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OpenAI’s Bob McGrew on how AI startups should think about moats Startups building agents today tend to look at the cost of human labor when they think about pricing. For example, some startups building AI lawyers think they’ll be able to charge tens of thousands of dollars per month... because human lawyers really expensive. Bob McGrew, former Head of Research at OpenAI, disagrees: “The reason lawyers are expensive is because their time is scarce — there’s only so many people who have undergone that training. But by the time you’ve made an AI model out of it, there will effectively be an infinite number of lawyers.” He continues: “Maybe you with your AI lawyer startup will be able to have a lead over other people, but it’s the same frontier model underneath. Some other startup can come in and compete that away. So we should expect to see it priced at some opportunity cost over the cost of compute.” Where will value accrue in AI? Bob believes it will be at the application layer — so much so that frontier model investment from companies like OpenAI should be viewed as “an option on the valuable places in the application layer.” ChatGPT is one valuable application. Coding is another. He offers startups the following advice: “I think you can compete with frontier labs, but you want to do something more than just a personal productivity task on your computer — something that involves other people or an enterprise. The moats that you have for your business are going to be the same moats they always were: network effects, brand, economies of scale.” Video source: Sequoia Capital (2025)show more

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76,458 views • 1 year ago •via X (Twitter)

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Startup Archive1 year ago

Watch the full @sequoia interview with Bob McGrew here:

Startup Archive1 year ago

Want even more startup insights from the world's best founders? Join the 10,000+ founders who read our free newsletter here:

Places Visited & Pictures Taken4 years ago

How do you choose the best picture from a photo walk in less time?

Agnese Rozite1 year ago

If your moat can be out-computed, it was never a moat...

SaaS Growth Strategies1 year ago

Very true, initially building with AI might seem like you are completely different, and the same is your moat. Eventually, many are going to be building that way, and we will go back to the same scenarios regarding moats.

