AI

“AI is mid by design. Right? And you do not want to be mid as a thought leader, as a content creator. People don't want to subscribe to mid things. They want to subscribe to a level slightly ahead of where they are.”

“And what's happened over the last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution is we've kind of gotten free energy. Like, energy is way more free than it was a 150 years ago. And so, as a result, we've built all these technologies, like the stove, and the dishwas…”

“I don't see a lot of being compacted by AI specifically. I think, you know, that space is being compacted as much as any other space in terms of, yes, we'll have all this copilot capabilities, some of AI capabilities here and there, but I don't see anything so…”

“I don't think AI really going to change that just because it's using model, you just pay to open AI and that's it. Like everyone can do that, right? It's not much of a Competitive advantage. So it's going to be more like a commodity features that a lot of like…”

“In the future, you know, in the future, I think programming is just going to be really just the problem solving. Like you come up with an idea, you come up with like the basic design for the algorithm in your head, and you just tell the AI, hey, just like, jus…”

“I do think that based on what we are hearing from customers, if we're not seeing returns in like a year or something, there will be more skepticism. So I think there is like a it is time bound, if you will, so.”

“Especially in Silicon Valley, where a lot of the innovation is happening, I think there's actually not that many AI use cases, to be honest, and, ah, AI, to me, even as of what, like January, 19, yeah, 19 to 24, still feels like, ah, in search of truly good us…”

“Practically every app, every internal app especially, is going to be AI infused over the next, like, three years.”

“If you go outside of Silicon Valley, there are actually a lot of use cases for AI, but, ah, a lot of this is not obvious. Like, you have to get into the businesses themselves”

“I think a lot of the utility in AI today like, I would probably argue 60, 70% of the utility, like, you know, businesses I found in AI is mostly via ChatGPT and across the world, too.”

“I think the companies that adopt AI the best, it is going to be engineering driven, I think, rather than, like, operations driven or anything else.”

“Like, I think we can, you know, 10 x the amount of developers, and still, you know, have a lot of people making a lot of money, you know, building amazing software, and also being, while at the same time being more productive. Like, I never understood this, li…”

“My view is actually hardware is still the bottleneck, and AI is also a little bit of bottleneck, but, like, I don't think there's any, like, obvious breakthroughs we need. I think it's just work.”

“Narrative matters a lot to human beings. And I think the recommendation system, that's really hard to capture. Like, it's easy to sell, it's easy to use AI to sell, like, a 20 dollar shirt, but it's really hard for AI to sell, like, a 500 dollar shirt.”

“I'm not so much worried about the dangers of AI and misinformation because I think the way to Stop one bad guy with an AI as 10 good people with an AI. And ultimately there is so much more one by creating than by destroying that I think that the forces of good…”

“At some point in the last few years, we casually skipped the Turing test, right? We broke through it.”

“It is very straightforward to take a model and say, parse through all of these documents and find second order derivative bets and say, oh, it turns out that energy is like very, very adjacent to investments in AI and may not be priced in the same way that GPU…”

“I feel like most people who write about language models being good or bad, some underlying message of like, you know, they have their camp and their camp is like, AI is bad or AI is good or whatever. And they like, they spin whatever they're gonna say accordin…”

“I don't think we should copy exactly what's going on with human all the way, but I think it's good to have a reference point because this is a working example of how intelligence works.”

“At the time, and still, like, AI is sort of at least nominally dominated by Python, but product building is dominated by TypeScript.”

“In my limited experience and working with designers myself, I think designers do not want AI to design things for them. But there's a lot of things that aren't in the traditional designer toolkit that AI can solve. And I think the biggest one is generating cod…”

“People sort of skip to like level five full autonomy, or we're going to have like an autonomous knowledge worker that's just going to take, that's going to, and then we won't need humans anymore kind of Projection that that's going to take a long time, but the…”

“I think the broader thing is that the more and more realistic you get, the more you run into sort of like multi-turn or iterative things where now the task of the AI isn't just to just, you know, extract from your brain what the problem is and kind of directly…”

“There are trade-offs. You cannot have it all. You cannot have safe and cutting edge sometimes. Because sometimes cutting edge means unsafe.”

“I think at this point, if you are in tech, especially in AI, but if you're in tech and you're not in San Francisco, you either lack judgment or you lack ambition. It's one of the two.”

