The Ledger, every show

“The data I have is that a number of very smart and even very self-aware research scientists have felt that, you know, there was some knee in the curve on recursive self-improvement or ASI, 18 months away, every 18 months for the last five years.”

“From a prediction standpoint, personally, I think we're going to see somebody make a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, trading markets with LLMs next year. It's inevitable.”

“One is there's going to be like some collapse of sentiment around a set of robotics companies next year, not because it like actually isn't as a field going to progress, but because, you know, people are beginning to project timelines and you know, not everybo…”

“In the end, a lot of the model optimization performance layer is open source, and it's a commodity And it will end up being like a fight at the infrastructure level, actually.”

“I think we're going to see technical proof of breakthroughs in robotics and in generalization this year, though not deployments.”

“If we take the cost of software and high quality software down two orders of magnitude, we're just gonna end up with more software in the world. We're not gonna end up with fewer people doing development.”

“You could argue now that you have a handful of companies that are showing really amazing video generation capabilities, where it's not actually, like, a bunch of smaller players are step function behind there between runway and Pika. And even you know, if you …”

“I think that there's a prior generation of go-to-market infrastructure that will become less relevant. Because it doesn't support, like, the scale, intelligence of, like, okay, I want all these first and second and inferred third-party signals.”

“There's like exactly one independent voice API business and tens of millions of revenue, and that's 11.”

“That's why you get actually a series of companies that are democratizing capabilities and really more on the prosumer side, but, you know, beginning to see things even in, for example, healthcare, traditionally really slow industry where you go zero to five or…”

“And then I think one thing that is often unsaid, because it's a little bit less idealistic, is that a lot of OpenAI people were very upset this last week about Not just the destruction of the mission, which I think was absolutely, like, genuine, but also destr…”

“I do think that if China cannot get A-one-hundreds, H-one-hundreds, top-of-the-line hardware, like, GPUs with good interconnect to train models, like, They will invest heavily in solving that problem. And so one of the things that has been quietly happening is…”

“Like I'm quite confident that we're going to have 10 and 20 person teams building billion dollar businesses.”

“And so I think the thing that is different today may be the speed of change, right? Like, I don't think we have decades to adjust to these capabilities in society.”

“We can do a lot of the work that a first year legal associate does end to end with these large models, and it's like, that's very valuable, right?”

“I think over time, actually, we spent, you know, we spent a lot of time with the research community, but I think the vast majority of companies, like, software is going to end up being built by, with love and respect, like, run-of-the-mill product-oriented eng…”

“That doesn't mean I think engineering as a profession goes away. I think they just, like, leverage these tools much better.”

“Returns in most firms are dominated by a few good investors, even when the partner group might be 10 or more.”

“Assuming you're talking about the macro, like, it's, you know, I think most of the pain is yet to come. We'll still be ugly.”

“I think that it will be a hard time for subscale seed stage funds without a differentiated strategy to persist. I think like it was not hard to raise 10 to fifty million dollars for a couple years and it just will become more because LPs are going to become mo…”

“Like if I were a betting woman and I am, I bet there's a three, five level model in the open source ecosystem within a year.”

“But I think the immediate effect is that A huge number of people that are attempting to create value or do new things in California choose to leave. It's right. That's already happening. It's hard to move an entire ecosystem very quickly. This is the fastest w…”

“I think we are gonna see, like, a slate of consumer hardware that mostly fails, but I'm still open-minded to it”

“I work with several teams now one of which is called Open Evidence and has, like, a pretty good penetration, like, 50% of doctors in the U.S. Now, where it's an explicit objective in the company to try to be as small as possible.”

“I'm told that the modulation of emotions and attention actually doesn't require upload. Like Fred and some professors we know would say it's just ultrasound devices coming soon to, you know, a consumer shelf near you”

“This is actually quite dominated by the fact that M&A is alive again. And so we're going to have outcomes”

“There aren't consumer agents that don't look just like search or research You know, in the large model products that are really working yet that I've seen, but I expect to see them this year.”

“If you recall, like a year ago, the point of view on sweet bench was like, it was impossible to surpass. Team percent or so. And I think the whole industry now considers that if not trivial accessible.”

“The web hosting companies that exist today, I think they either need to dramatically change or you will have a new generation of them. Because you know web development is probably the first to be attacked by code generation.”

“You're going to see providers try and push customers down a more locked in path in terms of like APIs, right? We saw this with, you know, AWS. You're going to have sophistication around like, don't just do, it's a storage bucket. You're, you'll have prompt cac…”

“I think we're going to see really, really cool experiences on the image video audio side, because as you say, if the models get smaller and they get better they also get, you know, and there's different architectures, like what Cartesia is working on, you're g…”

“Some of those people are generating a million dollars of cashflow for themselves. It's not because they're deep AI people.”

“They've never spent a dollar on like paid marketing.”

“There's a version of that company that's somewhere between, like, a companion and a game world that will be very big.”

“And so, like, if that's true, there's gonna be a bunch of different, like, new specialized solutions, and it's trillions of dollars of value at stake. And it's not just, like, Single direct attack on NVIDIA. That is like the opportunity.”

“And so I think there's a lot of developer demand, and I think it, like, foreshadows we should see Apple creating interfaces for running models locally as part of their ecosystem. That's my general prediction.”

“If you think in aggregate, a handful of players in terms of the hyperscalers are spending almost two hundred billion dollars this year on on compute for AI.”

“I am inclined to believe that, you know, a lot of these domains are going to be solved, and it's just a question of, like, picking the product path through.”

“I think the answer is mostly, especially some of these services firms, like maybe they partner to get there, but they mostly will not make the transition, I think.”

“And I think like, I think it is very likely to be a big mover in the ecosystem because if they sponsor some Baseline of models that are big enough to be valuable, high quality enough to be valuable with Facebook AI research. And then enough people find these m…”

“One thing that I've seen with significant research labs is like still continued insourcing of annotators for both pre-training sets and LHF because some of the external services and marketplaces can't get to the level of quality that they're looking for in par…”

“Most of the large cloud providers are sold out for any scale for at least through April of next year.”

“Inference, like inference already dominates open AI compute usage, right?”

“I think other people will arrive at that conclusion and like any other wave of enthusiasm, you'll see people abandon it as well as a technology.”

“I think your average venture capitalist does not spend a lot of time in computer science research”

“I think that Amazon and Apple will have to make more investments over time in these technologies than, like, they don't have labs doing cutting edge work when, like, They have the skill to support them.”

“Like any investor that claims they knew image generation From text was a killer use case, like, a year or two ago, besides you, is just empirically wrong, given David's completely investor-free cap table and amazing business, right, so.”

“I also think an interesting opportunity that we will see is building sort of company specific models with internal data. There's a question of how custom software like and services like these companies get, but if you are building a model that works in a speci…”