Opinion
Wolfe: AI-Generated Art Should Belong to the Human Prompter
“To your core question, yes, I think that if I do a calculation, and I'm using a calculator instead of like doing math by pencil, that calculation is still an input into my output. If I'm using AI to generate Art and it's my prompt instead of the gesture of my …”
Insight
Wolfe: Early-stage startup genius is notoriously hard to distinguish from fraud
“Now, it's very hard in the early nascent embryonic stages of a business to really, and I'm being intellectually honest here, know if somebody is going to be an absolute genius or a total fraud. Because the best storytellers are also the best con men, or women,…”
Disclosure
Wolfe: Lux Capital seeks scientists possessing hidden technological secrets
“And then the final situation, which is where we spend most of our time, is the Schopenhauer dictum, which is talent can hit a target that nobody else can hit, and genius can hit a target that nobody else can see. And that goes back to the asymmetric informatio…”
Opinion
Wolfe: Crypto is uninteresting because everyone is already interested in it
“To me, crypto today is not really interesting because it's so interesting to everybody.”
Insight
Wolfe: Startup risk and enterprise value operate like the laws of thermodynamics
“In fact, I always think of this like the first law of thermodynamics, that energy is not created or destroyed. Risk and value themselves are just changing form. And every time that you can kill a risk, subsequent value gets created because a later investor arg…”
Opinion
Wolfe: Biofuels made no economic sense because they reversed energy density progress
“And so in energy, people were going back to agrarian economies where we were growing biofuels, and that made no sense.”
Insight
Wolfe: The directional arrow of computing progress is increasing physical intimacy
“The undeniable arrow of progress, that directional trend is more and more intimacy.”
Assertion Partly supported
Wolfe: Thomas Reardon single-handedly coded Microsoft's Internet Explorer
“Single-handedly codes Internet Explorer, and makes a lot of money, retires, does another company, retires, and then early thirties now.”
Prediction Held up
Wolfe: Users will soon control ambient technology using neural micro-gesture wristbands
“What that implies is that you will wear something akin to a bracelet or a wristwatch, and you will be able to gesture like Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice to flick your fingers to turn on the lights, to swipe like you would swipe in three dimensional, three Rai…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wolfe: Computational generative design will make products look biological within a decade
“I believe that within a decade, you will see Architectural structures. You will see product design. You will see components inside of vehicles and industrial products that look way more biological because they were designed, interestingly, by a computer that a…”
Insight
Wolfe: VCs must privately anticipate failure while publicly cheerleading their startups
“Venture, by definition, is a cheerleader business. You're optimist. You're promoting the future. You're supporting companies who, against all odds, are likely to fail, and you know, you're cheering them on. But I think internally and privately, you have to ant…”
Disclosure
Wolfe: Lux partners get one solo high-conviction override investment per fund
“If you have one partner that is dogmatically table-bounding, and everybody else has said, I don't see it, what we decided to do for the tribe is, Is everybody gets one of those. So if I'm the one that sees it. Shane Parrish: One per year, one per career. Josh …”
Opinion
Wolfe: Venture capital has more irrational actors than ever before
“Today, in the market environment we're in, there are more irrational actors than ever before just because there's more money than ever before.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wolfe: Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold notoriously eviscerated dissenters at Microsoft
“And it's interesting because Bill Gates, in a sense, was notorious for that. You know Nathan Mervold, brilliant, you know, but would sort of eviscerate people if they were wrong.”
Opinion
Wolfe: Nvidia can reinvent itself with its cash and margins
“I think that their ability with that market capitalization and that cash and the margin that they have, they can reinvent and buy a lot of things. So I think Jensen is a thoughtful capital allocator. I think he's benefited and caught lightning in a bottle over…”
Disclosure
Wolfe: I run my medical records through LLMs to catch doctor oversights
“Today, I take my medical records as soon as I get them from top doctors, and I still put them into LLMs to see what did they miss, and sometimes it unearths some interesting correlations.”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Wolfe: Major LLM providers will offer enterprise document search within six months
“Why don't we wait six months? Because this is going to be available from all of the major LLM providers today that want to get the enterprise accounts.”
Assertion Supported
Wolfe: Sakana AI trained an evolutionary model on eight GPUs
“Their latest model
Which was based on this evolutionary technique was like eight GPUs, which was wild.”
Insight
Wolfe: Viewing data algorithms cannot crack the recipe for hit shows
“They've put a lot of money into this, but it hasn't yielded the recipe maker for, like, the next perfect show, and oftentimes the thing that you want to see is almost something that's orthogonal from what you've been watching.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wolfe: Marvel Movies Have Only Two or Three Years of Demand Left
“I heard Anthony Mackie, who's in You know, the latest Marvel movie talking about an expectation that he'll be, somebody was like, how long do you think you'll be doing Marvel movies? And he's like, I think probably like the next 10 years. And I'm like, probabl…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wolfe: AI will create automated patent trolls
“Well, yeah, there will for sure be AI patent trolls, if you put it negatively.”
Assertion Supported
Wolfe: AI already detects subtle CEO sentiment and linguistic shifts in earnings
“Already, there are AIs that can not only go through Qs and Ks, 10 Qs and 10 Ks, and can listen to quarterly earnings reports and CEOs that are talking at conferences or on podcasts and can get an emotional sentiment, can see where they're varying their languag…”
Insight
Wolfe: Spotting deprioritized back-page news stories creates an informational edge
“I like to know what the editor put on C-Twenty-two, That's not as visible on the website, because there's meta information that the editor is saying, this is not important to be on the front page, but if I disagree, and I think that there's a magnitude of info…”
Disclosure
Wolfe: Lux Capital Has Discussed Adding an AI Partner to the Firm
“We have not yet done this as a partnership, but we've talked about it. Having an AI partner.”
