The Ledger, every show

“So this phantom AGI, someday with AI, they can do everything a human can do. I think we're very far away from that. I would say, you know, like decades away, maybe even longer.”

“There are a lot of hyped up AI safety narratives saying AI could lead to human extinction, which is kind of ridiculous statement.”

“Those people, I just don't hire people like that anymore, but there are people that, you know, did a comfortable job, they kept coding the old way, and they just did not learn AI.”

“I feel like because of PR goals, AGI has been hyped up as a finish line, but I don't think it's a finish line. It's just, we'll have continually improving capabilities for, you know, decades to come.”

“I think the export control on chips has largely backfired. The way that the US and I think that the way the US first put restrictions on Huawei and then later on, you know, exported NVIDIA and AMD and other semiconductors that really incentivized China. So bef…”

“If I had one wish for the European regulators, I spoke with quite a few European regulators, I was hearing things like, we want to be leaders in regulating AI, and that's a competitive advantage. And with all due respect, that's not a competitive advantage. So…”

“I disagree with that. I think we're seeing useful agentic workflows right now.”

“Even earlier this year, we saw some senior business leaders advise people to not learn to code on the grounds that AI will automate it. We'll look back on that as some of the worst career advice ever given.”

“The companies with something to lose whose statements over time have become more moderated. So, you know, I find that as your established company, you just say more sensible things, but there are some companies that I think are at greater existential risk. And…”

“Over the last year, a bunch of people have advised others not to learn to code on the ground so AI will automate it. I think we'll look back on this as some of the worst career advice ever given, because as better tools make software engineering easier, more p…”

“I have a controversial opinion, which is, ah, I think it's time for everyone of every job role to learn to code, and in fact, on my team, you know, my CFO, my head of talent, my recruiters, my front desk person, all of them know how to code, and I actually see…”

“This idea that AI is so powerful, we might accidentally lead to human extinction. That's just ridiculous, but it is a hype narrative that made certain businesses look more powerful, and it got Yeah, ramped up and actually help certain businesses fundraising go…”

“And I feel like this has been used as a weapon against open source software as well, right? Which is really unfortunate.”

“So I think typing up dangers, supposed false dangers of AI, in order to get regulators to pass laws, like the proposed SB-SB-Ten-Forty-Seven in California, which, thank goodness, we shut down, Would have put in place really burdensome regulatory requirements t…”

“I've been in the room where some of these businesses said stuff to regulators that was just not true.”

“I think that open-weight models is a tremendous source of geopolitical influence.”

“When China's government makes an all-nation commitment, it's all industrial. Commitment. That's actually a very powerful force that I wouldn't underestimate.”

“I think Trump did a good job and then his whole team, David Sachs and Christian and so on, did a good job clearing out unnecessary regulations.”

“There are so many projects that used to take, you know, six engineers, half a year to build, that today I or one of my engineers can build in the weekend.”

“The fresh college grads know AI. We can't find enough of them. So many businesses would love to hire those fresh college grads.”

“I hope we can get much closer to five, six or more percent GDP growth. When looking at the future, it turns out one of the most expensive things in today's world is intelligence. This is why it's so expensive, at least in the US, to hire a highly skilled docto…”

“China especially has been really taking the lead or, well, Taking a lead or getting up there in terms of releasing tons of really good open way models. So I would say if not, it is kind of not whatever predicted, you know, a decade ago that China AI would end …”

“When the US has more closed models, and when, you know, teams are trying to pay these hundred million dollar salaries to extract talent, then that circulation of knowledge becomes very slow, and it slows down the rate of American and European innovation.”

“Open-weight models are a key part of the AI supply chain, and China releasing, you know, free low-cost or free models into that key part of supply chain means it's, Really starting to build up a lead, right, in, in build up a commanding user base”

“In fact, if you look a lot of the application layer investments. Sometimes it feels like, you know, firms are putting in a hundred million dollars so that they can pay Open Ananthropic. So the Open Ananthropic can pay NVIDIA, which is where all the money is, i…”

“I think we're seeing that right now with a lot of VC subsidized, you know, AI coding the laws of physics or the laws of finance says that at some point, right, this can't go on forever.”

