The Ledger
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Ramade: Machine Learning Models Cannot Learn Physics Probabilistically
“There are certain rules of the world that we've learned over time that need to be true. It's like gravity is 9.8 meters per second square. You can't probabilistically learn that by watching stuff fall in air and being like, yeah, my ML. No, no. I mean, there's…”
Ramade: Horizontal AI is not a winning game for small startups
“Look, I don't think for a small company playing in horizontal AI is really a winner's game”
Ramade: Hardware lab tooling has stagnated under 1980s incumbents
“The incumbent competitor set
Are three companies from the eighties.
You know, it's weirdly the underpinning layer of technology on which all of our software runs weirdly hasn't changed that much.
Developing the hardware has like stagnant
and it's kind of surpr…”
Ramade: Entire SaaS companies will become mere software features
“What we considered a SaaS company is now just going to be a feature for in the future.”
Ramade: AI capability for hands-on engineering tinkering remains disastrous
“The tinkering in garage problem is very unsolved. Like you look at AI's capability there. It's like, it's a disaster.”
Ramade: Palantir avoided competition by embedding deeply into customer problems
“And I think one of the things Palantir did so well is they were able to go so deep into a customer for so long that they encountered problems that for which there was very little competition for.”
Ramade: Electrical engineering enrollments dropped 90% over 50 years as CS surged
“The last 50 years, if you look at computer science course enrollments, they're up by 90%. None of us are surprised by it. But electrical engineering course enrollments are down by the same amount.”
Ramade: Re-spinning an incorrect circuit board adds three months to hardware cycles
“Each time you're like, oh damn, the board was wrong. I need to go and re-spin it. That's like, you're adding three months to the cycle.”
Ramade: Base AI capabilities are becoming commoditized APIs
“Base cognitive functions are just becoming available as an API. So like vision is just going to be available. We shouldn't work on a vision problem, like go fine tune like a Yolo or whatever. VLM is your favorite.”
Ramade: AI Loses Engineer Trust Permanently After Any Obvious Hallucination
“Where AI has struggled is you tell an engineer something obviously wrong. They're never trusting you again. And they shouldn't, honestly, like you want to fly in a safe plane.”
Ramade: Tariffs accelerated Arena's customer pull and deployments
“Like for us, it's been like, it's accelerated customer pull and deployments.”
Ramade: Defensibility questions will hit startups much earlier than before
“I feel like the question of defensibility probably is going to come up much sooner in a company's lifetime than it's ever done before.”
Ramade: Arena uses Nike playbook, targeting top semiconductor makers first
“And if we take the philosophy of we want to be a little like Nike, start by selling it to the Olympic athletes and get everyone to buy it. That was sort of the proving ground. And so we still have a few semiconductor companies, you know, that we're scaling up …”