AI

“In terms of things that I think are most likely to affect the future of humanity, I think AI is probably the single biggest item in the near term that's likely to affect humanity.”

“So, so I think if we can effectively merge with AI by improving that the neural link between your cortex and the, your digital extension yourself, which already, like I said, already exists, just has a bandwidth issue. [865] Elon Musk: and then effectively [8…”

“A lot of the modern techniques in artificial intelligence, if you even asked people like a decade ago, they would have told you like, this is never going to be a thing. It's a complete dead end. Why are you doing this research? And it really has kind of explod…”

“Everybody always wants to think about AI as if it were like this huge meteor just crashing into the earth where they're like, What do we do when the AI arrives, right? And it just like, it doesn't just turn up that it doesn't work like that, right? And in fact…”

“Northern Europe is kind of leading the way in terms of their willingness to kind of experiment with some of these models, and I think they've got a couple things going for them, right? Like, on one hand, I think they have a skilled labor force, right, that, li…”

“Certainly when I was a PhD student and when I was a young postdoc, it was a fairly niche area. So you could just kind of like beaver away in your little, little kind of corner. Doing things that you thought were intellectually interesting and being reasonably …”

“Like some things that used to be hard will be easy. And so, We'll offload all of that. And if people are happy just listening to the stuff that's now easy, then yeah, it's a problem solved and we'll be able to generate lots of it. But then what people tend to …”

“For me, the applied area, that's probably one of the more interesting areas, is looking at things like the application of artificial intelligence in the biological sector, so there's some pretty interesting work that's occurring around how to be better at pred…”

“The thing about League of Legends is it doesn't run on Linux and it doesn't have a game API and little things like that actually are the biggest barrier to making AI progress in a lot of ways.”

“One good book, like super intelligence in the case of AI, can give you a really, really great foundation right there, and then you can just kind of tack on information to that foundation or poke holes in that foundation, and then you end up with a solid unders…”

“It could be that you know, something truly catastrophic could happen if you sort of combine the, Scalability of AI and digital technology in general with, like, the adaptability of human intelligence for, like, finding vulnerabilities. If you put those togethe…”

“Reducing the probability of existential risk is super important, even if AI is you know, decades or centuries away, and even if we can only, you know, decrease the probability, you know, of that happening by, like.1% or whatever in expectation, that's, like, a…”

“I mean, I think it's actually, yeah, good development, right? Like, I mean, the history of AI is like all of these winners, and like, having another hype cycle to kind of balance it out might actually be a good thing.”

“My view on this is AI is about a rapidly efficient way of acquiring knowledge. We can use sensors, cameras whatever sensors, to observe a phenomena, and use deep learning, machine learning, some techniques to rapidly distill into self-knowledge.”

“Basically if you spend time, a ton of time with trucking companies, you are likely to have a whole different perspective here on how AI could solve problems in trucking, but you have to go really deep and spend time with them versus sitting, you know, in your …”

“It's the fastest any tech has ever improved. I think. Yeah. Certainly faster than processors, certainly faster than the cloud.”

“At this point, AI has passed Turing tests and is solving all of these very menial problems over the phone.”

“The fact that somebody else, I really believe, is now gonna go solve all the physics with this stuff, like, I'm so excited to be alive for that.”

“I think that's why I'm so excited for startups right now. It is because the world is still sleeping on all of this to such an astonishing degree. And then you have, like, the YC founders being like, no, no, I'm gonna, like, do this amazing thing and do it very…”

“At some point, the AI will get good enough to just, like, design chips better than, like, humans can, and then it will just, like, eliminate one of its bottlenecks for, like, getting greater intelligence, and so it feels like that's already kind of, like, We'r…”

“AI is going to help companies like 2000 person companies be run more like 200 person companies and 200 person companies be run more like 20 person companies.”

“I think that the role that we're going to be playing, You know, one, I think there's going to be two roles. One will be something like a lone genius. You know, the Alec Radford of the world working alone at his computer, coming up with some crazy idea, but now…”

“I think that's the, like that we need some twist like that for AI that lets people figure out How to use the AI to solve the problem they actually have not just sort of take their existing workflow and have AI do that workflow.”

“I mean, yes, AI has had some effects, you know, particularly on people who write code, but, you know, I don't think you can see it in the productivity statistics, unless it's about how big the data centers are that we're building.”

“One quarter of the founders said that more than 95% of their code base was AI generated”

“We're sort of in this uncanny valley still where, you know, you can do prompt app, but prompt app doesn't give you an app that is well designed yet.”