“I think AI is going to completely penetrate every category of software, but then I also think there are going to be a few very, very, very big horizontal agents that serve a lot of functions for people.”

“My PDOOM, insofar as I can quantify it, which I cannot, But if I had to, like, my vibe is like, 10% or something like that? And so there's also like a 90% chance that we live in like a pure utopia, right? And that's awesome, right? So like, let's go after the …”

“The thing that it's like to me is sorry, it's ingenuous, is like just putting this AI on a pedestal and calling it like an unknown alien technology that has like new and undiscovered potentials to destroy humanity. When in reality, all the dangers I think are …”

“There have been 133 funding rounds over a hundred million in AI this year.”

“Look, it's going to be a 20 year journey and we're in like year four or it's like the web and this is like 1998 or something. You know, you've got a long, long way to go before the amazon.coms are like these huge multi-trillion dollar businesses that every sin…”

“For us, it doesn't make sense to think of AI as just the absolute performance. So if you look at like the MMLU score or the, you know, any of these benchmarks that people like to look at, If you just get that score, it doesn't really tell, tell you anything. C…”

“The thing that AI is 10 X better at is a sort of a conversation Right? That's not intrinsically informative, but is more about an opportunity. You can say whatever you want. You're not going to get judged. If it's three AM, you don't have to wait for your frie…”

“They're fantastic at storing knowledge and retrieving the relevant knowledge. They're superior to humans in that regard.”

“I feel like we are bottlenecked by like human creativity on like completely changing the way we think about the internet or like some of the way we think about software, like AI right now pushes us to like rethink everything that we've done before in my view.”

“I think that we're bringing the cost of writing code down to zero. So the fact that we're still writing Python with AI cracks me up just cause it's like literally was designed to be ergonomic to write, not, not safe to run or fast to run.”

“Certainly software engineering will be one of the disciplines most impacted. And I think that it's very, so like, I think if you're in this industry and you define yourself by the tools that you use, like how many characters you can type into Vim every day, th…”

“I don't think those people are going to come in through, you know, some front end website somewhere. Like those people are going to come in through audio from a telephone to texting to email. Like that's just the most obvious outcome.”

“The thing that's hard is like reinventing the internet for agents. We don't want to rebuild the internet. That's an impossible task. And I think people often say like, well, we'll have this second layer of APIs built for agents. I'm like, we will for the top u…”

“Cause like one thing that I wrestle with is like evals is a solution, but the problem is, okay, your AI doesn't work, or it doesn't work as well as you want it to. And people don't associate the solution with the problem cleanly enough. Cause they don't know. …”

“I think what actually AI will enable is not that you bring your own algorithm, but you will be able to talk. You will be able to communicate with the algorithm.”

“Where AI is going to be headed on, I think, on the UI front is the same place as headed on the science front. That originally it's like, oh, well, based on the things that we know right now, it'll sort of combine them, but we're like right at the cusp of it be…”

“I think so I'm actually bullish on engineers in terms of their kind of long-term economic value. Not despite all the movements in Cogen and all the things that we're, you know, already seeing, but because of it because what's going to happen as a result of…”

“Like the fact that we even made the investments necessary to Have enough control to deliver excellent performance and collaboration will also give us the control I think it takes to build sort of the first editor that's truly engineered from the ground up for …”

“Now it turns out that like the fact that we're collaborative helps a lot also with AI. The fact that we're performant also helps a lot with AI.”

“What we're witnessing is developers becoming platform engineers. They're, they have to learn how to enable others to be productive. These others, of course, are AIs. And to do that, they have to give them environments to work in.”

“And I think if you, like, go to another state outside of the Bay Area, probably even in California, outside of the Bay Area, and then you ask somebody how much their life has materially changed, it's, like, pretty close to zero. Real-world inertia is enormous.…”

“So humans, they do not have an internet's worth of training data in their training data, but yet they can still do generally intelligent things. Whereas we're not seeing that with AI right now. So energy and training data are the two denominators that we use f…”

“It's still true. We have yet to have an AI successfully beat any level on any of these games. So it hasn't happened yet.”

“Thinking about what's going on in AI as really replacing search is the wrong take, or maybe not that interesting. It's really more like AI is replacing web browsing. I think that's actually like a more meaningful, like more fundamental shift.”

