpenAI.”

“Like, I think we're just at the end of software sales, right? Is the way to think about it. And like, that means you focus on community, you focus on network effects. There are things that are valuable, but like, there's no such thing as a software company any…”

“Well, they're just gonna go away.”

“We're a little bit making fun of the fact that YC founders do come out a little bit like animals, right? There's like having met with many of them, I guess not their fault. They're like young kids. They've been holed up in a room coding and that's all they've …”

“I think that the venture capital, the seed venture capitalists who invest in companies that are branded as AI companies are going to lose an impossibly large amount of money in the coming years.”

“AI is a powerful tool. It's incredibly powerful for existing businesses and existing structures. It's not a great startup opportunity.”

“Even like, I think Gavin Newsom understands that it's a, it's also, by the way, terrible for his political career, because if this passes, he will never be president, which is clearly what he wants.”

“If you're a founder, software is no longer any sort of differentiator. Software is just like consumable. Like, it's just like, it's like a piece of media. Like, it's not like you can't build a software company.”

“Imagine in the near future, you can have an AI driven girlfriend, right? Boyfriend, companion, whatever. That is exactly what you want, but digital. Always available, says that it does all the things you want, like is like a perfect companion in every possible…”

“NVIDIA will be down 15%.”

“Well, one, I think Benioff loves sales. Like, he loves winning. He's just a winning, so like, he doesn't care what he sells. He doesn't care about the product quality. He just wants to win.”

“He, I've always said this, and I mean it derogatorily and also not, is like, he's not a great technologist. He is the greatest marketer of our generation, right?”

“I've always said that if you want to invest in the AI narrative, the easiest bet in the world is meta, because it's all upside, no downside. I stand by that. You know, I think that's continue to continue to be the case. And like, that doesn't even matter if th…”

“I think when you get down to the practicality of how people use these things and their actual preferences or whatever, it just doesn't play out that way. It's not as much of a lock-in as you want it to be.”

“Well then to the point is there's no lock-in, right? It's like, it's always, the only thing that changes it, which is, was the original pitch, was that we're so close to this, like, game over nuclear style outcome that someone will get to first, and then there…”

“I honestly think this is going to be, this year is like an absolute make or break for if open AI is a thing or not is my view.”

“I actually think there's a very strong argument you're making right now, which I agree with, that actually, like, ChatGPT will be, is not Kleenex. And like this will be a like branding blip in history.”