“I think, like, prompting alone is sort of like we're in the telnet days of AI.”

“My point of view is that design has the opportunity to differentiate software at this age of AI, where we'll see whole new workflows emerge, where designers, engineers, product will work together in different ways than maybe they're doing today, or at least di…”

“My point of view is you get more breadth now in terms of the things that you can try, but it still requires a lot of depth to fully explore it.”

“The thing that we design is less kind of like the nouns, kind of the buttons and the text fields and the sidebars, but really think more about kind of like the verbs you know, autocomplete, autosuggest, summarize, send an agent to do something. Those are thing…”

“And the AI is so tolerant of minor grammar and punctuation mistakes that it honestly doesn't matter if the transcription's not perfect.”

“You might go and try four, five, six different prompts, and you finally get the solution. I'd actually just take that solution, git reset, and then feed that solution into the AI on a clean code base, so you can implement that clean solution without layers and…”

“I found I had bad results if I'm, like, prompting the AI multiple times to try and get something working. It tends to accumulate layers and layers and layers of bad code rather than, like, really understanding The root cause.”

“Rails is a 20 year old framework with a ton of well-established conventions. A lot of Rails code bases look very, very similar. And it's obvious to an experienced Ruby on Rails developer where a specific piece of functionality Should live, or the right Rails w…”

“So many industries like law or education or medicine that really were not big buyers of software in the past that are going to be transformed in the next five years.”

“And I think we're now getting to the point in legal, in finance, and all these other areas where it's become a competitive disadvantage if you don't embrace it. So I think it will become default.”

“Like I could easily see the demand goes up 10 X or a hundred X, who knows, but I just think the AI is getting so good that you just won't have humans fulfilling that demand in anything but the most niche of niche cases.”

“And you could see hundreds of millions of people displaced, and the idea that they're going to retrain as in a different job, I think is going to be extremely painful. And I can see the societal impact and turmoil being very, very grave for 10 or 20 years as t…”

“When mobile came out, the first mobile apps, or a lot of the first mobile apps, were basically just websites wrapped in a native app wrapper, but they didn't take advantage of any of the new technologies available on the mobile phone, like GPS, like multi-touc…”

“Part of the problem is that We're using old software development mentality, old software development techniques to build these features, and we're not actually taking full advantage of what AI can do.”

“You know, on average, we see about people using, you know, having AI write 40%, 50% of the lines of code produced within Cursor, but it's still a process of, you know, reading everything that comes out of the AI.”

“We're now kind of like cooperating with AIs, and usually they are doing the generation, and we as humans are doing the verification. It is in our interest to make this loop go as fast as possible, so we're getting a lot of work done.”

“I did sort of feel a bit like, you know, when I was in D.C. Taking a lot of flack for, like, getting rid of waste and fraud, which was an interesting side quest as side quests go. But Got to get back to the main quest. Yeah, I gotta get back to the main quest …”

“Something that I think is extremely important in building AI is, is a very rigorous adherence to truth, even if that truth is politically incorrect. I, my intuition for what could make AI very dangerous is if you force AI to believe things that are not true.”

“You know, the economy, assuming we don't, things don't go awry, and like AI doesn't kill us all and itself then you'll see ultimately an economy that is not, not 10 times more than the current economy. Ultimately, like if we become, say, or whatever our future…”

“I think it most likely will be a good outcome. I guess I'd sort of agree with Jeff Hinton that maybe it's a 10 to 20% chance of annihilation. But look on the bright side, that's 80 to 90% probability of a great outcome.”

“We, we've kind of run out of pre-training data or human generated pre like human generated data. You run out of tokens pretty fast certainly of high quality tokens.”

“And, you know, like, AI and robotics does give us a new possibility of a way to bring manufacturing back here and to bring sort of these complex industries here in a really important new way. And I would say that's at least worth trying.”

“The analogy I like most for AI is the transistor, like the historical tech, technical analogy. You know, some people figured out like a new, really important scientific discovery. And society, the economy, whatever you want to call it, just got to work. Just d…”

“I think AI is, like, somewhat mainstream right now. I, the negative, the way that it's not is most people still think of AI as ChatGPT, and a lot of people use ChatGPT, but they use it like a chatbot, and they have not yet wrapped their head around what's, wha…”

“I think the real question in the next five years is we've got to produce enough products that are creating great value, which I'm very confident of, right, by the way, in healthcare and education, in, Ah, in productivity. So there's many, many domains, but tha…”

“If you want to understand the language of nature, which is simulation I think the best way to do it is through a quantum computer, because after all you know, Physics and nature is quantum. And so therefore, but AI is, I think of it as an emulator of that simu…”

“To me, this artificial intelligence is unfortunately the worst name we could have ever picked And so I'm not into this anthropomorphizing AI at all. I mean, I think of it more. I come at it as it's a tool. It's not trying to replicate how we think.”

