Levie: Real-World Diffusion, Not Intelligence, Is AI's Ultimate Rate Limiter
Aaron Levie · Why AI Creators Keep Panicking (They're Wrong) · Jul 30, 2026 · at 12:21
Box CEO Aaron Levie explains to Joe Lonsdale why real-world bottlenecks will slow AI deployment despite fast model improvements.
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“Diffusion actually is, like, your biggest rate limiter, and diffusion is, like, a human, Has to get the intelligence from the model plus probably their data, and then they have to go interact with the real world and do something in the real world, and then bring back whatever the feedback loop is back to the model and the data. And that's actually your ultimate rate limiter, which is just like the speed at which humans can actually make sense of what the models are telling them to go do, the ability to go do an actual study on humans with a new kind of, you know, biomedical research, the ability to actually get the permits to build the thing that the AI, you know, helped you accelerate building. That's all of the kind of limitations of the real world.”
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