“If it's like a textbook stuff or like a step-by-step problem, then AI can solve it. But, however, if it requires, like, creativity especially, like, in combinatorics, you kind of need to create, ah, some example, and then try to prove them, ah, that it's the m…”

“In many ways, I think that's kind of the NP-complete problem of AI. If you can do that, you can kind of do anything”

“I could see a path to AI solving the integrations problem. I really couldn't see a path to AI solving this sort of messy data problem because it's more of a people process problem than it is like an AI software problem.”

“Even, especially in the US, right, like, a lot of banks that you would think would be, like, historically maybe more conservative, like, maybe not the earliest technology adopters, like, they are very, like, AI forward and tech forward.”

“Number two is that for AI to deliver on its promise, to be embedded in our lives, it must be fast. There aren't things that are embedded in your life that make you wait 10 or 15 minutes to get a good answer. Those are proof of concepts, but those aren't produc…”

“I think we'll look back on this era as like the MS-DOS era of AI, and the prompting and natural language that everyone's doing today, I think is just sort of like the start of how we're going to create interfaces to explore it in space.”

“The parallel that I think is kind of interesting is, you know, you compare AI to that, and it's like, there's been a long era of people that I think are very on mission and thinking about the big picture, the risks, the opportunities, the possibilities. And th…”

“The nice thing is that with the dialogue engineering we discussed, the longer your dialogue is, the better the AI gets, which is the opposite to what we're used to, right? Because you can edit the outputs that aren't great.”

“That really is like, to me, the number one thing I've learned from this and all forms of vibe coding and all the things that I've played with is that it's just extremely easy to get into this kind of like soporific state where the AI is doing the thinking for …”

“A key fundamental Thing of, like, basically all the AI work we do now is we realized that AI must be able to see everything that we can see exactly like we see it, and vice versa. We need to be able to see everything that the AI can see.”

“I don't think it's going to show up Next year. I don't think most businesses are targeting employee efficiencies next year, but I think every business is targeting employee efficiencies for 27 and for 28, which is suggesting more efficiency.”

“AI sped me up a bit, but only in specific cases and only when taking a lot of sort of digital hygiene practices.”

“And I do think that at the pace that, that AI is improving things, I mean, I think it might be possible significantly sooner than that. I mean, I don't think it's necessarily worth putting a number on it or a date”

“And so, if you have an opinion about how AI should work, what's the best way to get other people to work on it? And that's by launching a benchmark.”

“So this is how we define the next-gen developer or the Tenex developer. You're strong in fundamentals of software engineering. You can use AI across all phases of SDLC. You have very good knowledge of AI concepts and you build with good taste and business acum…”

“It still doesn't create good presentation. Still doesn't create good financial models. Still writes like pretty poor docs.”

“I actually think you're going to see a proliferation of developers. I think you're going to see Way more developers in, in the future. I think the job role will change for sure. I think it's not going to stay the same, but I think you're going to see way more.”

“I actually think the more AI becomes powerful, the more valuable human craft and other elements are going to become because people are going to easily determine, oh, this is all done by AI. I'm just going to attribute a lower value.”

“The way we define integrity is it's not about whether you use AI or not. It's about whether you follow the rules.”

“And also you're perversely incentivized because you leveraging AI in your work as you operating faster, but your incentive, just like a lawyer or just like any hour pay based knowledge worker is to rack up as many hours as possible.”

“I do believe that AI will do only one thing. It will Separate faster the good engineers from the bad engineers. If you're a good engineer, and you're using AI well, you will be an amazing engineer. If you're a poor, lazy engineer, and you don't want to underst…”

“With AI, all of these pricing models are minimally going to start to look like consumption based pricing, right?”

“I think that there's going to be a symbiosis and the degree to which one half is free will reflect in the other.”

“That's the advantage in AIs is not just about the models, but really about the data and maybe even more so is actually the data engine to generate that data.”

“It's not junior engineers. It's not non-engineers. They're all vibe coding. It's senior engineers, senior leaders people who have, so basically you can narrow it down to. 12 to 15 years of experience. They hate vibe coding and they hate AI and they're online g…”

“Yeah, so you, all you do is leave IntelliJ running, but you shouldn't look in it. It's a tool for the AI now, right?”

“Look, I have friends Who are much better engineers than I am, ok, I mean, world class, maybe some of the best in the whole world, ok, have built technologies that you've heard of, and they're not using AI yet, except the occasional, I'll ask Cursor a chat ques…”

“Jean just pulled up a study that showed that you actually have to spend a year or 2000 hours with AI before you trust it. And what does trust mean? Trust in this case specifically means before you as a user can predict what it's going to do.”