Ray Quant1 year ago

ai moats interesting, but liquidity anchors matter more long-term

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So, with autonomy, you get your time back. This is a very big deal. So it's not just, it'll save lives, like a lot of lives and prevent injuries. I think we'll see autonomous cars become ten times safer than a human. I mean, if you think of times past where there used to be an elevator operator in every elevator but once in a while, they get tired and accidentally shear somebody in half. Now, we have automated elevators. You just get an elevator and you press a button and you don't even think about it and it just takes you to the floor. And if you did see an elevator operator with a big relay switch, you'd be like, that's weird. That's how cars will be. And it's not just the lives saved in injuries, but if you think about the cumulative time that people spend in a car and the time that they will get back that they can now spend, well, I guess, on their phones or watching a movie or doing work or whatever you want to do you can think of the car in autonomous world as being like just little lounge. You're just sitting in a comfortable little lounge and you can do whatever you want while you're in this comfortable little lounge. And when you get out, you will be at your destination. So, yeah, it's gonna be awesome. Cost So, in fact, I think the cost of autonomous transport will be so low that you can think of it like individualized mass transit. The average cost of a bus per mile for a city, not the ticket price, because that is subsidized, but the average price is about a dollar a mile, whereas the cost of Cybercab we think probably over time, the operating cost is probably going to be around twenty cents a mile. Including taxes and everything else, it probably ends up being 30 or 40 cents a mile. And you will be able to buy one. And we expect the cost to be below $30,000. And I think there'll be an interesting business model where, let's say somebody is an Uber or Lyft driver today where they can actually sort of manage a fleet of cars and like, sort of manage, I don't know, 10, 20 cars and just take care of them. Like a shepherd tends their flock. You have a little flock of cars and you're the shepherd and you take care of your flock of cars. I think that would be pretty cool. I think it's going to be a glorious future. It's going to be really something special. Timeline We do expect actually to start fully autonomous unsupervised FSD in Texas and California next year. And that's obviously, that's with the Model 3 and Model Y. And then we expect to be in production with the Cybercab, which is really highly optimized for autonomous transport in probably, I tend to be a little optimistic with time frames, but in 2026. So, yeah, before 2027, let me put it that way. And we'll make this vehicle in very high volume. But well, before that, you will experience a robotic taxi via the Model 3 and Model Y program and model S and X, too. But the Model 3 and Y will achieve unsupervised full self-driving with permission, in wherever regulators essentially approve it. In the US, and then to follow outside the US. And Cybertruck, too. All our cars are basically, all cars that we make. Let's not get nuanced here. Self-driving technology One of the reasons why the computer can be so much better than a person is that we have millions of cars that are training on driving. It's like living millions of lives simultaneously and seeing very unusual situations that a person in their entire lifetime would not see. With that amount of training data, it's obviously going to be much better than what a human could be because you can't live a million lives. And it's also, it can see in all directions simultaneously and it doesn't get tired or text or any of those things. So, it will naturally be, like I said 10, 20, 30 times safer than a human, just for all those reasons. And I want to emphasize that the solution that we have is, AI and vision. So, there's no expensive equipment needed. The Model 3 and Model Y and S and X that we make today will be capable of full autonomy, unsupervised. And that means that our cost of producing the vehicle is low. Now, we are going to actually over-spec the computer for the Cybercab. 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What would happen if you have an autonomous world is that you can now turn parking lots into parks. And so, from we're taking the inglot out of parking lot. You're welcome. So, there's a lot of opportunity to create green space in the cities that we live in. So, like, that would be quite fantastic. Robovan Oh, and also, what happens if you need a vehicle that is bigger than a Model Y? The Robovan. We're going to make this and it's going to look like that. Now, can you imagine going down the streets and you see this coming towards you? That'd be sick. So this can carry up to 20 people, and it can also transport goods. You can configure it for goods transport within a city. Or transport of up to 20 people at a time. The Robovan is what's gonna solve for high density. If you want to take a sports team somewhere or you're looking to really get the cost of travel down to, I don't know, 5, 10 cents a mile, then you can use the Robovan. One of the things we want to do, and we've seen this with the Cybertruck, is we want to change the look of the roads. The future should look like the future. Optimus Speaking of robots. Everything we've developed for our cars, the batteries, power electronics, the advanced motors, gearboxes, the software, the AI inference computer, it all actually applies to a humanoid robot. The same techniques. It's just a robot with arms and legs instead of a robot with wheels. We've made a lot of progress with Optimus. And as you can see, we started up with someone in a robot suit. And then, we've progressed dramatically, year after year. So, if you extrapolate this, you're really going to have something spectacular, something that anyone could own. So, you can have your own personal R2-D2-C3PO. And I think at scale, this would cost something like, I don't know, $20,000, $30,000, probably less than a car is my prediction, long-term. It'll take us a minute to get to the long term. But fundamentally, at scale, the Optimus robot, you should be able to buy an Optimus robot for, I think, probably $20,000 to $30,000, long-term. And what can it do? It'll basically do anything you want. It can be a teacher or babysit your kids, it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks whatever you can think of, it will do. And, yeah, it's going to be awesome. I think this will be the biggest product ever of any kind, because I think everyone of the 8 billion people of Earth, I think everyone's going to want their Optimus buddy. And there's going to be maybe two. And then, they'll be producing products and services. I predict, actually, provided we address risks of digital superintelligence, 80% probability of good outcome, look on the bright side, the cup is 80% full, the cost of products and services will decline dramatically. And basically, anyone will be able to have any products and services they want. It will be an age of abundance the likes of which people have not, almost no one has envisioned. It will be something special. So now, one of the things we wanted to show tonight was that Optimus is not a canned video. It's not walled off. The Optimus robots will walk among you. Please, please be nice to the Optimus robots. You'll be able to walk right up to them and they'll serve drinks at the bar. I mean, it's a wild experience just to have humanoid robots and they're there, you're just in front of you. So yeah, with that, let's party!

