The Ledger
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Levie: OpenAI is intellectually honest and its demos work in practice
“But I'd say ChatGPT and OpenAI generally have been incredibly intellectually honest kind of You know, stewards in this space. And so when you see a demo from them, it tends to actually, you know, work like that in practice.”
Levie: AI startups should build for models existing in three years
“Which is, if you're watching this curve, you probably should be building software for what is going to exist in three years from now, as opposed to today, because you don't want to be building software that sort of assumes that the tokens are expensive, and th…”
Levie: Meta's open-source AI push will be a long-term strategic success
“So I think it's both going to be a commercial success. And I think it's like structurally, strategically something that, that is is going to look, you know, like a very good decision in the long run.”
Levie: More compute will inevitably fix current imperfections in AI technology
“Maybe it doesn't work perfectly right now, but it's like, there's nothing that is, is stopping it from working perfectly in a world of more compute, And just more breakthroughs on, on, on the on the models themselves, and that is kind of where we're at right n…”
Levie: AI Labs Will Inevitably Compete Head-to-Head Across All Use Cases
“You know, I think it's, to some extent, it was sort of an inevitable outcome because if you think about it, like if you have this AI model that is super intelligence packed into a model, it eventually has to converge on On, you know, all of this, all the same …”
Levie: Enterprise AI ROI will far surpass consumer use as tokens stay expensive
“The tokens are not going to be cheap anytime soon. And so the ROI on those tokens will just be much higher in the enterprise because it'll be, you know, generating something that is sort of, you know, impacts the GDP in some way.”
Levie: Most workplace employees will run AI agents in coming years
“But I think that I would expect most people have agents running in their daily life from a workplace standpoint over the coming years, just because the efficiency will just be too strong to kind of avoid.”
Levie: Prompt AI for pros-and-cons tables to prevent sycophancy
“In general, what you really want is,
The, as much as possible, you want the agents to do things like, generate me a table of the pros and cons of this thing.
Right.
And make sure that you make arguments for both sides, and then you want to be really in the …”
Levie: Having documents across 20 to 30 systems will not work with agents
“Where we come from in our industry of, you know, with enterprises managing enterprise content, companies have 20 or 30 different systems where their enterprise documents are, and that just simply won't work with agents.”
Levie: AI agents should have separate inboxes, not personal access
“The common practice and sort of state of the art is, is effectively don't give open claw or something access to your inbox. Create a separate inbox for the agent. And really treat that agent as a, another colleague that you're working with. And so it has its o…”
Levie: Extensive new case law for AI agents will emerge
“So in finance, in healthcare, in legal we have just incredible amounts of updated laws that will have to get written and case law that will be That will be generated over the coming years.”
Levie: AI systems have a strict trade-off between speed and accuracy
“There is one thing in AI that, that is is just like there's just no free lunch which is that you can have something fast, like insanely fast, but like moderately accurate or pretty accurate and insanely slow. Right. And like, you just get to choose.”
Levie: Nvidia relies on chip supply, not equity, to influence OpenAI
“They don't need to own a percentage of open AI. Like that's like, they need to sell chips to open AI. And so really they just need to ensure that they've got a very strong, you know, relationship that is, is sort of very sturdy and supporting the broad tailwin…”
Levie: AI reduces two-week codebase library updates to just ten minutes
“You used to have to spend like two weeks on like a library, you know, change that you wanted to make in your code base. And that's now a 10 minute activity. And, but are we spending any less time building software? No, it's because we're just now doing the thi…”
Levie: Early Adopter Enthusiasm Predicts Nothing About Mainstream Tech Adoption
“What happens is the early adopters, the people that, you know, we all hang out with and talk to all day, they're going to try everything. We're going to try these crazy goggles, and we're going to put, you know, magnets on our head, and we're going to do the c…”
Levie: OpenAI will continue aggressive push into AI coding and IDEs
“I would not be surprised if OpenAI continued their motivation for needing to be in this space more aggressively. And so I doubt this is the last that we hear from OpenAI on on either IDEs or coding in general.”
