The Ledger, every show

“If Anthropic thinks cloud code is already a win, In six or 12 months from now, they won't even be around.”

“These products are not going to be used by you know, a hundred million people. But they will generate revenue that's going to be higher than the advertising revenue of Google or Meta. It's going to happen.”

“And in that era, I don't think Google is going to be the one single monopoly because they're already like far behind in this interface.”

“The output tokens, if you're literally just a reseller of model tokens, you have no business. Because the model will get commoditized. So even if you're a model builder, you don't have a business.”

“It might not be inconceivable that Micron, the supplier of HPMs, might be more valuable than Meta in the next six to 12 months.”

“And definitely like companies like Anthropic lobbied very hard for it.”

“American government owns 10% of Intel. Nvidia and SoftBank own five percent each.”

“And 2024, 20 23 especially, and large part of 2024 too, Google had like, maybe a fourth or fifth best models at any moment. So as a startup outside Google, you had access to AI that was better than what Google internally had.”

“Google has the least incentive to bring out AI native search or agents right there on core Google homepage or Google apps. It can be hidden in a mode or like sometimes firing some for some queries, but it's never going to be the central piece of it.”

“I think it's just going to incentivize people to publish higher quality content. In order to get cited by an LLM powered answer, like Substack or things like that try to do, like you want to own your content and you publish it and make sure it's high quality a…”

“We, you know, like we still have the state of the art deep research in the world”

“So I, I'm bearish on advertising to really take off in the chat interface. I, I'm happy to be proven wrong there, but I'm bearish on that.”

“And the way we differentiate ourselves at perplexity Is we don't just orchestrate across tools and files and connectors. We also orchestrate across models. That is the differentiation that Anthropic and OpenAI cannot claim”

“There are real engineers in meta and in other companies spending like ten million a year per engineer on, on, on, on these, you know, coding tools.”

“My prediction would be agents that are like completely autonomous software engineers. Today, I think we're all using Tools like CloudCode or Codex to write code, but not as literal software engineers.”

“No one's going to be able to afford a twenty-four-seven AI, Frontier AI, running on the server.”

“I believe that the 2407 always on agent is going to be realized by the company that wants to play the role of the orchestrator, not the model builder, not the frontier model, but the orchestrator.”

“If you can solve this problem, you will capture the most economic value in AI long-term. Short term, it might look like, oh, like this other lab's revenue is growing, you know, exponentially, this, that, but long term, this is the one objective that truly matt…”

“I certainly think they can be sustainable.”

“I actually believe that there'll be a lot of resistance to building data centers. It's because people incorrectly think that data centers consume a lot of water or eat up a lot of power, which isn't, both are untrue.”

“So we're still going to see data center build out. It might not happen in the US.”

“There's going to be lots of amazing companies that are going to get built with far fewer people getting multi-billion dollar, multi-hundred million dollar valuations with like 20, 30 people and propelling like trillions of dollars of new GDP.”

“The advertising model around like travel or shopping or like fashion are not getting disrupted by agents because the judgment is not objective. Any, anything where the judgment is objective, the transaction is based on objective judgment, that's going to get d…”

“Yeah. Anyone can be a trillion dollar company.”

“We're training our own models post training it on top of amazing open source models, and that will bring down the cost that we currently spend on frontier model tokens. We expect to continue to use frontier models for designing new experiences and new capabili…”

“Absolutely. Because it's in your incentives to bring down the cost.”

“Our one thing that perplexity has is every revenue we make, unlike certain other wrapper companies, every revenue perplexity makes has positive gross margins.”

“That said, I'm fully working with the assumption that OpenAI will also build its own browser. Anthropic will also try to build its own browser.”

“The phone makers will start offering all of them as alternatives. It's not going to be like a locked-in default search option.”

“OpenAI has perplexity within ChatGPT that did not kill any of these companies.”

“We think, like, we can grow at least, you know, a few billions a year in just subs, which is a great business.”

“But those who are trying to game the SEO system and trying to get traffic, I think they're definitely going to have a harder time.”

“My, our belief is that nobody's gonna have a lead in them having the best AI model for more than a few weeks.”

“Not anytime soon. Which is funny because that's not paid as much as someone gets paid to write code today, right? So it's a, it's like, it happens in the reverse way. Like everybody wants to think what they do is the one that's the one that's going to be taken…”

“But I feel the, this year in 20, 25 and six, the differentiation is going to come from more agentic behavior. Where like the question answering, like answering questions will be seen as a commodity.”

“There's gonna be a bunch of great reasoning models, but there's not gonna be a hundred products that really package, personal context all the API integration, services integrations native integration to your phone to be an assistant really well.”

“It's actually pretty expensive to serve deep research for us. We still price it at 20 dollars a month. I think OpenAI's one is, like, slightly more detailed on some queries. But it's priced at 200 dollars a month. And you can see, right, that that's simply bec…”

“I feel like they're very well positioned to keep their existing ad business strong or even, or make it even stronger in a world where AIs actually work. It's a kind of a interesting position to be in for them where their ads business is going to flourish even …”

“Another thing I'll tell you why they'll, they'll still continue to be dominant for a few years is let's say you do your research on like what microphones to buy, whatever, or like, you know, Let's say the best headphones for podcast recording. You're buying eq…”

“The only one who's managed to do this, I would say, is Google. They built their own chips, they built their own software around it called JAX, and then they built their own accelerated linear algebra library called XLA. And then, you know, they have their own …”

“They're not going to hire as many people going forward.”

“I feel like humans will still trust other human businesses to do stuff for them, but they'll just push them to, like, hey, like, now that AI can use this, why do you guys need, like, three months to get it done faster? Like, why do you guys need to charge us t…”

“I think that layer is still not taken off, but it's certainly something that's waiting to happen because as you can clearly see, software creation is getting a lot easier. So someone's going to be able to be that platform for deploying all these things in a se…”

“There's this thing called Replit or Bolt, where you can just go and describe an app you want to build and the agent will build and deploy it for you. And I think that's where things are heading to. Bolt, B-O-L-T or Replit, R-E-P-L-I-T. And sure, it's not going…”

“I think what won't be democratized is access to compute, mainly because it takes a lot of money. And that really depends on which countries choose to invest early on and later on in the process.”

“I mean, perplexity, that's why we sort, we attribute it to a source, like, we don't, like, say it's our content, and that way we give credit to the source, and we're not actually training on the data, but ChatGPT is different. They actually train on all the da…”

“And then he told me the only thing that matters is he drew two circles. One big circle, called it unsupervised learning, and then inside he said, reinforcement learning, another circle, and he said, this is AGI, every other research doesn't matter.”

“That sort of router, that, that orchestrator, I think that's the hardest thing to build, and whoever builds that, and can operate that at a scale of billion users, and also knows how to monetize, like, some of those queries really well, is going to be the next…”