FULL TRANSCRIPT OF ELON'S CYBERCAB AND ROBOVAN PRESENTATION 00:00 Welcome 01:16 Cybercab & Future of transportation 04:33 Cost 05:53 Timeline 07:13 Self-driving technology 10:05 Inductive charging 10:24 The cities of the future 11:04 Robovan 12:13 Optimus Welcome Welcome to the We, Robot party. We have quite a show for you tonight. I think you're going to like it. As you can see, I just arrived in the Robotaxi, the Cybercab. And there's 20 more where that came from. So they've been traveling, there's no people in them. As you can see, the car is just going by with no people. We have 50 fully autonomous cars here tonight. So you'll see model Y's and the Cybercabs, all driverless. You'll be able to take a ride in the Cybercab. There's no steering wheel or pedals. So I hope this goes well, we'll find out. You see a lot of sci-fi movies where the future is dark and dismal, where it's not a future you want to be in. So, you know, I love Blade Runner, but I don't know if we want that future. We want that duster he's wearing, but not the bleak apocalypse. We want to have a fun, exciting future that, if you could look in a crystal ball and see the future, you'd be like, yes, I wish I could be there now. That's what we want. Cybercab & Future of transportation So, when we think about transport today, there's a lot of pain that we take for granted, that we think is normal. Like having to drive around LA in 3 hours of traffic. Yeah, people that live in LA, I mean, you know, try to get from Pasadena to El Segundo during rush hour. You can fly to another city faster than you can get to LA. And you have to drive the whole way, unless you're in a Tesla. Of course, our Tesla already does quite well at this supervised self-driving. So, supervised full self-driving is actually working quite well. I'm sure there's people in the crowd who are using that. So, we'll move from supervised full self-driving to unsupervised full self-driving where the car, you could fall asleep and wake up at your destination. But there's also a challenge for a lot of people that cars cost too much. I mean, when you factor in everything that goes into a car and the car insurance and the car payments, storage of the car, it's very expensive. You say, like, how many hours a week are cars used? Your average passenger car is only used about 10 hours a week out of 168 hours. So, the vast majority of the time cars are just doing nothing. But if they're autonomous, they could be used, I don't know, five times more, maybe ten times more. So you could actually, for the same car, would have five times as much value, maybe ten times as much value. There's 168 hours in the week, and like I said, only ten of them are used for driving. And then, a bunch of those hours are looking for a parking spot, which can be pretty annoying at times. So, with autonomy, you get your time back. This is a very big deal. So it's not just, it'll save lives, like a lot of lives and prevent injuries. I think we'll see autonomous cars become ten times safer than a human. I mean, if you think of times past where there used to be an elevator operator in every elevator but once in a while, they get tired and accidentally shear somebody in half. Now, we have automated elevators. You just get an elevator and you press a button and you don't even think about it and it just takes you to the floor. And if you did see an elevator operator with a big relay switch, you'd be like, that's weird. That's how cars will be. And it's not just the lives saved in injuries, but if you think about the cumulative time that people spend in a car and the time that they will get back that they can now spend, well, I guess, on their phones or watching a movie or doing work or whatever you want to do you can think of the car in autonomous world as being like just little lounge. You're just sitting in a comfortable little lounge and you can do whatever you want while you're in this comfortable little lounge. And when you get out, you will be at your destination. So, yeah, it's gonna be awesome. Cost So, in fact, I think the cost of autonomous transport will be so low that you can think of it like individualized mass transit. The average cost of a bus per mile for a city, not the ticket price, because that is subsidized, but the average price is about a dollar a mile, whereas the cost of Cybercab we think probably over time, the operating cost is probably going to be around twenty cents a mile. Including taxes and everything else, it probably ends up being 30 or 40 cents a mile. And you will be able to buy one. And we expect the cost to be below $30,000. And I think there'll be an interesting business model where, let's say somebody is an Uber or Lyft driver today where they can actually sort of manage a fleet of cars and like, sort of manage, I don't know, 10, 20 cars and just take care of them. Like a shepherd tends their flock. You have a little flock of cars and you're the shepherd and you take care of your flock of cars. I think that would be pretty cool. I think it's going to be a glorious future. It's going to be really something special. Timeline We do expect actually to start fully autonomous unsupervised FSD in Texas and California next year. And that's obviously, that's with the Model 3 and Model Y. And then we expect to be in production with the Cybercab, which is really highly optimized for autonomous transport in probably, I tend to be a little optimistic with time frames, but in 2026. So, yeah, before 2027, let me put it that way. And we'll make this vehicle in very high volume. But well, before that, you will experience a robotic taxi via the Model 3 and Model Y program and model S and X, too. But the Model 3 and Y will achieve unsupervised full self-driving with permission, in wherever regulators essentially approve it. In the US, and then to follow outside the US. And Cybertruck, too. All our cars are basically, all cars that we make. Let's not get nuanced here. Self-driving technology One of the reasons why the computer can be so much better than a person is that we have millions