The Ledger
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Masayoshi Son estimates superintelligence will require $9T in cumulative capex
“Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, mentioning just a few days ago that, Inez estimate to reach super intelligence that was going to be a cumulative capex, capital expenditure budget of nine trillion dollars, which you know, in typical MASA fashion he said was…”
AI venture investing is rebuilding another 2021-style bubble
“Half of your time, you basically untangle the consequences of the excess period of twenty-twenty-one, where you know, you think of helping, how to help company get fit and you know, cut burn, extend runway, be efficient, all the things. That's like one part of…”
Sam Altman asserts that AI scaling laws will absolutely continue
“I got a chance to ask that question to Sam Altman a few weeks ago. I was at an event at an event at OpenAI. Not surprisingly, when I asked him, you know, will scaling laws continue, he looked me straight in the eye and said, absolutely”
OpenAI aims to reach $100B in ARR by 2029
“The company has extraordinary ambitions to be at a hundred billion dollar in ARR in 29”
OpenAI's funding deal was priced at 13.5x forward revenue
“The multiple on the deal on a forward revenue basis was 13.5 X.”
SaaS will not die, but evolve into wrappers around AI intelligence
“We think that SAS It's not going to be dead. We think that SAS is just going to have to evolve dramatically. And if you think of SAS being largely a wrapper around a database, and you could argue that's what Salesforce is, you know, a lot of, like, workflow an…”
Turck predicts AI value will be captured at the application layer
“It feels like a lot of the value is actually going to be captured and retained through that application layer in, in a way that is maybe not entirely different from the cloud vendors.”
Turck says an incremental GPT-5 release would end the AI hype
“It sort of feels like if it's an incremental improvement, you know, that may signify that this end, this part of the hype cycle is, is ending. If it's, you know, crazy as everybody's hoping, then yes, then it feels like we're, you know, still very much in that…”
Turck says horizontal AI startups will struggle against reactive tech incumbents
“It seems that for stuff that's very horizontal startups are going to have a harder time building long lasting businesses because in this Cycle. They are facing a very different type of incumbents compared to prior platform shifts where you know, this time you'…”
Turck says AI evaluation startups currently lack significant enterprise traction
“A lot of those companies to put it bluntly don't have a lot of traction yet, because it turns out that, if you're trying to do something, and I can, I'm not picking on them, but like evaluation or monitoring and all the things, well, you need to have LLMs to m…”
Turck says vector database viability depends on incumbent database feature parity
“Do you really need a, you know, a specialized database to do that? Or in a context where some of the more general purpose players like the MongoDBs of the world have started announcing vector capabilities, you know, is that good enough? The answer to that ques…”
Turck: Cost pressures accelerate architectures using S3, Iceberg, and DuckDB
“And then there's the acceleration of like alternative architectures, you know, storage. Why don't you just dump everything in S three, which is very cheap. And then, you know, you could use iceberg on top to add some structure to it. You can, we talked about D…”
Turck: Google invented the Transformer but is playing catch-up
“So in GPT, which stands for generative pre-trained transformers, the T is a transformer architecture that was actually Developed at Google, and the irony is that Google is playing catch-up to Microsoft and OpenAI right now because OpenAI accelerated the develo…”
Turck: Academia has completely lost the AI research battle to industry
“Academia as of now has just completely lost the battle. In AI research and development, the darker dots, and this is a long time scale at the bottom, show that in the early years of the current wave, a lot of the research came out of academia, but today it's p…”
Turck: Enterprise data market will remain fragmented, avoiding single-platform consolidation
“So the future that we see is, you know, as much as the Databricks and the Snowflakes of the world would want to be The one platform where all things data and all things AI happen we actually from our vantage point, see much more of a particular persistent subs…”
Turck: The Information reports Claude Code hit $400M ARR in six months
“There was an article in the information just a couple of days ago that was saying that Cloud Code, which really came out, what, at the end of February of this year, so five, six months ago, is already generating four hundred million in annualized revenue. That…”
Turck: Many fast-growing AI startups operate at a unit loss
“And there's reportedly open questions around gross margins as well which means that on a unit basis, a lot of those companies operate at a loss. The more they serve customers, the more they lose money,”
OpenAI's $6.6B round was the largest VC round ever
“We just had the biggest venture capital round of all time with OpenAI, which raised 6.6 billion at one hundred and fifty seven billion post-money valuation.”
xAI built its Memphis Colossus data center in 122 days
“Colossus, which is based in Memphis, which by the way apparently was built in a 122 days. So the fastest you know, time ever to build a data center.”
Big tech and AI companies are driving a U.S. nuclear revival
“But yeah, in 24, it turns out that big tech companies and AI companies are the ones driving this, Revival of nuclear power with, you know, Microsoft entering into a deal with Constellation to revive Three Mile Island, which was the site of the last nuclear acc…”
OpenAI's $6.6B round required a $250M minimum ticket
“In the OpenAI round that we're talking about, you know, the 6.6 billion dollar round. The minimum ticket size was two hundred and fifty million.”
AWS AI business is growing 3x faster than original AWS
“AWS's AI business is a multi-billion dollar revenue run rate business that continues to grow at a triple digit year over year percentage, and is growing more than three X faster at this stage of its evolution as AWS itself grew”
Great companies can be built using current AI without further progress
“Actually just with what we have, there's Plenty we can do. Plenty of great companies we can build. Just taking the current state of models and sort of deploying them in a way that's, you know, integrated in workflows and, you know, verticalized per industry.”