“If there's one lesson history has taught us is that if you're going to use energy, you better have social permission to use energy. So that means you've got to make sure that the output of this AI is socially useful. In other words, if we really are not creati…”

“That is the under-hyped story, I think. Because right now the over-hyped thing is the model capability, and the model capability is fantastic, but man, if we can somehow get the world to recognize that this is making a real difference in the lives of people ev…”

“It's for one thing and one thing alone, which is to drive ultimately economic growth and GDP growth. So if I had to ask me my benchmark for AI is, is it creating surplus in the world around us? One community, one country, one industry, one company at a time.”

“I imagine that, like, Every category in some way can be reinvented, and I don't think you can look at, like, what it looks like today and just add AI onto it, add memory, or add a bit of a deeper connection. We're seeing that now, right? And I think there's co…”

“The real crazy unlocks come from the ability to take that memory that builds over time and intuit it forward.”

“The way I kind of like simply think about it is, is that for the last two cycles, let's call it the internet and mobile, we've moved from outcomes and attention into an area of relationships and affection. And I think that's much more dynamic and it's much mor…”

“As soon as you get to Have voice. I think people take a lot more liberty with how they talk, and you almost let ideas unfold, and you know, you peel back the onion in doing that. Now we've got voice that talks back to us digitally to prompt a conversation, and…”

“The founding fathers of AI who came together in 1956 in Dartmouth, you know, the John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky of them, they wanted to solve the problem of machines that can think, and that's a problem that Turing, Alan Turing, also put forward a few years e…”

“AI is going to move towards systems that are more like programmers that approach a new task by writing software for it. And when faced with a new task, your programmer like MetaLearner will synthesize on the fly a program or model that is adapted to the task.”

“Because, like, AI has captured the, like, the imagination of everybody, everyone, like, wants to know what's possible and are consistently underwhelmed by what, like, the established software companies can offer them, but they're open to, like, college student…”

“It's pretty clear now in the AI world that, like, the AI is very good at following instructions, and it's probably going to be hard for humans to compete with the AI on just, like, Following instructions reliably, in which case people here need to think about …”

“Things that seem like they were niche before AI, you can get people to pay you a lot, lot more money for because they're not just buying software, they're buying like work from you.”

“AI needs so much electricity, only nuclear power is good enough for that. You know, that wind, solar stuff, not, this is not true.”

“Safety is not a function of technology. It's a function of how we apply it. So like electric motor, you know, You can't, the maker of electric motor can't guarantee that no one will ever use it for an unsafe downstream task. Like using electric, electric motor…”

“And in terms of AI tech trends, if you ask me what's the most important tech trend in AI, I would say Is the rise of agentic AI.”

“I feel like AGI has been overhyped. And so for a long time, there'll be a lot of things that humans can do that AI cannot.”

“This idea that AI is so powerful, we might accidentally lead to human extinction. That's just ridiculous, but it is a hype narrative that made certain businesses look more powerful, and it got Yeah, ramped up and actually help certain businesses fundraising go…”

“There are a lot of people in the world who hate AI, by the way, so I think just throwing AI down people's throats on such a, you know, massive distribution area is not easy.”

“I think that we're making a lot of progress on making AI better at deeper tasks like hard coding problems, hard math problems. But I suspect that there's a particular overhang in areas where putting together knowledge that maybe no one human expert would have,…”

“I think one of the sort of basic features of AI that's different about the shape of AI intelligence compared to human intelligence is that there are a lot of things that I can't do, but I can at least judge whether they were done correctly. I think for AI, the…”

“That really was, that was like the first batch where it was like through and through, just, you know, AI companies pretty much”

“My prediction is that we'll probably see an increase in people projecting consciousness onto AI, whether or not that's the right thing that, you know, you agree with or don't agree with. I think that the number of people that will do that will increase.”

“If you really believe that development gets easier and it's more simple to create software, it's faster to create software, then like, what is your differentiator? It's design. It's craft. It's attention to detail. It's point of view.”

“Where you might have needed a 30 person marketing team, you now need five.”