of cars that are training on driving. It's like living millions of lives simultaneously and seeing very unusual situations that a person in their entire lifetime would not see. With that amount of training data, it's obviously going to be much better than what a human could be because you can't live a million lives. And it's also, it can see in all directions simultaneously and it doesn't get tired or text or any of those things. So, it will naturally be, like I said 10, 20, 30 times safer than a human, just for all those reasons. And I want to emphasize that the solution that we have is, AI and vision. So, there's no expensive equipment needed. The Model 3 and Model Y and S and X that we make today will be capable of full autonomy, unsupervised. And that means that our cost of producing the vehicle is low. Now, we are going to actually over-spec the computer for the Cybercab. So, our AI 5 computer will be somewhat over-spec'd because I think there's actually also an opportunity, sort of like an Amazon Web Services, where if the car is driving for 50 hours a week, there's still over 100 hours left and there's a potential there to have a massive amount of distributed inference compute, where if you've got like a fleet of 100 million vehicles and a kilowatt of efficient inference compute, you have 100 gigawatts of compute, which is really quite substantial. And if it's there, you might as well use it so that I think will make sense. So, our autonomous future is here. As I said, we've got 50 Teslas driving autonomously. We're trying to give you a sense of what cities will be like in the future. And when you get in, you'll see like, it's really quite a wild experience to just be in a car with no steering wheel, no pedals, no controls, and it feels great. So we have enough vehicles here, so everyone should be able to try it out and experience the set that we've built here. It's a very big set. So it's like really we've used I don't know, 20, 30 acres or something like that. It's really big. So, it goes on, the ride's long. And we set it up to feel like a ride, like a park ride. So, it'll be cool and you'll get to experience it tonight. Inductive charging Something we're also doing is and it's really high time we did this is inductive charging. So, the robotaxi has no plug. It just goes over the inductive charger and charges. So, yeah, it's kind of how it should be. The cities of the future One of the things that is really interesting is how will this affect the cities that we live in. And when you drive around a city, or when the car drives you around the city, you'll see there's a lot of parking lots. There's parking lots everywhere, parking garages. What would happen if you have an autonomous world is that you can now turn parking lots into parks. And so, from we're taking the inglot out of parking lot. You're welcome. So, there's a lot of opportunity to create green space in the cities that we live in. So, like, that would be quite fantastic. Robovan Oh, and also, what happens if you need a vehicle that is bigger than a Model Y? The Robovan. We're going to make this and it's going to look like that. Now, can you imagine going down the streets and you see this coming towards you? That'd be sick. So this can carry up to 20 people, and it can also transport goods. You can configure it for goods transport within a city. Or transport of up to 20 people at a time. The Robovan is what's gonna solve for high density. If you want to take a sports team somewhere or you're looking to really get the cost of travel down to, I don't know, 5, 10 cents a mile, then you can use the Robovan. One of the things we want to do, and we've seen this with the Cybertruck, is we want to change the look of the roads. The future should look like the future. Optimus Speaking of robots. Everything we've developed for our cars, the batteries, power electronics, the advanced motors, gearboxes, the software, the AI inference computer, it all actually applies to a humanoid robot. The same techniques. It's just a robot with arms and legs instead of a robot with wheels. We've made a lot of progress with Optimus. And as you can see, we started up with someone in a robot suit. And then, we've progressed dramatically, year after year. So, if you extrapolate this, you're really going to have something spectacular, something that anyone could own. So, you can have your own personal R2-D2-C3PO. And I think at scale, this would cost something like, I don't know, $20,000, $30,000, probably less than a car is my prediction, long-term. It'll take us a minute to get to the long term. But fundamentally, at scale, the Optimus robot, you should be able to buy an Optimus robot for, I think, probably $20,000 to $30,000, long-term. And what can it do? It'll basically do anything you want. It can be a teacher or babysit your kids, it can walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks whatever you can think of, it will do. And, yeah, it's going to be awesome. I think this will be the biggest product ever of any kind, because I think everyone of the 8 billion people of Earth, I think everyone's going to want their Optimus buddy. And there's going to be maybe two. And then, they'll be producing products and services. I predict, actually, provided we address risks of digital superintelligence, 80% probability of good outcome, look on the bright side, the cup is 80% full, the cost of products and services will decline dramatically. And basically, anyone will be able to have any products and services they want. It will be an age of abundance the likes of which people have not, almost no one has envisioned. It will be something special. So now, one of the things we wanted to show tonight was that Optimus is not a canned video. It's not walled off. The Optimus robots will walk among you. Please, please be nice to the Optimus robots. You'll be able to walk right up to them and they'll serve drinks at the bar. I mean, it's a wild experience just to have humanoid robots and they're there, you're just in front of you. So yeah, with that, let's party!