“Absolute margins are important, but when you have a view for where the technology is going, Then it lets you not build for the margins today, but what you can forecast them being in the future”

“AI as a technology Doesn't really offer an answer to the moats for most businesses. So if you're building AI, you know, for drones or legal or for whatever, the moat is more of a function of that industry.”

“Previously software used to be a moat, right? If you had, you know, invested 10 years to build a software, it's really hard to replicate that. That one moat is much weaker than before”

“I actually think that a decade from now, we will still be working to identify Valuable applications and enterprises and building them. Having said that, we will make a lot of progress over the next one or two years, but we're not going to be done, you know, ev…”

“Writing code by hand is becoming obsolete, right? Oh, really don't do that. Not, but they get AI to write code for you.”

“So when an industry is immature, it turns out where to draw those boundaries to let different participants do their part and have it still interoperate. That's less clear. But then as the industry matures in this You know, more standards for if I want to publi…”

“So what I'm seeing is for the application layer, there is very clear ROI. I think it's fantastic. So someone else trained these models who can build applications for, you know, a 100,000 dollars or a million dollars and start generating ROI.”

“So the coding dev tools and API tools market, the mode there's weaker than having a strong consumer brand.”

“So I think there is probably a little bit more juice out of the scalability element to this piece, so hopefully you'll consider making progress there, but it's getting really, really difficult.”

“Society's perception of AI has been very skewed by the PR machinery of a handful of companies with amazing PR capabilities. And because that number of companies drove scales and narrative, people think of scale first of this vector progress.”

“It's like a deeply intellectual exercise, and I think the term vibe coding makes people think it's easier than it is. So frankly, after a day of using AI-assisted coding, like, I'm exhausted mentally, right? So I think of it as rapid engineering, where AI is l…”

“So, there's so many things that, you know, would have taken a team of six engineers, like, three months to build, that now, today, one of my friends or I was just building on a weekend.”

“Founders that are on top of Gen AI technology, thus, you know tech oriented product leaders, I think are much more likely to succeed than someone that maybe is more business oriented, more business savvy, but it's not, doesn't have a good feel for where AI is …”

“Everyone in my team at AI Fund knows how to code. Everyone is a good hub account, and I see for a lot of my team members, you know, when my, I don't know assistant general counsel, or my CFO, or my front desk operator, when they learn how to code, they're not …”

“The best engineers I work with today are not fresh color strats. They're people with, you know, 10, 15 or more years of experience, but they're also really on top of AI tools, and that, those engineers are just completing a class of their own.”

“And even though a lot of the PR excitement and hype has been on these technology layers, it turns out that almost by definition, the biggest opportunities have to be at the application layer. Because we actually need the applications to generate even more reve…”

“And in terms of AI tech trends, if you ask me what's the most important tech trend in AI, I would say Is the rise of agentic AI.”

“Getting data for a lot of startups is a slow mechanism for making decisions. And a subject matter expert with a good gut is often a much better mechanism for making a speedy decision.”

“One surprising thing is, we're used to thinking of code as this really valuable artifact because it's so hard to create, but because the cost of software engineering is going down, code is much less of a valuable artifact as it used to.”

“So I'm on teams where, you know, we've completely rebuilt the code base three times in the last month, right? Because it's not that hard anymore to just completely rebuild the code base, pick a new data schemer, it's fine, because the cost of doing that has pl…”

“So choosing the software architecture of your tech stack used to be a one-way door. Once you're built on top of a certain tech stack, you know, set a database schema, really hard to change it. So that used to be a one-way door. I don't want to say it's totally…”

“With software engineering becoming much faster, the other interesting dynamic I'm seeing is that the product management work, getting user feedback, deciding what features to build, that is increasingly the bottleneck.”