The Ledger, every show

“And I think it's an emphatic, no, it's not a bubble. Probably it's still a little under hyped.”

“And I think it's an emphatic, no, it's not a bubble. Probably it's still a little underhyped.”

“I think this is likely what we're doing with AI and AI safety and stuff like that, that we could foresee in 1020 years AGI, where there's actual safety issues, but we are so far from that today. That's, I think, actually getting close to the peak of inflated e…”

“I believe in two years where everyone's gonna say, oh, you know, we thought it would solve everything and it's all a very limited number of use cases. It's complete hype. And, you know, we'll probably see a bit of a crash and we'll see a retrenchment in AI.”

“Cause you'll see the case of iteration at open source is going to eclipse close source.”

“Even if we do that, you'll still have a revolution in the economy. You'll still have a revolution in the way things happen because the, Limiting factors now are not the technology, it's diffusion of the technology into the economy.”

“That's gonna be, law's gonna be fully transformed. From really the bottom up. Like, their whole business model will have to shift. So you'll have to move from today law is sold per hour. You're gonna have, hours don't make any sense when it's agents doing work…”

“And so the like super long-term world is it's all Context to the LLM. It's all requirements. It's all standard operating procedures, which is what FDs do. It's all changing the way people of the business operate, which is an FDE job. And that's the future of s…”

“Now in AI we're investing, like, three percent or four percent. It's like, it's not even yet on the scale of the industrial revolution.”

“And so I think you'll see over the next 10 years, a lot of retirements, a lot of firings, perhaps because people won't make that transition,”

“O1 just came out. We haven't fully benchmarked on our side yet. It's definitely an improvement. And so open AI is ahead of everybody else. It's an improvement in reasoning which is good. We can talk about that later on, but I expect people will catch up within…”

“So I think if that happens and that's what the world looks like, then a LLM looks kind of like a query processor in a database. You give it context, it does its work, you get the answer out. But the point of leverage is the place with, at which the context Liv…”

“There's a lot of AI hype, but if you look at companies like Nvidia, they're actually not that expensive on an earnings basis. Like it's not, we're not in bubble territory, you know, Cisco, 2000 timeframe.”

“If you are in AI or AI adjacent, you should be raising every three to four months, in my opinion, and you should be doing it aggressively.”

“There are rounds happening that are 102 hundred X revenue in the early stage markets, and even there you have to assume, you know, you're gonna have 10 X Multiple compression in the later stage rounds. So I don't think those are sustainable for any period of t…”

“Money managers returning fee-bearing assets will never be a trend, in my opinion.”

“My estimate was, I think the amount of venture scale opportunities has gone down 60, 70%.”

“If you look at it today, though, we are, the exponential in LLM performance is so far working against us that you need Order of magnitude increases in compute, 10 X increase in compute to have relatively sublinear increases in performance. So you're at decreas…”

“And that kind of starts to tell you that we make it close to the trough of disillusionment at some point where all this, you know, the infrastructure that was built and the idea is build it and they will come. You know, the people actually don't come. The reve…”

“On the M&A side, I do think it has a lot to do with regulation and Lena Kahn, you know, threatening to block most mergers and acquisitions, and that's why you see these acqui-hire inflection character AI adept type acquisitions where it seems like they're doin…”

“I think we probably think it's a little overhyped in general, where we think it's real for sure, but it's not going to be an opportunity the size of software or AI or something like that. The defense budget is naturally limited as a percentage of the economy. …”

“I don't think we've ever seen pre-IPO so many leaders leave the best, like, crown jewel company in Silicon Valley. It's common, like, you IPO, everyone gets rich and they leave. Okay, that's normal. But before IPO, right in its, like, heyday, you don't see the…”

“I don't think it's gonna, you know, the space is gonna crash or everybody leave overnight, but I think just slowly over the next five years, unless AI really takes off, you'll see a general shrinking of venture capital, I think”

“Big tech is doing a good job of anchoring the price of all these features pretty low, like co-pilots, 20 dollars a month per developer. It's incredibly cheap relative to the value that it does add. And that really anchors, you know, value in that market pretty…”

“They're really subsidizing the space, a lot of big tech, which I think is positive for open source and positive for users, hard for startups.”