Mario Nawfal

241,051 views • 1 year ago

Elon Musk on the rapid advancement of AI and robotics "I'm confident that if AI and robotics continue to advance which they are advancing very rapidly working will be optional, and people will have any goods and services that they want" AI and robotics are advancing so fast that, eventually, they could satisfy nearly every human need. At that point, abundance becomes the default, and the real question is no longer about production, but purpose "There is a limit people can only eat so much food. But I think if you can think of it, you can have it in the future"

Elon Musk on the rapid advancement of AI and robotics "I'm confident that if AI and robotics continue to advance which they are advancing very rapidly working will be optional, and people will have any goods and services that they want" AI and robotics are advancing so fast that, eventually, they could satisfy nearly every human need. At that point, abundance becomes the default, and the real question is no longer about production, but purpose "There is a limit people can only eat so much food. But I think if you can think of it, you can have it in the future"

X Freeze

756,817 views • 3 months ago

Elon Musk: In the future, every country will have its own AI clusters. “It's currently very difficult to actually build an AI cluster and have it run. It's not like just pulling a computer out of a box. They are currently very difficult to run. And are you going to be training a frontier model? Because if you're training a frontier model, then you need a massive amount of compute and a level of technical skill that only a few companies possess. But, over time, I think every country will have AI compute clusters. It's just going to be a normal thing.” Future Investment Initiative, October 29, 2024

Elon Musk: In the future, every country will have its own AI clusters. “It's currently very difficult to actually build an AI cluster and have it run. It's not like just pulling a computer out of a box. They are currently very difficult to run. And are you going to be training a frontier model? Because if you're training a frontier model, then you need a massive amount of compute and a level of technical skill that only a few companies possess. But, over time, I think every country will have AI compute clusters. It's just going to be a normal thing.” Future Investment Initiative, October 29, 2024

ELON CLIPS

95,313 views • 8 months ago

"A generation of management teaching taught us CEOs should trust their people and get out of the way. But I don't think 'trust' and 'getting out of the way' are the same thing." Brian Chesky on how Founder Mode will become even more important with agentic AI: "Great leadership is presence, not absence." "Leadership is presence. You should actually be partnering with people. You should be on the field with them. If you're a calvalry general, you should be on a horse. You should be on the battlefield. You're not overseas just writing blueprints. You gotta be on the field with them, you gotta be leading by example." "Leadership is from the front, not the back." "I think AI is going to create the equivalent of an AI founder mode. Now you gotta be even more hands-on. I don't think in the era of AI, there should be any pure people managers. Because you're so close to the details and data. Everyone has the opportunity to be hands-on, and it's hard to imagine only managing people and not agents."

"A generation of management teaching taught us CEOs should trust their people and get out of the way. But I don't think 'trust' and 'getting out of the way' are the same thing." Brian Chesky on how Founder Mode will become even more important with agentic AI: "Great leadership is presence, not absence." "Leadership is presence. You should actually be partnering with people. You should be on the field with them. If you're a calvalry general, you should be on a horse. You should be on the battlefield. You're not overseas just writing blueprints. You gotta be on the field with them, you gotta be leading by example." "Leadership is from the front, not the back." "I think AI is going to create the equivalent of an AI founder mode. Now you gotta be even more hands-on. I don't think in the era of AI, there should be any pure people managers. Because you're so close to the details and data. Everyone has the opportunity to be hands-on, and it's hard to imagine only managing people and not agents."

