The Ledger
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Tunguz: AI agents will deliver significant enterprise ROI by 2026
“And I think in twenty-twenty-five, going back to your first question, we'll make some pretty material advances there, where the predictability is much better, and that will lead into, I think, twenty-twenty-six, where we'll start to see pretty significant ROI …”
Tunguz: AI inference costs will drop by another 1,000x
“I think you've seen a thousand X reduction in overall inference costs in the last three years. I think we'll probably see another thousand X reduction.”
Tunguz: Small language models will dominate enterprise AI adoption
“So I think we'll start to see particularly the enterprise small language models dominate.”
Tunguz: The $250B annual search marketing market is up for grabs
“There's two hundred fifty billion in search engine marketing spend every year, and so all of that is now totally up for grabs.”
Tunguz: Theory Ventures invests in data, AI, and blockchains as modern databases
“Every software company, every product that will be built for a user that's That on a computer will have data as its fundamental building blocks, and so we invest in data systems, databases, visualization. We invest in AI, both at the infrastructure and the app…”
Tunguz: In Q1 2024, Ethereum was world's most profitable software entity
“Ethereum in the first quarter of 24 produced on a percentage basis is the most profitable software company in the world. And on a aggregate dollars basis, six largest producer of cash, it's worth seven snowflakes put together. It's three hundred fifty billion …”
Tunguz: Consumer AI will surpass one billion users in 2025
“So you're kind of approaching the billion user number in consumer AI. I think we'll definitely surpass that this year.”
Tunguz: Microsoft projects compute constraints and aggressive GPU buying through 2025
“Microsoft is still compute constrained. And they project, I think, all the way through twenty-twenty-five, they'll still be needing to buy GPUs aggressively because it just cannot serve service all of the demand.”
Tunguz: Enterprise AI buyer blocker shifted from security to cost
“We have about 200 buyers that we call theorists around the firm, and we asked them, what is the biggest adoption, adoption blocker to AI? And about a year ago it was security, but today it's cost.”
Tunguz: High toil and labor shortages make buyers accept 75-80% AI accuracy
“We look for three things when we invest in software companies. We look for toil, lots of repetitive, really boring work. The second thing we look for is a labor market that cannot supply enough people to do that work. There aren't enough graduates or people wh…”
Tunguz: AI agents that actually work will emerge in 2025
“I do think the year, I mean, 20, 25, everyone's been talking about agents. I think you'll start to see agents that actually work pretty well.”
Tunguz: Microsoft, Google, and Meta each deploying $70B–$80B CapEx in 2025
“You have like Microsoft and Google and Meta each deploying something like 70 to eighty billion in capital expenditure, just buying GPUs and building data centers in just next year.”
Tunguz: Theory Ventures secured Fund II commitments before fully deploying Fund I
“We haven't deployed fund one fully. It means that we have commitments from investors that when we will start to raise funds too, that the money will be there.”
Tunguz: Theory Ventures stores all research in text files for AI processing
“We store it all in very simple text files. And the whole idea is that AI is really good at processing raw text. So we store it all in text files and we build systems on top.”
Tunguz: Modern software often repackages terminal tools invented decades ago
“I think there are a lot of brilliant programming ideas that exist within the terminal that had been invented 30 or 40 years ago that are constantly surfacing and being exposed to different people.”
Tunguz: Moving and unifying fragmented enterprise data is AI's biggest blocker
“The average enterprise is more than a hundred different software applications, and so you might have three or four different Salesforce instances, and You're marketing data as a customer data platform. That's a third thing, a second thing, and maybe you have a…”
Tunguz: 100x cost difference between small and largest AI models
“I was just looking at the analysis between the smallest models, which are about four or two to four billion parameters, and the very largest models, which about four or fifty billion parameters, you have a hundred X difference in inference costs.”
Tunguz: Social media ad spend surpassed search engine marketing in 2024
“Social media advertising for the first time ever surpassed search engine or SEM in twenty-twenty-four, roughly two hundred fifty billion each.”
Tunguz: Theory Ventures builds concentrated portfolios of about 15 companies per fund
“There are three of us on the investing team, and then the remainder work on what we call the intelligence team, which is a research part of the firm, and we build small, very concentrated portfolios, about 15 companies per fund”
Tunguz: Large companies average 8,000 daily security alerts, reviewing under 1%
“Every large company in the world has, on average, about 75 different security products. All those security products produce alerts. An average boost is about 8000 alerts per day, and humans need to review those alerts, but because it's really boring, fewer tha…”