Opinion
Genuine AGI safety concerns are 10 to 20 years away
“I think this is likely what we're doing with AI and AI safety and stuff like that, that we could foresee in 1020 years AGI, where there's actual safety issues, but we are so far from that today. That's, I think, actually getting close to the peak of inflated e…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kolicich: Expect an AI crash and market retrenchment within two years
“I believe in two years where everyone's gonna say, oh, you know, we thought it would solve everything and it's all a very limited number of use cases. It's complete hype. And, you know, we'll probably see a bit of a crash and we'll see a retrenchment in AI.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kolicich: Open-source AI iteration speed will surpass closed source
“Cause you'll see the case of iteration at open source is going to eclipse close source.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kolicich predicts wave of VC firings over failure to adapt to AI
“And so I think you'll see over the next 10 years, a lot of retirements, a lot of firings, perhaps because people won't make that transition,”
Prediction Held up
Competitors will catch up to OpenAI's o1 reasoning model within six months
“O1 just came out. We haven't fully benchmarked on our side yet. It's definitely an improvement. And so open AI is ahead of everybody else. It's an improvement in reasoning which is good. We can talk about that later on, but I expect people will catch up within…”
Insight
Incumbent software systems will capture AI value through existing data gravity
“So I think if that happens and that's what the world looks like, then a LLM looks kind of like a query processor in a database. You give it context, it does its work, you get the answer out. But the point of leverage is the place with, at which the context Liv…”
Opinion
Nvidia is not trading at dot-com bubble valuations on an earnings basis
“There's a lot of AI hype, but if you look at companies like Nvidia, they're actually not that expensive on an earnings basis. Like it's not, we're not in bubble territory, you know, Cisco, 2000 timeframe.”
Insight
AI startups should aggressively raise capital every three to four months
“If you are in AI or AI adjacent, you should be raising every three to four months, in my opinion, and you should be doing it aggressively.”
Opinion
Early-stage 100x AI multiples are unsustainable artifacts of mega-fund capital oversupply
“There are rounds happening that are 102 hundred X revenue in the early stage markets, and even there you have to assume, you know, you're gonna have 10 X Multiple compression in the later stage rounds. So I don't think those are sustainable for any period of t…”
Opinion
Venture capitalists voluntarily returning fee-bearing capital will never become a trend
“Money managers returning fee-bearing assets will never be a trend, in my opinion.”
Opinion
The volume of venture-scale startup opportunities has declined 60% since 2021
“My estimate was, I think the amount of venture scale opportunities has gone down 60, 70%.”
Assertion Supported
LLM scaling exhibits decreasing returns, requiring 10x compute for sublinear improvements
“If you look at it today, though, we are, the exponential in LLM performance is so far working against us that you need Order of magnitude increases in compute, 10 X increase in compute to have relatively sublinear increases in performance. So you're at decreas…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
AI will hit a trough of disillusionment as revenue lags infrastructure buildout
“And that kind of starts to tell you that we make it close to the trough of disillusionment at some point where all this, you know, the infrastructure that was built and the idea is build it and they will come. You know, the people actually don't come. The reve…”
Opinion
AI acqui-hires are specifically designed to bypass Lina Khan's antitrust scrutiny
“On the M&A side, I do think it has a lot to do with regulation and Lena Kahn, you know, threatening to block most mergers and acquisitions, and that's why you see these acqui-hire inflection character AI adept type acquisitions where it seems like they're doin…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
The capped defense budget will yield only tens of new primes
“I think we probably think it's a little overhyped in general, where we think it's real for sure, but it's not going to be an opportunity the size of software or AI or something like that. The defense budget is naturally limited as a percentage of the economy. …”
Opinion
The volume of pre-IPO leadership departures at OpenAI is historically unprecedented
“I don't think we've ever seen pre-IPO so many leaders leave the best, like, crown jewel company in Silicon Valley. It's common, like, you IPO, everyone gets rich and they leave. Okay, that's normal. But before IPO, right in its, like, heyday, you don't see the…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kolicich: Venture capital will shrink over five years unless AI takes off
“I don't think it's gonna, you know, the space is gonna crash or everybody leave overnight, but I think just slowly over the next five years, unless AI really takes off, you'll see a general shrinking of venture capital, I think”
Insight
Kolicich: Big Tech's Low AI Pricing Will Hurt Competing Startups
“Big tech is doing a good job of anchoring the price of all these features pretty low, like co-pilots, 20 dollars a month per developer. It's incredibly cheap relative to the value that it does add. And that really anchors, you know, value in that market pretty…”
Insight
Kolicich: Big Tech Subsidizing Open Source AI Is Hard for Startups
“They're really subsidizing the space, a lot of big tech, which I think is positive for open source and positive for users, hard for startups.”
Opinion
Kolicich: LLMs won't collapse vertical software pricing to zero
“And just the process of defining that software system such that an LLM can generate it would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so even if it were free to generate a new software system, you would probably still use one of the incumbents as long as…”
Opinion
Kolicich: Open-source AI models lag proprietary models by one year
“Some people have said it's six months from state of the art. I think it's more like a year away from the state of the art, but these models, those models that keep coming out are getting better and better and better.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mega-check foundation model investors have largely avoided write-offs via returned capital
“If you're an AI investor doing very big checks and foundation model up, foundation model layer up, you haven't really had many write offs. You've in your losers, or I wouldn't say losers in the companies that haven't broken out, you've made your money back.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
The future of software is human-in-the-loop symbiosis, not fully autonomous AGI
“And so that would mean the future of software looks more like man-machine symbiosis. Then it does AGI, you know, the computer does everything for you.”
Assertion Supported
Aggregate AI hardware capex vastly exceeds actual AI deployment revenue
“Aggregate capex on AI hardware. It's like vastly out exceeding revenue generated by AI companies in the actual deployment of AI.”
