The Exchanges

Q Turing. Turing builds realistic reinforcement learning environments and data systems based on real operational traces, the kind of infrastructure Frontier Labs need to train superintelligence. Visit Turing.com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Talking about the public markets now, you have a public market company, Nebius. Let's talk through that because that is like a really hot company right now. They just had a huge deal. What was it like? Twenty six billion dollars.

A Yeah. We announced a big deal with Meta. Yeah. First and foremost, as a venture investor, I wouldn't wish it on anyone to own a public stock. I mean, having a stock apps be like the major app that I use on my phone now. It's very stressful having to mark to market every day. Uh, You know, that's an, an amazing story of an entrepreneur, Arkady, who actually built Yandex, which was built to about a thirty billion dollar market cap on the NASDAQ. And then the war broke out in Russia and many of the engineers followed Arkady out of Russia. And he basically collected where he was and was thinking about what he was going to do next with all these engineers that followed him. And it was actually one of the founders of Excel, Jim Schwartz, who introduced me to Arkady. And basically said, he's trying to think through what's next. He's got a few balls in the air. You should talk to him. And so for a couple of years, Arkady and I went back and forth on what would eventually become Nebius. And actually the early innings of that was me trying to convince Arkady to sell me his 30% stake of ClickHouse, which he rightfully refused to do. And, uh, but as I got into that negotiation with him, I got to know him as an individual and he is the most Quietly humble killer I've ever met. He is truly, truly special and end of one entrepreneur. And, you know, most people would have hung the cleats up an…

AI assessment note: “We announced a big deal with Meta. Yeah. First and foremost, as a venture investor”

Q Nebius is, could you just give like a brief quick line on that? And then also where does it fit for inference people? This will be a wide-ranging audience, but in terms of inference, why is that becoming so important now? Obviously we're seeing it with agents and more different types of compute that they need and all the data that they're creating, but like, could you just share that?

A Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, at its most base level, Nebius is intending to build a next generation hyperscaler. So they want to own everything from the data center itself through to designing the server racks. They actually have a hardware team inside the company. To building all of the software that goes on top of that infrastructure. So we talk a lot about how many data centers need to be built, how many GPUs need to be delivered to handle the demands of AI, both training as well as inference, which we'll get into in a second. These guys are one of the most aggressive teams to scale that infrastructure and meet the moment, and they want to own all of it vertically integrated, and that's really important when you think about delivering inference. So inference is we've now trained all these models and we need to get value out of them. So in its most basic form, if you're asking a question of ChatGPT and you're getting an answer, that's inference against ChatGPT, against OpenAI's model. But as you allude to, agents start using inference in an exponential way. The demand curve goes way up for what we, what we're going to need from an inference perspective. And when you control capacity by owning the data centers and the GPUs, and you control the software, you're in an advantageous position to be able to Uh, meet the moment and, and deliver inference for a market that, you know, we …

AI assessment note: “Nebius is intending to build a next generation hyperscaler”

Q talked about Elon, so I want to talk about SpaceX. Um, I'm just kidding, but, uh, you guys, you are the growth team here at Excel. We're about to apparently get three trillion dollar IPOs, which is insane. How do you expect the market to handle that? Is it going to absorb that? Are we going to get a shift? What are the different scenarios that we could walk through?

A I mean, I think it was a huge, a huge win for Elon to lead the charge and get SpaceX into indices early. Whether or not you believe that's right or wrong, it was a huge win to be able to help buoy some of the float that's going to hit the market. And that to me is far more important than what happens in the next six months. And maybe that's us wearing our long-term investor hat and thinking about things over many horizons rather than some sort of near-term return threshold. So Could it be rocky in the early days? Possibly, but I don't think, what I don't think is rocky is the business models that are behind those companies, and I do think that if anything, you know, I would want to be long-term holders of that basket over, over many generations.

AI assessment note: “help buoy some of the float that's going to hit the market”

Q Do you think it'll ever get to a tipping point?

A You know, it's a philosophical point because like at some point, you know, if you, if you go so far, you're talking about machines running a lot of things and, you know, you can go as far as the Elon point of view where we need to harness the sun's energy to be able to create as much possible infrastructures to support this token consumption. Maybe that's too far, but it's only going as far as the value It receives back, right? And so there is going to be a governor against if we don't see value back from it. Now, extremely far is where AI runs a lot in our lives and much, much further and much more penetrated than what we see today.

AI assessment note: “there is going to be a governor against if we don't see value back”