TBPN

16,005 views • 3 months ago

Interesting that in three of my recent conversations with Krishna at Anthropic, Dylan Patel, and Gavin Baker, each said that frontier tokens are capturing the majority of the economic value. Gavin: "An overwhelming amount of the economic returns to AI at the model layer have been at the frontier. That's surprising to me, and I think it's been surprising to a lot of people. This is one of the most important questions to be answered, and you need to have a hypothesis on it as an investor." Krishna: "We think the returns to frontier intelligence are extremely high. Customers invest really heavily in more tokens with the newer models. The ones at the frontier clearly are capturing this economic value, driving meaningful ROI for customers. The returns to frontier intelligence are not slowing down." Dylan: "No one gives a crap about GPT-4 class models. They want the frontier because the frontier lets them create the economically valuable things."

Interesting that in three of my recent conversations with Krishna at Anthropic, Dylan Patel, and Gavin Baker, each said that frontier tokens are capturing the majority of the economic value. Gavin: "An overwhelming amount of the economic returns to AI at the model layer have been at the frontier. That's surprising to me, and I think it's been surprising to a lot of people. This is one of the most important questions to be answered, and you need to have a hypothesis on it as an investor." Krishna: "We think the returns to frontier intelligence are extremely high. Customers invest really heavily in more tokens with the newer models. The ones at the frontier clearly are capturing this economic value, driving meaningful ROI for customers. The returns to frontier intelligence are not slowing down." Dylan: "No one gives a crap about GPT-4 class models. They want the frontier because the frontier lets them create the economically valuable things."

Patrick OShaughnessy

121,110 views • 2 months ago

Lightspeed's Bucky Moore says the real opportunity in the AI app layer is in large industries far enough afield from where the model providers are today — and where the context engineering to get customer data into the model is extremely nuanced and messy. "I think this is kind of the elephant in the room right now — whether post-training open-source models combined with the unique user feedback you get from being an application provider is defensible enough." "That is going to be an inevitable challenge for any of these industries that hit a maturation point of AI adoption, like legal and software engineering have." "But on the other hand, there are some industries where they're very large, they're far enough afield from where the model providers are today — and probably will continue to be — and the context engineering to actually get the customer data into the model is just so messy. It requires going across different business functions, it requires a lot of hands-on forward-deployed engineering." "Those are the kind of companies that we get really excited about. Because I think being really good at that is not only defensible, but it also allows you to generate a feedback loop with your customers, where you hear a lot of their secrets. And those secrets allow you to feed that back into how you make your product better at the expense of anyone else playing in the space. Because if you're serving the customer, they're only serving you those secrets." "I think Palantir is a good example of this in the pre-AI era, and I think we're going to see many companies ascend in that same way."

Lightspeed's Bucky Moore says the real opportunity in the AI app layer is in large industries far enough afield from where the model providers are today — and where the context engineering to get customer data into the model is extremely nuanced and messy. "I think this is kind of the elephant in the room right now — whether post-training open-source models combined with the unique user feedback you get from being an application provider is defensible enough." "That is going to be an inevitable challenge for any of these industries that hit a maturation point of AI adoption, like legal and software engineering have." "But on the other hand, there are some industries where they're very large, they're far enough afield from where the model providers are today — and probably will continue to be — and the context engineering to actually get the customer data into the model is just so messy. It requires going across different business functions, it requires a lot of hands-on forward-deployed engineering." "Those are the kind of companies that we get really excited about. Because I think being really good at that is not only defensible, but it also allows you to generate a feedback loop with your customers, where you hear a lot of their secrets. And those secrets allow you to feed that back into how you make your product better at the expense of anyone else playing in the space. Because if you're serving the customer, they're only serving you those secrets." "I think Palantir is a good example of this in the pre-AI era, and I think we're going to see many companies ascend in that same way."

