Insight
Generalized AI software will defeat vertical AI specialization
“One of the things that is a massive fallacy in AI applications today is verticalization. As paramount. All of the VCs, a lot of entrepreneurs as well, believe, because it's been true for the last 20 years, that building a very verticalized piece of software is…”
Opinion
AI hallucinations are old news; modern models outperform humans
“I think it's old news. And I think the only reason we still talk about it, it's like everyone talks about hallucinations and, you know, no one knows if it's happening or what's going on. It's like fugazi fugazi. Like, it was a problem back when the models were…”
Opinion
The alpha is gone for starting new AI companies today
“I don't mean to be relatively pessimistic, but I wouldn't start a company in AI. I mean that from the perspective of, like, the alpha is gone.”
Opinion
Sivulka is "very short" Accenture, consultancies, and the Big Four
“I'm very short Accenture and consultancies, but and the big four.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hybrid teams of humans and AI agents will dominate organizational structures
“You're going to start to have, you know, fully human organizations. Actually fully AI organizations like the one person billion dollar startup or, you know, these things that are effectively just APIs. And you'll actually have, and this will be the most common…”
Insight
Prompting AI agents will soon become synonymous with management
“As agents are rolled out, you'll actually start to see you know, people that are really good at prompting, really good at defining a process, be the best managers, and actually be the best at extending whatever their agenda is in the organization, or making th…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hebbia pioneered inference-time compute scaling two years ago
“And actually the whole scaling at inference paradigm was pioneered at Hebbia. So our early matrix product two years ago, we're one of the first people to say, hey, you get way better accuracy from using more large language model calls at runtime.”
Opinion
Chatbots are like calculators, inadequate for serious enterprise knowledge work
“Chatbots are, in my eyes, like the TI-eighty-four, or like the HP-twelve-c, like a calculator. It's a one-off, you know, I'm gonna go and put in my equation and then get a response. Nobody does their taxes in a calculator. Nobody, you know, computes a DCF or, …”
Assertion Contradicted
Hebbia was the first company to productionize RAG in 2020
“Hebbia were actually the first to turn that into a product. So it's like a very close thing to my heart. So back in 2020, we were the first people to actually productionize it, roll it out.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hebbia developed an undefeated re-ranker architecture that it does not use
“And we came up with a novel re-ranker architecture, which four years later, academia and industry have not beat, and we do not use it.”
Opinion
The San Francisco artificial intelligence ecosystem suffers from strong groupthink
“I think not a lot of people are saying it, but I think like SF has a really big group think.”
Insight
Enterprise AI sales are currently driven by FOMO, not traditional pain points
“Right now, it's less around pain, it's less around, like, standard enterprise SaaS cycles, and probably more around FOMO, around missed upside, around value cases that are really hard to define.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
AI will transform junior finance roles without reducing total job counts
“So I firmly believe that being an investment banking junior won't look the same as it looked five years ago. I definitely believe the same for investors, for lawyers, for everyone else. But I actually don't really think that that will decrease the amount of jo…”
Disclosure
Hebbia requires its 100 NYC employees to work in-office 5-6 days
“So we built a team of a hundred amazing incredibly smart folks all five days a week, sometimes six in office in New York city.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hebbia is on track to process five billion document pages in 2025
“This year, we're already on track to process around four to five billion pages.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hebbia is deployed at 40% to 50% of top asset managers
“And now we're deployed at, I think, between 40 and 50% of the world's largest asset managers.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Enterprises will still be deploying AI in chatbot form in 10 years
“We will still be deploying AI. In its current form as a chatbot in 10 years.”
Opinion
Elongating context windows is the primary bottleneck in artificial intelligence
“And I think the number one problem in all of AI is elongating the context window.”
Opinion
Sivulka calls Microsoft Excel the most important software ever invented
“The spreadsheet in Excel is the most important software to have ever been invented.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
The artificial intelligence base model layer will eventually become commoditized
“We believe the model layer will become commoditized.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Maximizer boosted Hebbia's token throughput to 500 million tokens per minute
“Before we had Maximizer, with all the rate limits that we had, we could, like, run a million tokens a minute, and now we can do 500 or four hundred fifty million tokens a minute.”
Disclosure
Hebbia is willing to spend $10,000 annually per user on compute
“We'll spend 10,000 dollars in model costs per user a year. We don't care.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hebbia serves major banks and U.S. government without fine-tuning
“We have not, so we work with many of the largest asset managers, we work with many banks, we work with the US government and we have not needed to fine tune or, you know, kind of personalize any part of the software.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sivulka: Not a single job has been replaced by Hebbia
“To date, not a single job has been replaced by Hebbia, you know, knock on wood.”
