The Ledger, every show

“Venture capital is a business about outliers, and when somebody succeeds, their opinion, and I think their decision-making gets over-indexed on their successes, which often, as you know, are outliers, and it's hard to generalize from a single outlier, and my b…”

“I think this whole idea of NeoCloud being somehow this new category is a lot of marketing speak. There are really good, reliable, trusted data center providers in America who've been around 20 plus years.”

“I mean, what's worse is the paper is actually not even being Published anymore because there's a six month embargo inside of DeepMind, right? Like we've heard about this where a paper comes out and then I think there's a six month embargo window where if anybo…”

“AI alignment, don't get me wrong, is hard, but not the hardest problem. Human alignment is really the problem right now.”

“Some people would call that recursive self-improvement totally happening.”

“So I introduced them to 22, you know, friends up and down Sandhill road. And so there's some investors there and we got 21 no's, right?”

“Tell them to give me a call when they'd like to be investors in the world's fastest growing business of all time, and then they can lecture me about public benefit governance and market share adoptions.”

“Now, president Trump is actually, I think trying to do his best from what I can tell in at least giving America enough freedom to innovate that these standards can even be discovered in our labs here. Because first you need somebody to actually pioneer and fig…”

“It's not clear to me that we need 50 inference companies, and it's not clear to me that VCs are smart enough to realize that they're just lighting hundreds of millions of dollars on fire in a category where having four or five really good inference trusted pro…”

“The commercial community has forgotten how to build businesses, and they've forgotten the difference between first principles and marketing.”

“There's a huge misallocation of public capital into venture managers who didn't, are not capturing enough value in Frontier AI. Instead, they're investing in a bunch of stuff that's not going to exist, and the public's going to be mad.”

“Until we've solved cancer, every month that we're not rushing to the frontier of accelerating biological discovery or scientific progress is a month that millions of people are suffering from disease that we could be solving with the eye.”

“Marginal risk is, I think, a slightly just more technical way to say, we have the tools to manage risk. We don't need new ones.”

“I believe that most people five years from now will spend the bulk of their time offline, not online.”

“My co-founder, Seb came from he built the Borg export GQM scheduler at Google, and there, I think, 95% was considered an outage, so 96% node utilization is, should be standard, and most single-time clusters are not running at that”

“Up to 20% of all data centers this year in the US, my understanding is are at risk... Of not getting the community support they need to get brought up.”

“The problem remains then and now is regulatory because you actually can't shift the burden Of the wrong clinical diagnoses from the physician to the AI system.”

“Have you met Dario? Dario's a scientist. He's gone from zero to like what will soon be a trillion dollar company in four years.”

“And I think teams who can raise too much money too fast, too early, who don't have to define what the P zero is, because that's the only thing when you have scarce resources, you gotta invest in. Those cultures end up being the most fragile and brittle, and th…”

“You need physical verification built into the system for agentic commerce.”

“In fact, Elon's like got 500,000 GBP hundreds in Memphis. And running an 11% MFU and less than 60% node allocation. I mean, this is twelve billion dollars of compute being wasted.”

“We're literally, in our lifetime, we're going to have flying cars. We're going to have room temperature superconductors. We are going to solve cancer.”

“If we stopped capabilities today and half of us in the AI ecosystem vanished off the planet, nothing would change. It's still so early.”

“If we don't secure frontier model inference, or what I call state of the art inference behind a coordinated iron dome, I don't think we have a sustainable shot at staying at the frontier over the next decade.”

“And I can tell you throwing more compute at the problem is probably having super exponential gains right now per iteration. So it depends on which domain you're talking about, which modality. There's no saturation in superconductor discovery, for example, at a…”

“About a year ago, as an example, I realized there was a lot of talk about models being good at physical physics and chemistry, AI for science. And I was a visiting scientist at the applied Physics department at Stanford. And we started benchmarking these model…”

“Context feedback loops where you are, you have unique and differentiated access is where progress will be most legible to you. And if there are other teams who don't have access to that context, it'll also be where you have a superior business model.”

“Because the context, the mission-critical context of those workloads is so important to be run locally that you can't run them on Amazon, AWS, GCP, or Azure, and it's the first time In 15 years that the sort of hyperscaler dominance is up for grabs for startup…”

“We're actually giving away most of our compute at cost. Now, if you're a shareholder, you'd go, wait on, do you have billions of dollars of compute infrastructure you're giving away at cost? Yes, because we think that's the right thing for humanity.”

“And many of them are running their own generators in their backyards at half capacity. And I'm going, this makes no sense. Let's all pull our generators so that a shoe factory can spike up during the day, a steel factory can spike up during the night, and then…”

“Well, obviously in the world of infrastructure, I think we need something like the grid. For, in the compute infrastructure. So that's what I've spent most of my days on, which is a coordinating mechanism for that, that allowed this, the, not the commoditizati…”

“We have started securing about 1.3 gigawatts of computer infrastructure. That's roughly forty billion dollars of cloud spend over the next four years. And that is financed roughly, you know, between with about 20% of equity. The remaining is debt. So 20%, that…”

“Like that's roughly what the continent needs for full sovereignty, right? To have as, at least as much infrastructure locally as there is within the alphabet holdings sort of pool. Over the next four years.”

“We're not in an AI bubble for sure. I'll tell you that, which is the question I keep getting asked. We are definitely in a GPU wastage bubble where there are stranded pockets of compute, like billions of dollars of compute that are sitting unutilized.”

“Huawei chips are able to produce capabilities improvements today in China that rival some of the best chips here when integrated up and down the stack.”

“I think if there's any reason why OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and so on don't hit their revenue targets over the next few years, it's because they won't have access to enough compute.”

“Oh, so many. I'm saying periodic is one.”

“As long as the capabilities frontier keep moving and we want a healthy, independent ecosystem, we'll just keep Raising more capital. There's no end to that. I don't really, the day machine learning stops working as a systematic way to give humanity more capabi…”

“What would have taken 50 people to do four years ago, now with the right AI tools, you can do with one person.”

“No empirical evidence at the time that this was, that AI was creating net new marginal risks, and just factual inaccuracies that we were ahead of China, because if you just paid attention to what's happening, DeepSeek had already started to publish a fantastic…”

“No, actually it's not that hard to distill on the outputs of our labs.”

“The status quo is you do not hold scientists liable for downstream uses of their technology. That's absurd. That's a great way to shut down the entire innovation ecosystem and start throwing literally like researchers in jail.”

“We're in a race with adversaries, and that should be the calculus we should be working backwards from.”

“Closed source and open source are not just differences in technology, but completely different markets altogether. They serve different types of customers. And so, and I think if you believe AI is this sort of explosive new platform shift, then there'll be win…”

“Relative to five, six days ago, I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration anymore to say this research preview has been for voice what ChatGPT was for text.”

“It's the single largest probably purchasing decision That's going to happen in the next 24 months is do nation states start buying?”

“For most countries, it's impossible to have total infrastructure independence at all parts of the stack. What is much more feasible is to be great at one part of the stack and then collaborate with another sovereign or another country or region to achieve join…”

“Essentially forces most startups to lose much needed ground to big tech companies, and that entrenches incumbents more.”