TBPN

46,862 views • 4 months ago

"The good future of AI is one of immense prosperity where there is an age of abundance, no shortage of goods and services. Everyone can have whatever they want, unless, except for things we artificially define to be scarce, like some special artwork. But anything that is of manufactured good or provided service, will, with the advent of AI plus robotics, that the cost of business services will trend to zero. I'm not saying it'd be actually zero, but it'll be everyone will be able to have anything they want." 一 Elon Musk

"The good future of AI is one of immense prosperity where there is an age of abundance, no shortage of goods and services. Everyone can have whatever they want, unless, except for things we artificially define to be scarce, like some special artwork. But anything that is of manufactured good or provided service, will, with the advent of AI plus robotics, that the cost of business services will trend to zero. I'm not saying it'd be actually zero, but it'll be everyone will be able to have anything they want." 一 Elon Musk

DogeDesigner

38,145 views • 3 months ago

Mark Zuckerberg says he is not an AI researcher -- so here is the one number he obsesses over to win the superintelligence race: "I'm not an AI researcher. So it's not like I'm in there telling them what research ideas to do." "The things that I can do as CEO of the company are: I can make sure that we have the very best people and talent density. I can make sure that we have by far the highest compute per researcher, and that we do whatever it takes to go build out all that capacity." "We're building this Prometheus cluster, which is going to be the first gigawatt-plus single cluster, a contiguous cluster for training, coming online next year." "We're building a cluster in Louisiana that is going to be 5 gigawatt, and we're building several more clusters like that that are just going to be multiple gigawatts." "We're talking about many hundreds of billions of dollars of capital. So you both need to have a good business model that can support it, and you need to believe in it." The tell: the richest lab in the world is not optimizing headcount. It is optimizing compute-per-researcher, and betting hundreds of billions that whoever owns the biggest contiguous cluster owns the frontier. Talent gets you into the room. Watts decide who leaves with the model.

Mark Zuckerberg says he is not an AI researcher -- so here is the one number he obsesses over to win the superintelligence race: "I'm not an AI researcher. So it's not like I'm in there telling them what research ideas to do." "The things that I can do as CEO of the company are: I can make sure that we have the very best people and talent density. I can make sure that we have by far the highest compute per researcher, and that we do whatever it takes to go build out all that capacity." "We're building this Prometheus cluster, which is going to be the first gigawatt-plus single cluster, a contiguous cluster for training, coming online next year." "We're building a cluster in Louisiana that is going to be 5 gigawatt, and we're building several more clusters like that that are just going to be multiple gigawatts." "We're talking about many hundreds of billions of dollars of capital. So you both need to have a good business model that can support it, and you need to believe in it." The tell: the richest lab in the world is not optimizing headcount. It is optimizing compute-per-researcher, and betting hundreds of billions that whoever owns the biggest contiguous cluster owns the frontier. Talent gets you into the room. Watts decide who leaves with the model.

Karl Mehta

255,587 views • 1 month ago

Sequoia partner Pat Grady says software is shifting from apps that demand attention to agents that work quietly in the background. This shift will change what moats will look like, and will be especially hard for incumbents to deal with. "It's two very different business paradigms," he says. "In an era of apps, you want a lot of surface area with your customers, you want them to spend a lot of time in your product." "In an era of agents, things can just be running passively in the background. The amount of surface area you have with your customers, the amount of time they might spend in your product might be de minimis. So the nature of the moat that you [will need to build] is different." "I think we'll see a lot of companies in the coming years able to live in the software world and have some of the workflows people are accustomed to. And then separately they can deploy these passive agents that kind of function as coworkers who just come back to you when things are done." From his appearance on the show in January.

Sequoia partner Pat Grady says software is shifting from apps that demand attention to agents that work quietly in the background. This shift will change what moats will look like, and will be especially hard for incumbents to deal with. "It's two very different business paradigms," he says. "In an era of apps, you want a lot of surface area with your customers, you want them to spend a lot of time in your product." "In an era of agents, things can just be running passively in the background. The amount of surface area you have with your customers, the amount of time they might spend in your product might be de minimis. So the nature of the moat that you [will need to build] is different." "I think we'll see a lot of companies in the coming years able to live in the software world and have some of the workflows people are accustomed to. And then separately they can deploy these passive agents that kind of function as coworkers who just come back to you when things are done." From his appearance on the show in January.

TBPN

47,208 views • 4 months ago