Jun 8, 2023 · 34m · no-priors
No Priors Ep. 20 | With Sarah Guo and Elad Gil
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In this episode of No Priors, hosts Sarah Guo and Elad Gil analyze the technological, strategic, and geopolitical landscape of generative AI, dispelling prevalent industry misconceptions while examining enterprise disruption, developer agents, and regulatory risks.
Statements from this episode (17)
Gil: Generative AI is a technology disruption, not an extension of prior ML
“And in reality, we've had a technology disruption. We've shifted to two very different architectures, diffusion-based models, which is a statistical physics model for ImageGen. And then on the language side, we moved to these large language models, which some …”
Guo: Some investors will conclude generative AI is unready and abandon it
“I think other people will arrive at that conclusion and like any other wave of enthusiasm, you'll see people abandon it as well as a technology.”
Gil: AI hype will increase as products rapidly scale revenue
“I actually don't think it's going to, I think there's going to be more hype rather than less coming simply because certain things are really starting to work at scale from a revenue perspective and really quickly.”
Gil: NRC creation stopped US nuclear reactor approvals for 50 years
“You do realize that once the NCR, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency existed, we had no new nuclear designs approved for the last 50 years due to this agency existing.”
Guo: GitHub Copilot operates by inspecting only five recent files
“Today, you know, you have Copilot looking at your five open files, your five most recent files and doing Function completion. And like that already has such a massive impact on productivity, but I think we're really early in figuring out how to deliver more co…”
Guo: Autonomous AI agents writing pull requests will see major progress
“I think there are a lot of really interesting ideas that are floating around now from, I think the more obvious like search or to the very fun, like, okay, well, if you just had like, you know, AI Elah, the junior developer that takes any JIRA ticket or shortc…”
Guo: Expanding context windows to 1M tokens will not naively solve LLM context challenges
“The idea that like a hundred K or even a million tokens is going to solve all our problems. And like, you just ask your questions and dump in all context naively is ridiculous to me. I think it's a really important area of product and research work.”
Gil: LLM context window size limitations will be solved in two years
“I think in two years it'll be reasonably solved in terms of the size of context windows. It'll be usable. Like, I'd be happy to take that bet, but we'll see. Like, I think the context windows are going to get very large.”
Guo: MiniMax team comes from government-aligned facial recognition firm SenseTime
“The Minimax team is former SenseTime folks, right? And for our listeners that don't spend as much time in the, like, Chinese ecosystem, SenseTime was a like, broadly a facial recognition company. That did a lot of work with the Chinese government.”
Guo: US GPU export bans will spur China to build competitive chips
“I do think that if China cannot get A-one-hundreds, H-one-hundreds, top-of-the-line hardware, like, GPUs with good interconnect to train models, like, They will invest heavily in solving that problem. And so one of the things that has been quietly happening is…”
Guo: Salesforce has a pattern of announcing products that never broadly deploy
“Salesforce is an amazing company in terms of many dimensions of execution, but it does have repeated pattern of like announcing, you know, interesting products that like never seem to see the light of day or get broad customer develop deployment.”
Gil: Large tech incumbents will take 12 to 18 months to ship AI products
“I think it'll take 12 to 18 months for a lot of larger companies to really start to have anything.”
Gil: Speed of AI adoption serves as a metric for management competence
“And you could almost Measure the rapidity with which somebody adopts this technology almost as a metric of management competence. Right. The most competent companies, or at least the ones closest to this technology will adopt it soonest.”
Gil: Salesforce and legacy ERP vendors are vulnerable to AI startups
“This feels to me like the first time that maybe Salesforce is vulnerable or certain ERP vendors are vulnerable or others where you have a lot of very dense interconnected software.”
Guo: Datadog is well positioned to capture enterprise AI automation
“Datadog is an extremely good place to actually go attack some of these opportunities in that they do the data collection natively, right? And they have a very broad suite product.”
Gil: Biotech is stuck in the old machine learning mindset
“When I talk to bio people, they still constantly talk about data, data, data, data, and they don't seem to understand at all the new capabilities of these technologies, right? They're still stuck in the old ML world.”
Guo: Autonomous event-driven accounting systems will disrupt enterprise software
“I think that's a pretty big ask, but like imagining translating any economic event, right? Eladco paid an invoice or transmitted this cash balance from one account to one of its suppliers, the ability to take that And like record the transactions from an accou…”