The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 30 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Khosla: Open-source AI models will die due to massive training costs
“It is costing an order of magnitude more to train, and that's why I don't think open source models will be viable because of the training costs.”
Khosla: Open source AI models will not be viable due to training costs
“It is costing an order of magnitude more to train, and that's why I don't think open source models will be viable because the training costs.”
Khosla: AI will eventually make almost all professional human expertise essentially free
“One of my big forecasts is almost all expertise will be free.”
Khosla: Frontier AI compute costs will drop 80-90% within a year
“My bet is, a year from now, it'll cost one-fifth to one-tenth of what it does today, and my advice to all our startups is ignore the cost of compute, because any assumption you make, any dollar you spend on optimizing your software will be worthless within the…”
Khosla tells his portfolio startups to completely ignore AI compute costs
“My advice to all our startups is ignore the cost of compute, because any assumption you make, any dollar you spend on optimizing your software will be worthless within the year, and so forget about it.”
Khosla: Startups should ignore compute costs; AI software optimizations become worthless
“And my advice to all our startups is ignore the cost of compute. Because any assumption you make, any dollar you spend on optimizing your software will be worthless within the year.”
Khosla: Investing in startups building independent GPU cloud infrastructure is silly
“Beyond the model itself, and I think it's silly to invest in the cloud, people who are buying GPUs to build clouds.”
Khosla: Regulation ensures Europe will never participate in the tech industry again
“I think the Europeans, for example, have ensured they'll never participate in tech again. You know, they keep shooting themselves in the foot.”
Khosla: Marginalizing Muslims is the one thing that could slow India's economy
“Leaving a community of Muslims behind is such a bad idea. It's the one thing that can slow up a rapidly growing economy.”
Khosla: Apple Partnership Establishes OpenAI Leads LLM Competition
“Obviously from an open AI perspective, it clearly establishes where open AI is in the competition for the best LLMs.”
Khosla: Small models will not replace large frontier models for intelligence
“If you want human level intelligence from a model, it'll be a big model, and there'll be a couple of them around, some better than others, some a year or two ahead of others, but I don't think small models substitute
For big models”
Vinod Khosla: Khosla Ventures has never taken a dollar in management fees
“By the way, I, since I started the firm 20 years ago, I've never taken a dollar in fees.”
Khosla: Apple Partnership Validates OpenAI as the Best LLM
“Obviously from an open AI perspective, it clearly establishes where open AI is in the competition for the best LLMs. Obviously many people wanted that business. And many things were evaluated, and so it's really rewarding to see where Apple thinks the best AI …”
Khosla: Small models will never substitute for large, human-level AI models
“If you want human level intelligence from model, it'll be a big model, and there'll be a couple of them around. Some better than others, some a year or two ahead of others, but I don't think small models substitute for big models, but they do some things reall…”
Khosla: AI inference costs will drop up to 10x by June 2025
“I think what will happen is the expensive PhD will become dirt cheap. My bet is a year from now, it'll cost one-fifth to one-tenth of what it does today.”
Khosla: AI labs must prioritize usage and training data over near-term revenue
“So I'm pretty convinced The next few years, the revenue isn't the important metric. You don't want to, of course, lose so much money you can't afford it, but you're not trying to make tons of money. You're trying to get tons of usage and you're trying to get t…”
Khosla: OpenAI executes crisply, while Google has great technology but poor execution
“I think OpenAI has been very good in execution, but Google has great technology and technologies. They just haven't been as crisp about their execution.”
Khosla: Massive incumbent tech giants will dominate the large language model market
“Large LLMs will belong to the large players, players who can run on train on very large clusters, people who can pay for proprietary content, whether it's with Reddit or somebody else.”
Khosla: AI primary care and therapy will become larger than specialized AI
“I think the specialties will become embedded in the generic. And the general, like primary care and mental health therapy are two examples that I think will be larger businesses because there's other aspects than just the knowledge aspect.”
Khosla: Blindly funding Google DeepMind spinouts with $2M seed checks is bad
“Anytime somebody leaves deep, deep mind, give them two million dollars, that's a bad strategy.”
Khosla: OpenAI executes better than Google despite Google's great tech
“I think OpenAI has been very good in execution, but Google has great technology and technologies. They just haven't been as crisp about their execution.”
Khosla: Automatically funding anyone leaving Google DeepMind is a bad strategy
“Anytime somebody leaves deep, deep mind, give them two million dollars, that's a bad strategy.”
Khosla: Cognition's Devin is building an autonomous AI programmer, not a Copilot
“Of course, we invest in something like Devon. That's very popular. Everybody knows about it. They're building an AI programmer. They're not building tools for programmers like Copilot. They're building a programmer.”
Khosla: Has never taken management fees in 20 years of venture investing
“Since I started the firm 20 years ago, I've never been I've taken a dollar in fees.”
Khosla: 80% of Khosla Ventures seed investments are under $25M post-money valuation
“I would guess That 80% of the investments we've made in C are below twenty-five million posts.”
Khosla: Computers Will Learn Humans Instead of Humans Learning Computers
“This idea that computers will learn humans instead of humans needing to learn computers. And I think we were seeing the beginnings of that.”
Khosla: Siri Marks the Beginning of Evolution Toward Agentic Interfaces
“And Siri is the beginning of what will evolve over time into agentic sort of interfaces for humans.”
Khosla: Passes on 80% to 90% of startups seeking billion-dollar valuations
“I'd say 80% or 90% of the billion dollar valuations, maybe more, we pass on.”
Khosla: Portfolio company Zordi operates fully automated, human-free strawberry greenhouses
“We have a greenhouse that's fully automated, including picking the strawberries, which would be hard to do by hand. And they sell at like five times the price in every New York restaurant prices them at like five bucks a strawberry or something. But there are …”
Khosla: Khosla Ventures followed a $2M Symbolica seed with $15M
“And I said, fine, I'll give you a two million dollar seed. And if you prove this out, then we can talk more. They came back in March of this year, not very long ago, and said, here's the results that I promised. I said, don't go out. I'll write you a fifteen m…”