Levie: AI coding will be the killer app for token volume
“Coding is, is definitely the one that is like, you know, this incredible, like, you know, one person could cause thousands of dollars per day of GPU expense if they really want it. So I think this is going to be the killer app for the foreseeable future in ter…”
Levie: Engineering work is shifting to managing and auditing AI agents
“Basically the new form of engineering work out there is to come up with incredibly precise prompts that are super tuned for his use case. And then kick off all these agents in the background that, that are going off and doing work. And then he goes and reviews…”
Levie: Existing AI models will deliver massive economic gain without further progress
“Even if you stopped right now, you'd still have, you know, massive amounts of economic gain get delivered from what we've already created.”
Levie: B2B will drive most AI and API volume over time
“If you want to be in the B to B game, which will be most of the volume of AI usage and APIs over time, because that, that, that's how you will show up in every other product, then this matters a ton.”
Levie: Most AI agent use cases will be enterprise backend automation
“I actually think most of the use cases will be on the enterprise side, so they're gonna be like things that we never even see. That are just happening behind the scenes in our technology and our software kind of every day.”
Levie: Box will reinvest AI productivity gains into growth over profit margins
“If I could get an engineer within Box to, you know, write 20% more code, and let's just imagine it's all perfect, you know, code, or a sales rep to be 20% more productive, i.e., for the same dollars, they can sell 20% more in, in revenue. In both of those exam…”
Levie: In 3-5 years, AI will give startups scaled sales and engineering
“AI as an example, this is, you know, three to five years out for this idea, but like if AI can basically do the things you know, that, that are usually those first steps to just getting started with the business. That, that I didn't have access to before becau…”
Levie: 10x cheaper AI models will drive 100x more usage
“If you could make, again, kind of wave magic wand and you say like we have GPT five or GPT six, and it costs like a 10th
Of what today GPT-IV costs I would argue that you'll probably get a hundred X more usage of AI, not, not just 10 X, you know, more usage of…”
Levie: Cloud hyperscalers do not need high margins on AI itself
“Ultimately, like if you're a hyperscaler in the cloud, what you really want is all of our workloads.
You just want us to build our full application on your tech stack.
So
You're not really trying to make that much margin on the AI itself.
You actually want, li…”
Levie: Box's latest AI agents use up to 5 million tokens
“When we launched our first kind of AI use case within box, our product, The average number of tokens that was being used on a task was like 5010 1020 thousand tokens. Now our latest agents might use a million tokens or five million tokens on executing a task.”
Levie: Society will learn over time how to prompt AI without bias
“And that, that'll be, I just think that'll be like a thing we generally learn over time in society, just as we eventually learned how to use search engines and other tools.”
Levie: Vertical SaaS Proved $50B Companies Win Over Horizontal Tools
“Even in, you know, kind of Traditional SaaS software. We saw 30, 40, fifty billion dollar vertical software companies emerge in categories where there was already plenty of horizontal products that could have solved those problems, but just that relentless lev…”
Levie: AI context windows improved 500x in 18 months
“And at the start of ChatGPT in let's call it November of twenty-twenty-two, the context window was somewhere on the order of about 4000 tokens. Just yesterday Sundar announced two million tokens on the latest Gemini model. So when you think about it there's li…”
Levie: OpenAI cut high-quality token costs tenfold in 18 months
“And the fact that we've now done that, or not we, I mean, OpenAI has basically done that, you know, I don't know, four or five times in the past 18 months. So we're already maybe a 10th of the total amount of cost of a kind of fairly high quality token just in…”
Aaron Levie: LLMs serve as the common reasoning engine across agent architectures
“If you go and ask like 10 AI startups that are doing anything with agents, you'll probably get, you know, more or less 10 different architectures of kind of how the agent actually functions. But what is at least similar to all of them is the LLM or the model i…”