“And now it's becoming almost a commodity where you're expected to do it, but clients are also not really that excited to pay for Very simple contract review when they know that AI can do, you know, 99% of it.”

“I think that there are probably some markets where you're really well served by going and immediately talking to a bunch of people, listing down their problems really rigorously, or, you know, really kind of systematically and exhaustively thinking through eac…”

“AI is going to be this transformative technology maybe more so than, you know, any revolution in recent technological revolution in recent centuries, but it's going to take a couple of decades, and it's going to be this industry-wide effort where there are all…”

“My view is that there's a fundamental limitation with how we do AI today, and maybe this gets solved, but AI today can't truly generalize out of distribution. Everything I can do needs to be represented in the data.”

“So conversely with AI you're no longer really having to convince people that AI is the future. Everybody tends to be bought in, in the enterprise segment. There's a lot of still slowness in adoption in large enterprises. But it's not because people aren't conv…”

“If your market is not truly transformed by AI, don't touch it. It's not, it's just not worth it because you're going to be fighting against a headwind that is just unnecessary to fight against. Like go after markets where AI like fundamentally changes like the…”

“One is in a world where AI proliferates it's gonna be really hard to know like what's real. And crypto provides a level of hardness and verification that I think can connect to AI in a way that solves that problem. Like if you have millions and millions and mi…”

“Like one thing that I think is like the standard way people parallelize chips isn't the whole thing is one failure domain. Like one chip fails, the whole thing can crash.”

“If we end up relying on these models, that's a massive question for society, right? That there's going to be a handful of corporations that get to decide what is okay and not okay for an AI to do for you. And if we start relying on AI to do everything, then th…”

“There's this huge advantage that AI has over humans when it comes to bringing comfort to an audit, which is that they can be less biased and they can also have no memory.”

“I think another outcome actually is the opposite. It's like maybe all of this automation on, on generating code makes it easier to just raise the quality bar extremely high.”

“And obviously right now AIs are not trustable enough to make that happen.”

“But I think if you take a step back, and you say, hey, hold on a second, here's two principles, and you can choose the AI that follows this principle or this principle, The first principle is that we're never gonna blow smoke up your ass. We're only gonna tell…”

“And I think even today, like you talked to a bunch of VCs and they're like, oh yeah, like I'm ahead of the curve. Like I'm investing in AI. I'm like, no, like you're two years behind already. Right. Like, tell me about what you think needs to happen in two yea…”

“And actually that might be different every six, 12 or 18 months, right? Cause the capabilities of AI are changing. So like an AI native company today might be different than what an AI native company tomorrow looks like in 12 months. You might be outdated if y…”

“If you look back at the history of all the products that have done this in one form or another over the past 25 years, nobody's done it for music. The reason, you know, we believe is that Technology up until AI did not make music creation easier, right? The ca…”

“And obviously a lot of people have been talking about this for a while. AI is going to be a great tutor. It's going to be great at teaching you things. But nobody's really gone in and built the product for that yet.”

“Basically retention will go up, so certain paid models will be, ah, possible now that weren't possible earlier, but then you still gotta solve the distribution problem.”

“No, actually AI Creates like a really interesting opportunity for the browser to be an investable service.”

“It is hard as a larger company to reorient and rebuild your company to use AI well. And this is, I think to your point, the huge advantage that a lot of earlier companies that can build from the ground up in this way.”

“This is why I think a lot of the hype in that, AI killing SAS is way overblown because particularly for a lot of business workflows, like very high guarantees on performance are fundamental to it. You know, if you put a record into your CRM, that stuff better …”

“It's still taken us a full year to get the team kind of fully on board and ramped and like believing and seeing and building.”

“With the capabilities of AI, because they're so jagged, you, it's a technology first understanding of what is possible. And so if you go to your customers and tell them and ask them what they want, like, they're not even going to be able to describe what's pos…”

“There's more software appearing. It's getting just more and more competitive. I think it's got, it's become a step change more competitive with AI.”

“Well, it turns out that 90% of enterprises don't know how to do You know, IT, let alone AI. It's weird to say that that's a good thing, but in the context of fast takeoff, like that is a real break on the ability of this new, really insane technology from actu…”

“AI is going to reduce the cost of, like, producing the time to produce things, and so then the expectations from your users and customers will just go up, and you'll need to keep hiring more people to satisfy, like, the growing expectations. I feel like this y…”

“So continuing to trace the exponential, I think what will happen is coding will be generally solved for everyone. And I think today coding is practically solved, you know, for me, and I think it'll be the case for everyone you know, regardless of domain.”

