The Ledger, every show

“And my sense is in 28, there's increasing talk about also trying to add a exit tax in California. So if you actually try and leave, they'll, they'll try and take a big chunk as sort of a penalty for that.”

“You have these steps, and so it's this ladder that you're climbing, and eventually you're going to hit a point where it can do all of human services, right? And I don't know if that's GPT seven equivalent or eight or six or 10 or whatever, but we're going to g…”

“Because SARS, they both snuffed out with the original form, but then it leaked four times in the first two years after it was cultured in a lab. It kept leaking from what eventually became the Wuhan Institute of Biology when they moved it from Beijing to Wuhan…”

“So you need physical form for the AI in order for it to truly be an existential threat. And that's why if I were to focus on an area, it'd probably be robotics or something like that, because that's where you suddenly give physical form to something. And if yo…”

“The biggest issue we had there is we had a bad investor who, as we were exiting the company, basically tried to claw more value for themselves as part of our exit. And this is sort of a Midas list investor who's very well known now.”

“I know some labs have slowed down on their hiring of researchers unless they're above a very, very high bar because the cost isn't the research or it's the compute associated with the person.”

“OpenAI, Anthropic, and others are the fastest companies to ten billion dollars in revenue basically ever, right?”

“Some of the highest Scoring models against benchmarks now are Chinese models on the open source side. On the closer side, it's still a lot of the US models, but things like Quinn, DeepSeq, et cetera, are doing very well.”

“OpenAI, you know, almost bought Windsurf.”

“There may be a subset of companies that are forever private, because they can afford to be. That may be Stripe, that may be SpaceX, that may be some other companies.”

“Definitionally, most startups are going to fail. And this wave is going to be just like every other one. And the place where every founder and investor think they are is in the right companies, right? And the reality is most people aren't, right? 90% of people…”

“I think in a couple years we'll start thinking about it as we're selling units of cognition, right? We're selling bits of person time or person equivalent to do stuff for us.”

“If you look at it, about half or more than half of all biology research in top journals is not reproducible.”

“If you actually look at crash data, Real data, and people have now reproduced this across multiple countries, multiple time periods, it's the age of two. So for six extra years, we keep people in booster seats and car seats, at least against the data, right?”

“If you look at AI, it's like, 80 to 90% of the market cap is all in the Bay Area.”

“Google was a good example of a organization that would always hire well, but couldn't fire well. It took them a really long time to clean people out. Years, like literally years. Facebook, on the other hand, was kind of known for a more mixed early talent pool…”

“My sense is everybody thinks that they were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on compute leading up to this. And so from that perspective, it wasn't really novel.”

“First, the foundation model market should at least partially consolidate. And it may be in the sort of ancillary areas. So that's image gen, video, voice, you know, a few other areas like that. Maybe some secondary LLMs or foundation models will also consolida…”

“For higher risk forest needing prescribed burns, it takes an average of 4.7 years to get through environmental reviews for simple projects and seven and a half years or so for longer. For more complex projects.”

“If you got rid of all of cancer and all of heart disease, I think you add something like five to seven years”

“Somebody on my team actually went back and asked what are all, There are common schools that all the founders of the biggest companies went to, or the last decade, for example, right? And there's basically three schools that are like a huge chunk of the overal…”

“There'd be like three eras of mankind in terms of, or three eras of intelligence, right? And the first era is basically people. And the second era is some hybrid era where it's a you know, if you look at the number of intelligence units or whatever you want to…”

“Google released a model, I think two years ago called MedPalm too, where if you compare the answers from that model relative to physician experts, it outperformed them. In other words, if you use physicians to train the model will get worse.”

“You know, there's a CEO of a well-known AI company who actually, this is like his dinner question where he'll just ask people around the table, what proportion do you think that your kids will at least at one point in their life date an AI bot or have them as …”

“Where they do a lot of the work that you mentioned in terms of iterating on copy, iterating on the imagery, doing it by different format for, is it TikTok versus TV versus whatever. That is all very automatable with AI. And so I'm very excited about that area.…”

“And so the big wave of enterprise adoption hasn't even happened yet, right? It's very early days. So all the impact is in the future.”