“And just the process of defining that software system such that an LLM can generate it would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so even if it were free to generate a new software system, you would probably still use one of the incumbents as long as…”

“Some people have said it's six months from state of the art. I think it's more like a year away from the state of the art, but these models, those models that keep coming out are getting better and better and better.”

“If you look at the Industrial Revolution in Russia in the early 20th century, I think investment as a percentage of GDP got up to 20 or 25%, and then China was investing 40 or 50% in their industrial revolution of GDP, and now in AI we're investing, like, thre…”

“I've thought for a long time that would rally because you'd have existing incumbent businesses launching AI products, and you'll see that they have data gravity and they have workflow, workflow gravity. They're a great channel to sell AI to their businesses, a…”

“If you're an AI investor doing very big checks and foundation model up, foundation model layer up, you haven't really had many write offs. You've in your losers, or I wouldn't say losers in the companies that haven't broken out, you've made your money back.”

“And so that would mean the future of software looks more like man-machine symbiosis. Then it does AGI, you know, the computer does everything for you.”

“Aggregate capex on AI hardware. It's like vastly out exceeding revenue generated by AI companies in the actual deployment of AI.”

“Microsoft doesn't care if the margins and foundation models are 80% or 30%. They can't lose that layer, right? Even if it's a commodity, it needs to be a commodity on Azure. Same thing with Amazon. Needs to be a commodity on AWS.”

“Defense primes are good at aeronautics. They're good at explosives. You know, I tend to, I always say, like, they're good at boom. Don't compete on boom. What they're bad at generally is software, is AI, is autonomy.”

“We literally had conversations internal at AVC with our partners where we were worried about our offices getting protested. And we gave a like small chance that, you know, actually maybe our reputation is completely ruined because at that time, everyone was ag…”

“Most of these companies I mentioned that we invested in are started by people who were actually at one of these successful companies, Endural, Palantir, or SpaceX before, or who were in military service themselves, and they know sort of the landscape. It's ver…”

“This sort of like supervisor worker type paradigm where it's not workflow software, it's supervisor software where you supervise the agents.”

“If you look at enterprise software, we call it one. And they're very simple systems. In many ways, they're wrappers over a database. If you look at Salesforce, Salesforce doesn't help you make a decision, really. Maybe there's only for the product I do today, …”

“When A tiny girl or somebody else deploys money onto a cap table. They might say own five percent of that cap table, and they'll have, their dollars will have a leverage effect on the ecosystem as a whole. Because while they buy five percent of the company, th…”

“I think perplexity is actually a very good product that, you know, does a better job on synthesizing information than even Google does.”

“Co-pilot operates Much more like an auto-complete. So if you're writing an article on email or in Word, you automatically notice a sentence. It's pretty good. It does save you time, but it's not fundamental.”

“Most major inference players, for example, i.e. People who help you host open source models or train new open source models are growing incredibly quickly. We're not particularly interested in investing in that. Aaron at the stack.”

“Think of an ERP, think of a CRM. They're organizing, but they don't help you really run your business or make decisions in your business.”

“Anthropic is frontier at coding, and so you're going to pay a premium on that, and they probably have fine gross margins on, on doing that.”

“So I think you're going to see this trend where In at least certain domains, the big model companies are pushing the frontier in certain areas, and then everything in the wake gets commoditized.”

“And by the way, hold on, they're also the fastest growing companies of all time.”

“Augie can handle maybe 95%, 90% of cases. And when things get challenging or doesn't know what to do, it can hand off to a human.”

“There's five key things that AI is good at. Like, these are the tasks. You can add one more now, computer use, but you think AI is good at multi-turn conversations, document understanding, structured output, Search and reasoning. If you can break a workflow do…”