“I don't think that people are quite ready to have relationships with machines, even though like, I mean, that's sort of what the headlines seem to say, like, oh, you know, the people are having Relationships with machines now, but I, you know, I just don't lik…”

“Historically in machine learning, you always, you know, it's like the rule was you have to know your data set really well. But now we're kind of outsourcing that to the AI itself, where the AI is the, it's the AI's job to understand the dataset and figure out …”

“It's very easy using the same tools that everybody else is using to end up in the same place. You have to be intentional about ending up in a different place. And so rather than start from What does the AI spit out? And then let's tweak that. I would start fro…”

“There's this meme out there that BCI is an artificial intelligence adjacent story and that the goal is to, I mean, you have to merge humans and machines, and I do think that there's something to that. But I think the more immediate thing here is that I see BCI…”

“If the end of the quest of artificial intelligence are super intelligent machines, then I think the end of the BCI quest are actually conscious machines.”

“Many people in neuroscience have gone over to AI because they're basically still doing neuroscience, but it's just way easier to do it on the models.”

“Elon, he, I mean, he saw what was coming in AI, like, very much more clearly than many other people much earlier, and I think the implications of, like, if you gotta, this can't be a separate thing from humanity, and that needs to emerge somehow, I think that …”

“I personally don't think that machine learning or AI in 50 years is still going to be built on this stack.”

“I think AI can, you know, give us opportunity to keep the base, like to raise the floor essentially, to create baseline products, maybe like the seven out of 10, Really quickly. Really easily.”

“So I think what AI is helping us do is it's helping us speed up our process and certainly helping us explore more. We can look at, you know, 20 ideas in the time it normally would have taken to look at two. However, the, you know, it doesn't replace craft. It …”

“And they, like, sold 500 of these Apple Ones, and I think we're at the Apple One moment right now. We are coming up with the primitives, we're learning how do these things work, and how do we sell it, and how do we package it”

“We basically have a choice to be made over the next, I don't think it's even that long. I think it's like 18 to 24 months. It might take five years, but there are sort of two scenarios”

“I think you have to assume that if you're a big, large company that's not AI native, you're doing a turnaround to some degree.”

“Brex has gone deeper on AI than almost any enterprise company we know.”

“This is actually an answer to one of the questions, which is like, will there be jobs or whatever? It's like, as long as there are limits on RAM, actually like there will be. So I don't know. I mean. Kind of an interesting one, right? Literally you can't have …”

“I think the CEO needs to be the chief AI officer. Like it's not a engineering team thing. It's not like a product team thing. It's like, you have to understand the bounds of the technology better than anyone.”

“Whatever problem you have in your life, why can't you solve it with AI? And just like start there. And 80%, yeah, you can use a chat bot, but a 20% that you can't. Figure out why and go build something that makes you solve that problem. Less so because of the …”

“With AI in particular, things are changing so fast that you just can't wait to see the demand materialize from the customer base. So you need to get ahead of it, which I think us and many others I think are going to get wrong more often, and we need to be at e…”

“I feel like all the alpha is in building your own AI. I mean, if someone else is using whatever is off the shelf, but you're, you have a thing that can recursively self-improve, and it is, you know, I mean, the mechanic, people are very flippant about markdown…”

“The task of reading radiology scans has been automated, but the number of radiology jobs has increased some 20% in the last several years, even though AI has taken over the whole field.”

“The narrative about AI destroying jobs is exactly backwards. AI eliminate tasks. AI automates tasks away. But it doesn't necessarily eliminate jobs. And the reason for that is because the job of a person has a purpose, and that purpose has many tasks. Some of …”

“Loss of control, accidents are not entirely theoretical things.”

“And that means that we have to, you know, be fairly quite reserved about not imposing our worldview about what we think people should or shouldn't do with AI, or even what we think the good ideas are, while still making sure that we can ensure enough of a safe…”

“In fact, if we are right that AI is going to be such a big change, startups will be much more important to making sure that The power of this technology gets widely distributed throughout the economy and society, and it's not just concentrated in a few compani…”

“At Boom, we need far more software engineers in a post AI world. They would need it in a pre AI world. Why? Because the cost of software development has dropped. Anybody, including hardware engineers can now become a coder. And we need software engineers to ma…”

“And so I think a decade looking back, it'll, it'll be obvious that intelligence became abundant and that agency became abundant.”

“Like all of a sudden the scarce resource isn't gonna be Intelligence or agency. I really think it's going to be vision and ambition.”