“I feel, it feels like we're a couple of years away from that though, right? Like there's some things that we can become dramatically more cost efficient on, but you know, at least the existing coding co-pilots and other things give you some efficiency, but not…”

“And I think from that is this under overhyped perspective, one could argue this is very under hyped in part because there's been so little true enterprise adoption. But despite that, you're seeing these massive waves of revenue and usage and everything else, a…”

“I think the M&A environment is going to be constrained due to our current FTC slash the more global regulatory viewpoint on whether they want M&A to happen or big tech to get bigger.”

“And so one could argue that in the long run, that's where those types of models should go is the inference platforms probably provide things that are more in that range. And then the hyperscalers and their partners, you know, a handful of them will be at the f…”

“I think on the foundation model side, from a venture capital or angel investor perspective I think we're going to see fewer new language models But we should see models in a lot of other areas and, you know, we have new things happening in music. We talked a l…”

“Eventually the entire UI will go away once agents get good enough, right? And so I think this is kind of the intermediary step of human in the loop. And eventually as agents get smarter and smarter, and that's going to be through breakthroughs in the base mode…”

“But at least for the next few years, it seems like where we're going to see that Really huge market cap incremental add maybe companies like OpenAI and some of the model companies, but also it seems like increasingly it's just going to be existing companies ad…”

“They trained a model specifically on medical data, and the output from the model tended to be more correct than human physician experts.”

“And so I think people are really underestimating what happens once we have self, self-evolving neural nets, which I think is coming quite soon.”

“I think if I were to sort of divvy up that pie of those companies, sort of mid to late stage private tech companies, not in AI, and what's going to happen to them next year and in 20, 25, I think a third of them are just going to go under, or a third of, I sho…”

“And it feels like in this wave, it's probably eighty-twenty again, right? It's probably, Google will probably become a player, right? OpenAI is closely aligned with Microsoft. And then, you know Salesforce with AI is probably Salesforce, right? It probably isn…”

“Travel is decimated. Restaurants are decimated. And yet the stock markets are slightly down. And so I think all that's going to be reconciled.”

“My belief is that we're going to see a second wave of COVID in the fall, and there will be a subset of states that will lock down and a subset of countries that will again.”

“I think May to July or May to August or May to September, something like that is going to be the valley of false hope in some sense, and I hope I'm wrong.”

“I think even Spotify, I think, invested the direct listing to get around some structure that a PE firm went in around an IPO, and that's why they didn't do an IPO. They invented direct listings to get around a structure, as far as I know.”

“SoftBank would be an example of that, where they invested a very large amount of money In a number of companies, a number of those companies are now below where SoftBank has invested. A number are well above, like Gardent. And it looks like the Second Vision F…”

“And I think most people are going to stick around. And I think no matter what, the Bay Area will continue to be a tech epicenter.”

“Nobody's really building scalable apps on Ethereum right now.”

“Most crypto projects from today are going to go to zero. There's a few that are going to be incredibly valuable and already are, and that's going to grow, but I think most are going to go to zero.”

“And I think the same thing is true in the crypto world where there's still a real lack of infrastructure in crypto. And so there's all sorts of really interesting ideas of how you decentralize different services. And I think many of those things will fail. And…”

“And then in parallel, I think there's things that exist today that are sort of the Amazons of crypto that are gonna be massive in their own right and already exists. You know, maybe it's Bitcoin, maybe it's Ethereum, maybe it's a privacy token like Monero, Zca…”

“I do think a lot of people will be making mistakes on the preemptive side, though, because they're basically investing ahead of time with little data evaluations that aren't merited by the data, and so you either have to be extremely good or extremely lucky, a…”