“One of the things that has surprised me though is actually that, like, So much data infrastructure has actually scaled quite elegantly to meet the AI use case.”

“And actually, you know, it is, it's somewhere in the, like, twenty-thirty-ish thing that, like, it will probably reach, like, human level intelligence.”

“We've probably released more data than basically anybody on the real world use cases of AI.”

“Like the best UI UX for Brex is just the card. Like every single thing that you have to do in the software beyond just swiping the card is like an opportunity for AI to eliminate some work for you.”

“I think that it's true that sometimes a lot of progress on the whole is just a series of small incremental changes that, yeah, that push. I think that's accurate. That's true. There's also, it also feels that there's also a lot of like small, like seemingly mi…”

“You want to know what the real modern dark arts are that like AI resistant area of the world is like a medicinal chemistry that is like, The spot where, like, you know, there's so much superstition.”

“All those, like, sort of simple logistical things, I think, are accelerated by AI, just as, like, a consequence of AI being an accelerating technology.”

“And I think that's the easy way to succeed in an AI over humans is you can try more ideas faster.”

“And I think that's gonna be, like, the hottest button issue of, like, the next election, right? If not the midterms, right? And it seems obvious to me that, like, any party that wants to win should just become the anti-AI party.”

“You can just see how the AI tsunami could wipe you out. If you make just two, three, four or five wrong decisions in this space, like couple wrong architecture decisions, couple wrong AI feature decisions, couple wrong API platform decisions. And you might be …”

“Shipping is like getting it into prod, fixing the things that are broken, maintaining it over time and like continuing to make it better. And like that part is not quite solved by AI yet.”

“I don't like just doing like thought pieces on this is where it's going and like trying to be all macroeconomic about AI. That's as turned out to be a giant waste of time because no one can really predict any of this. So I just, Collect case studies.”

“I don't think you're going to find a company over the next few years that doesn't directly or indirectly have all their data available for search and connected to AI.”

“And I think AI has also changed the buy versus build equation in terms of, it's not really about, can we build it? It's about, do we have time to build it?”

“I think type safety is important for humans, but it's critical for AIs.”

“I don't actually think AI should be booking flights.”

“I think we're going to see a lot of like applications and companies that do very impressive things with AI that in the short term might seem very effective because they're very specialized to individual use cases. But I think once models get better at generali…”

“I think now we can use AI and these models to actually like shortcut these careers and almost like simulate the early years of your work and like just make them like super dense in like these learnings.”

“So we were able to screen with artificial intelligence a set of 1010 of thousands of materials where each individual experiment, if it were done in the lab, would have taken months to years. And through AI, we uncovered this sort of unexpected chemical phenome…”

“I think this is the grand unification basically of AI and crypto is what's about to happen now. I think AI is the crypto killer app, I think is where, where this is really going to come out.”

“There's an incredible latent power in giving everybody who uses the system The option to be able to drop down and actually understand and see how it's working. And that worked really well for the web, and I think it's working really well for AI.”

“How are we going to apply AI in education? The answer is we're not because it's a literal government monopoly. It is never going to change the end, and there is nothing to do. By the way, you can create an entirely new school system. Like that's the one thing …”

“And so now we know that it's going to sweep through coding and then we know, you know, we know that if it's going to work in coding, it's going to work in everything else, right? It's just that, cause that's like the hardest, in many ways, that's the hardest e…”

“I would say, I think that this could be really good for any sort of service that makes, that allows people to be kind of lazy, because I think that AI has a very strong ability to just sort of reduce people's willingness to do work. It's like you could offload…”

“I would start to think of the top of the tree and a lot of leaders and a lot of executives are bottlenecks for their entire organization. A lot of what they're doing, 70% of what they're doing should be things that Are pre-standard in industry.”

“I think a lot of people were saying, oh, like, AI is going to change how you build a business, but I think what helped me actually, like, make this a business is I did all the, you know, like, the normal business stuff, you know, like, talking to users, gettin…”

“With AI, actually, you can launch 10 instances of chat and have each one try a different route and send it as a scout that moves very fast into the unknown, pushing outwards. And you can just very quickly get some feedback to see, okay, these approaches are no…”

“AI has become superhuman, at least on certain tasks. And that's what led to these recent papers which maybe we should talk about that resolve a problem that was puzzling physicists for experts in the field for over a year, and they weren't able to resolve it a…”

“If you have a code base that's easy to change for humans, it's going to be easy for AI to change too. And it's going to mean that you can work a lot faster because A code base that's difficult to change for humans is going to be even worse for Aeon.”

