The Exchanges

Q people in the technical fields are going to be seeing that there's, there's real advances. So, so I'm curious to get, yeah, I'm curious to get your take on like, uh, on, on this. What do you think about this? Like, again, going back to that question. Yes, we know open AI is feeling the pressure, but like, is how should we view this? Is this the promise step forward?

A Well, I think it's a good strategy, what you just described, that if this is a model that is perhaps more useful for people who, um, are doing data analysis, they're scientists, they're coders, um, then they've got a specific model which just has a little bit more of a clear utility for them, whereas if you're in marketing or you're in customer service, then you're more likely to use the previous model, something like GPT-FORO. Which is a lot more sort of language oriented as opposed to reasoning oriented. I think that's no bad thing in terms of business use case because I think till now there's been this kind of Um, this effort to try and create, create this. Well, we started off with this ambition to create artificial general intelligence, right? That was the founding of open AI. We want to create, um, AI that has the same broad cognitive capabilities as the human mind. Um, and I think that actually has a big downside when you're actually trying to sell something packaged like that to businesses, which is that you're giving them this Swiss army knife of a tool that has all these general capabilities, and the risk is that your end customer can end up just becoming paralyzed with indecision on what to do. Like, if you talk to some businesses who are trying to figure out how to use generative AI models, I heard from one bank, for instance, they asked, they put out a survey to th…

AI assessment note: “Well, I think it's a good strategy, what you just described”

Q out this week. Okay, so, Parmi, I'm curious, like, you know, I think a lot of us have a perception of Sam Altman. Um, maybe many, but somewhat fewer have a perception of Demis Hassabis, who's the head of DeepMind at Google. What do you think, uh, what did you learn about the two of them? That is not fully represented in the public consciousness that is important to know.

A Well, I, what I learned from both of them is that they both Were incredibly mission-oriented people. Um, they had very different personalities. Sam was a very outspoken, um, charismatic individual. He was an entrepreneur's guru. Um, he, even after his company's first startup looped, essentially failed by Silicon Valley standards, he somehow managed to create this incredible respectability around himself among Um, startups and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley as this almost Yoda of, um, of, of entrepreneurial advice. He would, um, post blog posts with just like, 99 pieces of, pieces of advice for, for startups. And he was just an incredibly good communicator, and someone who would also, at the drop of a hat, help other entrepreneurs. So I've, I've spoken to entrepreneurs who said, yeah, I just, you know, sent an email, I didn't I think he'd respond, and then he responded right away and introduced me to someone who helped me raise money, and so he has really engendered a ton of goodwill among startups, because he's very responsive like that, um, and it's actually given him an incredibly powerful position in the Valley, just as a, as someone who's incredibly well connected, and that was even before he started OpenAI, when he was the head of Y Combinator.

AI assessment note: “what I learned from both of them is that they both Were incredibly mission-oriented”

Q uh, dollars. And it's the round, like we talked about in this, on the show in the past, uh, Thrive Capital, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Apple are all talking about getting involved. So let me ask you this. You, you obviously just wrote the book about these companies. Um, What's the deal with taking all this money and getting this massive valuation and still being a nonprofit? How's that even possible?

A But they're not a nonprofit, right? They're a capped profit. And one of the reports that came out a few weeks ago, there was a report saying that there's some interest among, um, the management of open AI to restructure the company in such a way that it could become even more investor friendly. So go even further in the direction of being a for profit organization. Um, so the only way that it's really a nonprofit is that it's, it has this nonprofit board, which has a significant amount of power that is very unusual for a company. For example, it had the power to fire the CEO or did it? It didn't really, right? Because he came back. Yeah. Um, so, I mean, that's just what I kind of tried to make. The main point I wanted to say in my book was that I was just so fascinated when ChatGPT came out that two people, Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis, had become like these rivals to create artificial general intelligence, and they both started out with really humanitarian goals, like really altruistic goals, like curing cancer, solving climate change. Sam Altman wanted to, you know, Improve the wealth of people, um, across the pop, across the population. Um, but it was just so hard to keep those goals in check when money became such a focal point because building AI was so expensive. And, um, and they just ended up getting sucked into the gravitational pull of big tech companies. I mean, tha…

AI assessment note: “But they're not a nonprofit, right? They're a capped profit.”

Q the ones that were released this week, Preview and Mini. So there's like an actual model that OpenAI has that, you know, I think will eventually make its way into the product. And if the models do live up to this sort of, um, Improve benchmarks and become super valuable. For some cases, maybe they can charge much more. Is that one way that they end up justifying the valuation?

A Maybe, but I can't see it being that high. It's pretty high. I can totally, I can totally see big numbers being tossed around though, and I'll give you why, the reason why I think that is, I think it was last year, I was talking to somebody who was from an AI company that worked very closely with OpenAI, and they, they talked to people at OpenAI all the time, and they were like, oh, yeah, so Sam and OpenAI, they're doing another funding round, and he wants to raise a hundred billion dollars. He was like, they're saying, that's what they're saying in the company. He's trying, and I was, I remember responding, you mean a hundred billion valuation, right? And he said, no, no, no, they actually want to raise a hundred billion. Um, I don't, I could never corroborate that with anyone, but my sense is that big numbers get tossed around a lot.

AI assessment note: “Maybe, but I can't see it being that high. It's pretty high.”

Q to use them in practice, right? This is actually something that I highlighted. There was a Grok engineer who said, who said, um, oh, one seems powerful, uh, so far, but everyone is kind of unsure what to do with it. Kind of humorous place to be after all the speculation. So what do you think happens as these models get smarter in fields like science and coding and math?

A I think it's really interesting because there's this race in Silicon Valley to make everything more and more capable. Which is disconnected. I think a little bit from the sentiment among their enterprise businesses in the rest of the world who are just like, we don't necessarily need AI that's more capable. We just like, we're quite happy with what you've already put out there. Like that is already. Pretty impressive as a step change up from what was even available two years ago. Um, so my sense over the last year has been one thing that's been lacking from the AI model vendors, like OpenAI, like Anthropic, like Google, Microsoft with Azure, has been just to do a little bit more hand-holding with their business customers on how to actually implement the current models that are available. But I think there's just this kind of Um, you know, rabbit enthusiasm to try and just make these models smarter and smarter. We, you've talked on your show before about the arms race. Um, it's kind of had this, it's, it's got this kind of self-perpetuating cycle that the, um, you know, even like Salesforce last night, just their, their announcement got completely overshadowed by OpenAI, but they announced AgentForce Which is basically what they say is the very first AI platform for businesses that has autonomous agents. There are startups that have been talking about doing this, but haven't rel…

AI assessment note: “sentiment among their enterprise businesses in the rest of the world”