Accenture reported $3B in annual generative AI consulting fees
“Famously Accenture reported three billion dollars in in annual fees which You know, made the headlines and all the things.”
Turck calls Sam Altman the Steve Jobs of this generation
“It seems that Sam Altman, who's you know, the Steve Jobs of our generation, we're actually joking the, you know, Steve Jobs of the TikTok generation when you know, unlike Steve Jobs who was fired and came back years later, like he left and came back within a, …”
Turck says Inflection AI would not have pivoted if commercial performance was strong
“If they had something unbelievable going on, they would probably not have made that decision.”
Turck says Midjourney makes $200M to $300M with 40 employees
“Midjourney has built what seems to be an unbelievable business with, you know, people effectively playing with stuff, you know, whatever their revenue are like, two hundred million or three hundred million, like, 40 people, so Presumably insanely profitable.”
Turck: AI app moats will come from workflow, not the models
“Arguably, the competitive advantage is actually not going to be AI, but the competitive advantage is going to be the workflow And the collaboration that you build on top of the AI to do those things, which I think is not any more or less interesting than your …”
Turck: Snowflake and Databricks architectures are converging into direct competitors
“And the story of the last few years has been the great convergence of those two stacks. And in particular data breaks has worked on making their data lake more structured and look more like a data warehouse. And Snowflake is still in the early days of taking t…”
Turck argued the 2012 NYC tech community lacked an engineering culture
“And three, I think that big data is a very interesting opportunity for us, for the, ah, New York tech community to really build an engineering culture in this city, ah, which hasn't been the case so far, but for reasons I'll discuss.”
The tech community should embrace mainstream big data media hype
“As a community, I think we should embrace the media hype.”
Turck predicted the industry would realize Hadoop is extremely complex
“So everybody's gonna realize sooner or later that Hadoop is really complicated to install.”
Turck predicted big data advantages would become temporary table stakes
“I think that the, I think the advantage that big data is going to give to companies is going to be temporary. I think it's going to be evolving towards being, ah, something like, ah, like what zero stock was to manufacturing a few years ago where, you know, at…”
Turck called Bloomberg the original big data company
“Fundamentally, Bloomberg was the first big data company out there, I think.”
Turck: Startups selling raw data to Bloomberg earn less than projected
“I think that the business of selling data is, is a very difficult business, and from a Bloomberg perspective, we've, you know, spoken, or we speak very often to startups that come to us with the hope to sell their data, raw data, and I think they quite frequen…”
Turck: AI startups in 2025 must build for capabilities six months away
“One of the key lessons for anybody in the startup world. In 2025, which is bet on what the models will be able to do in six months from now.”
Turck: Coding is currently the most successful generative AI application
“When people talk about, okay, what generative AI applications have been successful so far, coding seems to be number one by far.”
Canva engineer submitted a 50,000-line AI pull request
“We had Brendan Humphreys, CTO of Canva, who was talking about that exactly, which is, okay, this is great that you can create code, but, like, we had one guy who submitted a PR that was 50,000 lines and they have a peer review culture, and Yeah. They basically…”
Turck: AI-native startups hold more buyer credibility than larger incumbents
“You can be a one-year-old or two-year-old company and actually be a lot more credible than a five, seven, ten-year-old company, which may be 10 X, hundred X your size, but because you're part of that you know, platform shift and you're like AI native, people t…”
Meta, Google, and Amazon on track for $200B in AI capex
“The three top companies, MetaGoogle and Amazon, are on track to invest two hundred billion in AI infrastructure this year.”
Billions will likely be incinerated in the AI boom
“It's possible, perhaps likely, that this is going to be the same thing here, that the same thing is going to happen here, where, like, another few billion dollars are going to be incinerated in, in this moment.”
Enterprise AI deployment is hindered mostly by non-AI organizational hurdles
“Even deploying AI there's a lot of things that have nothing to do with AI itself. Like, you know, to get you know, procurement authorization and compliance and all the things. So you know, far from killing us all just like deploying it in your department is is…”
Nvidia released an AI model that outperformed GPT-4
“Just a couple of weeks ago, Nvidia announced that In addition to having the best chips, they just released a model that was actually better than GPT-IV.”
LLM performance evaluation is arguably more critical than for traditional software
“Those things are stochastic, not deterministic, meaning that they don't get the right answer a hundred percent of the time, and you don't get the same answer each time you ask. Therefore, evaluating performance is more important arguably, than any other kind o…”
Suno AI is an early candidate for an AI-native app
“One company that we discussed a couple of times on the Mad podcast that could be an early candidate for what a truly you know, AI-native consumer app what it might be would be Suno.”
39% of Americans use ChatGPT and 28% use it at work
“39% of Americans say that they use ChatGPT, including 28% that say that they use it at work, and 11% use it every day.”
Census data shows only 5% of U.S. businesses use AI directly
“Only five percent of American businesses say that they are using AI technology to produce goods or services.”
Customer service AI startup Ada shifted pricing to per-resolution billing
“And we saw, saw that in our portfolio with Ada, which is one of the leaders in AI chatbots for customer service, where, you know, not that long ago, they would sell on a per seat basis, and, you know, occasionally, you know, per conversation basis, sort of sel…”