“What I've noticed is the more I lean into the kind of AI experimental stuff, the more it actually turns people off my materials. I'm finding that actually a traditional approach is what- Give me the lectures, yes. Yeah, what still works for most people. Most p…”

“The stuff that we're doing as software engineers now is like, we seem to be a step ahead of everyone else, because we're able to work in a domain where AI is actually producing quality stuff.”

“And I think that's actually the, like, the greatest form of AI we can create. AI that's actually seamless. You're not actually looking at your screen. It's always there. It's always helping you out and being proactive.”

“I think, you know, to your point, I think five to 10 years from now, it will be immoral to use weapons without AI. Because weapons without AI will be more likely to cause collateral damage or unwanted damage.”

“If you create code, if you have an idea and you create it into some way of like, I'm going to run it and use the app right now, you may still use AI in that moment, but that's okay. At some point you're going to do the next thing.”

“The interesting matrix problem when we go from like a developer set of concerns to all kinds of different professions is that what that word means to me is different than it means to you is different than it means to the, you know, analyst or the salesperson. …”

“World models, don't get me wrong, are cool and everything, but you and I both know that that is a layer of abstraction that is sometimes not usefully precise enough.”

“And we realized continual learning is kind of the ultimate, like, paradigm to do that. Is like, how do you have humans in the loop? How do you build this intelligence around them that is constantly learning and growing on its own? And I think that's going to b…”

“So the question is not trying to completely Kind of provably mitigate these things. That is arguably just a, it's a good goal, but just like zero bug software, we're probably not going to get there. At least not that soon.”

“It is clearly a different form of intelligence than people. It's some alien intelligence that is vastly different, and that difference is actually often brought out to a large degree by things like adversarial attacks and red teaming, because there are certain…”

“It's like we could kind of run experiments on the brain, observe every neuron in it, reset its state to prior states, and run counterfactuals, none of which we can do with humans, and yet we still understand neither very well. Even with that, all that ability,…”

“Where three things matter in AI it's data, infrastructure, and evals. Right. So you can only improve what you measure. And once you are very careful about measuring, What matters? And you have really talented people on the team. We're going to figure out how t…”

“Our contention is that the highest leverage application of artificial intelligence Is the drug discovery and drug design process.”

“I mean, if you do it in 10 years is near zero.”

“I think this thing is too volatile to treat as a utility, right? Like imagine if like Edison was like, you know, working on his like electrical stuff and light and Lighting and all that. And you immediately try to regulate it. Like, no, you'll probably wait 50…”

“50 is like, that's like the end of our lifetimes. And like, I think, I don't know, I'm gonna just throw out 10. No, ten's too high. Five percent.”

“Unless I'm misunderstanding something, I don't think that they could entirely converge in principle because if an AI is generating exactly the same world that it exists in, The signal to noise ratio is, is non-existent. Like part of what makes us so flexible i…”

“The problem is that if we get the Trapped in this automation mindset, we are leaving on the table so much more value for what AI could be doing for not only human work, but human wellbeing, human interactions, human relationships.”

“The point for me is, the principle is, any kind of, like, efficiency and intelligence, they cannot really be decoupled. Sometimes people think if you're building something that's more efficient, that can save you dollars, therefore you're not in the premium ca…”

“But it was clear that we needed to bridge a gap and get this thing all the way out and make, do AI for actual material science and not just the computational version.”

“I still deeply believe that academic is the main source of innovation for the whole field, and particularly when it comes to biotech.”

“I think with AI now, those proxies starting to fall apart, like, you know, and the number of tokens you use or the number of pull requests you make are like no longer like maybe as hyper correlated with that. Is your team able to hit the goal or are they on tr…”

“My suspicion is that there's everything, everyone will be, like, T-shaped in a way, and that, like, AI will enable everyone to become a generalist. Like, you know, things that, like, I never would be able to, like, come up with a design before, and, like, even…”

“But I think this is where more broadly the lesson is the physical world may be more forgiving because, you know, where there are extreme events like hurricanes that have very specific physical signature. Right. So it's like extreme, but in a very specific way.…”