William Welser IV is the co-founder and CEO of Lotic AI. He discusses strategic positioning for AI startups amid intense competition among foundation model providers.
“There's been really an AI race between these large companies, which has led to a commoditization of these tools. And if you take the approach of I'm not going to fight them, I'm not going, but I'm going to learn how to ride on all of the rails. I'm going to look at them as commodities. Then you run a far better chance of succeeding.”
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More from William Welser IV
Insight
Welser: Current LLM systems are inherently sycophantic
“So right now these systems are sycophantic. They are, they're based on our prompts. They're going to take what we say and give us back what we've asked, and then we're going to iterate.”
William Welser IVAug 1, 2025▶ 2:22Consider You Might Be Wrong: His Tattoo Runs His Company
Insight
Welser: LLMs cannot master conversational nuance because human emergence lacks rules
“Like, all of that last mile of interaction, it's not there, because there's no rule set against it. Like, there's too much emergence that happens between an individual when you or between two individuals when you're talking together, and then there's emergenci…”
William Welser IVAug 1, 2025▶ 6:08Consider You Might Be Wrong: His Tattoo Runs His Company
Opinion
Welser: People are offloading cognitive responsibility onto LLMs
“I am worried, and I have seen lots of examples just in my
personal space where people are offloading their intellectual curiosity. They're offloading their cognitive responsibility onto these LLMs. And they're not taking it with a grain of salt. They're sayi…”
William Welser IVAug 1, 2025▶ 9:21Consider You Might Be Wrong: His Tattoo Runs His Company
Insight
Welser: AI's true risk is humans becoming too dumb to make decisions
“I'm not really worried about AI becoming so smart that we have our, you know, AI overlords. I'm worried about us becoming so dumb That we are just reliant upon something to make any decision. We're reliant upon something to just tell us the answer.”
William Welser IVAug 1, 2025▶ 15:18Consider You Might Be Wrong: His Tattoo Runs His Company
Opinion
Welser: Software cannot scale to enterprise level through vibe coding
“Like I can build lots of things, but if I'm gonna like scale something to an enterprise level, I'm not gonna do it vibe coding. Because there's a lot of other things that are required on the, in different parts of that system to make it robust, to make it so i…”
William Welser IVAug 1, 2025▶ 23:49Consider You Might Be Wrong: His Tattoo Runs His Company
Insight
Welser: AI algorithms can run on individual data without pooling user data
“There's more than enough data at the individual level to run these very, very powerful algorithms. I don't need to commingle my data with yours just so I can run those algorithms.”
William Welser IVAug 1, 2025▶ 26:28Consider You Might Be Wrong: His Tattoo Runs His Company
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