The Ledger, every show

“My hottest take is that in the next 12 months, 90% of tokens will be going to open models.”

“I think it's pretty embarrassing that we don't have frontier open models in the United States.”

“There's a very common Silicon Valley fallacy, which is there's like research is like the pinnacle. And then there's engineers who implement the research, you know, they're not quite there, but you know, they're still great. And then there's sales and marketing…”

“And the parts of engineering that become less important are funny enough, the things that the Silicon Valley has really bragged about a lot, which is like, Competition winning or like Olympiad type. Are you like as fast as possible at coding? Are you, do you m…”

“Especially there's some high schools that, like, really focus on, like, you must do the math olympic, like, you must do this, the Amy, to then go to the IMO, and, like, this is the path to success, where actually that's kind of anti-signal, because there it's,…”

“And by saying you want to slow down AI, that's saying like, These people who have relationships with loved ones who have dementia, you're like, no, no, no, sorry, you guys, you gotta maintain that relationship for a little bit longer. We're scared. We don't kn…”

“She is genuinely so kind, so intelligent, and like, people just in, throughout tech, throughout the world, really love her, and for good reason, and she has an incredible network. She's so generous with her time. Like, there is, like, kind of dirty work invest…”

“If we need FDEs to make the product work, we have a shit product. Like, the point of FDEs should be accelerate and get them consuming faster. If you're putting in FDEs, because that's the only way you'll get a deal done, I'm sorry, my friend, you have a shit p…”

“I think that has been not only like disingenuine and wrong, but it's like really hurt the psychology of a lot of people, developers, like just people in the world. Does AI a disservice? Does the world a disservice? Because this is again, talking about the use …”

“Our take is that it is very unlikely that the optimal UI or the optimal interaction pattern for this new software development where humans spend much less time writing code. I think it's very unlikely that that optimal interaction pattern will be found by iter…”

“We might see a short-term contraction of usage of the very frontier models.”

“Now, I actually think this is good for Harvey because it's nothing like trying to do something yourself to make you realize, oh, shit, this is actually really difficult. This doesn't actually matter for us to have the in-house ability to build this ourselves. …”

“The bare case against factory is if one model provider gets significantly better than all of the others. So basically I think a key thing for us is that all the models are going to be roughly as good as each other.”

“A lot of enterprises will realize so many of the tasks that we're doing, we don't need the very frontier to do it. Like, and we can do it much faster, much cheaper with these open models.”

“Phase three is the hangover, where you go and look at the bill, and it's like, oh my god, we are spending so much. I have no idea what the ROI is. Does this, like, is this helping our business? That's where a lot of these companies are at now”

“One of the CIOs I was speaking with realized we've been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on people asking Opus 4.8 questions like, Hey, how's it going? Like, what should, what are my macros from the food I ate today? Like, what's the weather…”

“I actually think it can be as low as zero percent for some individuals, and it can be as high as like 1010 of thousands of percent for some individuals.”

“I would say order of magnitude will probably be comparable to salary.”

“Probably, like, 80 to 90%. It's typically the planning that really needs the frontier models.”

“I think that the reality is it will come to haunt some of these companies one day, because I think right now where there's a gold rush and everyone's like desperate to sign, you know, and get more tokens from these people, it's easy. They're kind of like, in m…”

“The future of software development is where these organizations, instead of having engineers, That build the software. They're going to have engineers that build the factories that build their software.”

“Maybe there's like some short term blips, but like long term, absolutely not. Like not even close. I think there might be similar corrections to like this thing at Uber, Where, oh, we were going a little haywire. We weren't allocating it appropriately. And the…”

“So generally, yes. I mean, they're the best firm.”

“I think there are probably going to be in the next couple years some pretty big incidents that occur because of,”

“There was a brief period of time where I thought it might be just one or two companies that run away with being kind of the frontier and the best. What seems pretty clear to me is it's probably going to be at least four that are going to probably be approximat…”

“Like if you do have billion token context window model, you throw it all in there. It's still gonna be more expensive. The reason why retrieval is so important for us is because even if there is a model that's going to have these larger context windows, and ce…”

“The world going forward, there is going to be nothing that no one can build.”

“The age of the polymath is back.”

“There's kind of an ego thing, where, oh no, no, the work that I'm doing, only a frontier model could handle. Oh, this mere open model can't deal with the work that I'm dealing with. And this is like, even admittedly, when I first started switching over, I'd be…”

“What's happened with Uber publicly has happened privately with a lot of customers of ours.”

“The best engineers are going to be the ones that don't see sales and marketing as dirty work, but as again, an important part of the product, because as an engineer, you're no longer, you know, just your job is ship feature.”

“These are all things that the best organizations at like developer experience would invest a lot of resources in, but they would do it because it makes it easier for engineers to work, easier for them to onboard. But the impact of doing that well is just like …”

“Short term, yes. Long term, no. Short term, yes, because it's just a shock to the system where, you know, there are all these big layoffs that are happening that are pretty aggressive, and, you know, these are 1010 of thousands of people that had a job that no…”

“Dementia is kind of a go-to example where everyone understands how big of a deal that is. That is something that can be solved with better AI and better software. Like it's a matter of time. Like we will solve it and we can solve it.”

“So I think what is necessary for the best outcome for the consumers Is going to be models that are separate from the applications. You, as a consumer, do not want to use applications that are provided for you by the same people that are giving you the model, b…”

“Every CIO I speak to is really keenly aware of, we cannot, you know, throw our lot in with just one model provider. We're gonna need to be agnostic.”

“I think it would be ill-advised if they were to try and go to the niche of non-technical people writing code for code sake, because I think that is going to be run by, like, if you're going to need enterprise controls over who has access to what databases and …”

“Probably on the, like, frontier model lab side.”

“In Europe, I mean, it's a, it's tough. I think that there were some, there was some good positioning that Europe had, you know, a few years ago, a few decades ago with nuclear that I think hasn't been, you know, delivered on as much as of late, but that would …”

“I think you are doing a bad job on hiring if you need to, like, mandate certain crazy hours or you need a bed in the office.”

“In my mind, the answer here is, I think they're approximately equivalent. Like, to me, it doesn't really matter. The biggest reason that affects like the EV is like volatility of the company. That's the only, like, cause I think from the business perspective, …”

“Capability in code is really core to performance on any LLM and like loosely, the better any LLM is at code, the better it is at any downstream task, even that's like writing poetry.”

“That, and also like just in the enterprise, the use cases are pretty different than those represented in something like Sweebench.”

“The reality is very clearly in the next few years, the amount of lines of code written by a human will go down. Like the percentage of code written by humans will go down.”

“The promise of test driven development is going to finally be delivered with this world of AI agents that are working on software development”

“At the end of the day, no one really cares about the metrics. What people really care about is like developer sentiment. When you're kind of playing that game at the end of the day, if you want to do a metric, talk to developers and ask if they feel more produ…”

“There's this one very large public company that we work with and Pulling in just a large migration task from taking four months to taking like three and a half days. That is the best ROI that you don't need to measure this or that.”

“At the beginning of the year, we saw enterprises were using less than one percent open models, like less than one percent of their tokens were going to open models. Then in around March, it kind of crossed that one percent threshold. And then in May, it crosse…”