The Ledger, every show

“I think the UK can go back to being pretty much the richest country in the world per capita. I really truly believe that.”

“Yeah, I think it's a real risk for Europe that it becomes a place where We regulate technology we didn't build, and I think that's a huge mistake.”

“I think that we are seeing the flattening off of the value of just adding more compute and more data to language models.”

“I think nuclear war is really underrated.”

“I mean, I do think the EU AI Act is a mistake.”

“And the number one issue that these companies had, and I'm really not exaggerating, was we want to invest billions and billions of dollars to build compute infrastructure in the UK, and your local county councils in the middle of nowhere keep vetoing our data …”

“So I think probably like the worst idea in the world that it's acceptable to hold in polite company is like degrowth. Like the idea that like, oh, you know, like the real problem in the world is like Too many people, too much stuff, too much consumption, we sh…”

“You could be an extremely highly paid crossword puzzle solver which is sort of how I think about, Jane Street playing a zero sum game, or you can, like, change people's lives.”

“I, 12 months ago, if I'd been on here, I would have told you, It's too late to build an AGI company, like that ship sailed, there's gonna be like three or four of them, they already exist. I now think the most ambitious founders today should seriously consider…”

“I actually think we would have never got off the ground in Silicon Valley because the people would have just said, you know, you just can't do this.”

“And its first trillion dollar company. It will happen.”

“Arguably India may be the best place in the world to build a foundation model company today because of the multilingual aspect.”

“The bit where Silicon Valley starts to have a pretty overwhelming advantage is if you're going from a thousand to 10,000. There are just not that many people outside Silicon Valley who have run thousand person engineering teams. But there are actually lots of …”

“China is more paranoid about AI safety than probably any other government.”

“The U.S. Export controls on, you know, the semiconductor supply chain have had an impact. It's harder if you are a big Chinese company to build a access a 100,000 GPU cluster.”

“I don't think there's a lot further to go in just finding more text. You know, I think we may be at the flattening out of the S-curve on text, but I suspect the next S-curve could just involve finding ways to yeah, to use video, to use, like, interactive exper…”

“My, if I had to bet, my bet is that the enormous amount of capital and talent That has been aggregated, you know, around this relatively small number of companies because of the hype will be enough to unlock the next S-curve, and so you'll see, you know, kind …”

“In the short term, I think we're likely to see more divergence, you know, over the next couple of years than convergence.”

“Ah, you know, I think it, I think I would not be, I mean, I'm a huge fan of OpenAI.”

“And I think in China, as we've seen in other parts of the tech industry in China, the CCP is very nervous about entrepreneurs being given that much room. And so I think that it's not trivial to create the conditions in which a Chinese Sam Altman or a Chinese D…”

“The one bipartisan issue in Washington Is screw China. And, you know, like, it's certainly true that I remember writing about in 20, you know, 1819, about, like, Trump export controls, and what's interesting is that the Biden White House has been as aggressive…”

“I think we'll get really good agents in the next five years.”

“On AI the UK has less regulation than any other country that has a significant AI industry.”

“I think in, in London, it's much more plausible that you build a truly world-class research team and keep them together for long enough to really see the impact.”

“I've raised more money in Ann Arbor, Michigan than I have in London, and I won't name the name of the pension fund, but, you know, one of my biggest investors is a sort of state pension fund in Michigan, and they've been amazing partners to us for a long time,…”

“Being able to build cheap, Smart drones benefits rogue actors, you know, non-state actors a lot more than it benefits states.”

“One of the reasons I've, Really pivot my time within EAF to working on defensive technologies is, I think there's an amazing commercial opportunity there, but I also think it's what the world needs. We need to build the technologies that mean that the negative…”

“Even today in the UK, even with all the progress has been over the last decade in the ecosystem I would say the most aspirational job for a Cambridge computer science grad is to go work at Jane Street and be a trader.”

“Like, why does Silicon Valley work? Because the most ambitious and talented people in that area become founders. If the same thing happened, In the UK, in Europe, in India, we'd have very similar outcomes.”

“You got into the thing where it's very hard if you're new to what we do to compare the CV of like a thirty-one-year-old Who's actually good but not exceptional, and a 21 year old who's exceptional but has no experience, and choose the 21 year old. But you actu…”

“Part of the reason it's hard to do investing here is that often by the time you meet founders, they've conditioned themselves to, like, reduce the ambition in the pitch, because they're just, you know, being so used to people being like, well, that's not very …”

“And you know, one of the things I think is really important to understand about where AI is today and why I think it's you know, some people say it's overhyped. I actually think if anything, it's still underhyped.”

“The way you do this well, isn't by having like a really good matching algorithm or Doing really great matchmaking or doing a lot of like marriage counseling for co-founders. The way you get really good at it is by letting people test and fail very, very rapidl…”

“We have two unicorns so far and we have probably another dozen that I would expect to become unicorns over the next couple of years, you know, that are sort of valued in the mid hundreds of millions.”

“We've chosen not to regulate AI like the Europeans have, and, you know, we generally have had a more permissive regulatory system than in Europe.”

“Each country is going to want some sort of technological sovereignty in, in AI. They're not going to want to be dependent on a small number of US companies to provide everything.”

“I don't think anyone in the West has done anything like as ambitious as UPI. I think it's like an incredible triumph of public-private collaboration.”

“I think there will be AI decacons built in India, and I think now's the time to start.”

“At least in the West, I really do think it's San Francisco and London.”

“Many of the best companies globally over the next decade will be headquartered in the founders home country. They might have the technical team there, the engineering team there. But they're gonna be doing go to market through the US. I strongly believe that.”

“Like, there are very few sectors where the UK is a big enough market to be a publicly listed company if that's your only market. Same for Europe.”

“If you grew up in the Bay Area, and you go to Stanford, and you graduate, and you never thought about starting a company, and there's a very negative signal on you as a founder.”

“Certainly the last five years, but arguably longer, the story of AI is really a story largely about the deployment of just enormous amounts of compute and enormous amounts of data, and not that many new ideas, candidly.”

“I think the pure LLM approach absolutely is commoditized. Will be, either is or will be very quickly commoditized.”

“For example, if you train a large model, you have to, like, supply random samples of the training data to the to the CCP or to the government. You have to you have to, like, show it's, like, political, that it is not gonna undermine any of the, you know, state…”

“Whoever builds the protocol, that for key slices of the economy, Actually allows agents to come together and do business together. That's going to be an extraordinarily valuable company.”

“You have probably the top embodied AI company, private company in the world in Wave.”

“I don't think AI today is more powerful than nuclear weapons.”