No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:25:58 · Sarah Guo, Elad Gil
[00:25:58] S1: I think the opportunity to go spend your energy on, you know, something where you have, like, compared advantage and understanding and should benefit from all of this. The supply chain bottlenecks, domains that should accelerate like bio, diffusion into other valuable fields. Like, to me, that that seems a lot more exciting than being concerned about the downfall of mathematics and going on, you know, vacation until the world ends. [00:26:25] S0: Oh, yeah. Lots of places to go do stuff. And I do think that's where a subset of the research community will end up over time. Right? And that's an interesting question is how many researchers do you need if you're a top AI lab? And how does that number relate to the number that you have now? And is it you have the right number? Is it you need five times as many people? Is it you need half as many, but they only know you have a certain bar because it's compute constrained? And you wanna map it against the best ideas, and the best ideas come from a subset of people on average. Not always, but on average. And so it's a really interesting question of how does all this stuff fall out, and then where does the n plus one person go? And there's lots and lots and lots of places for the n plus one person to go. They're still exceptional. They're still top of the bell curve. Again, I don't wanna have that misinterpreted as the person is not being amazing. It's just at some point, people will do some cutoff on their power law.
00:27:18 · Sarah Guo, Elad Gil
[00:27:18] S1: I think you will appreciate this. Maybe you've heard it because it's an old ex Googler joke. But when Google is like, I don't know, 50,000 people or something, the question was, how many people does it take to run Google? And if you ask somebody within search and ads, they're like, oh, like 20% of people in search and ads. And if you ask somebody outside of, you know, search and ads, they'd say, like, 50,000 people or whatever Google is. So I think this is probably some varied perspectives on the concentration of contribution. I don't know, having never worked at Google. [00:27:53] S0: Yeah. I mean, we definitely know that yeah. I mean, I worked at Google. I thought it was a wonderful place. [00:28:00] S1: In search? [00:28:01] S0: I worked on mobile search a bit, and I worked on worked on ads a bit. I mean, I worked on a bunch of mobile stuff, and then I worked on a bunch of, like, AI ads related stuff.
00:28:01 · Elad Gil, Sarah Guo
[00:28:01] S0: I worked on mobile search a bit, and I worked on worked on ads a bit. I mean, I worked on a bunch of mobile stuff, and then I worked on a bunch of, like, AI ads related stuff. [00:28:12] S1: Can I ask you a very different question, which is, like, can you think of anything that could disrupt us all right now? You could have, like, investors, like a number of different players collapse in their commitment on the CapEx side because the markets hate it. There's some sort of freak out about the debt and the returns profile. You seem like minor indication of that, but not not real pressure yet. And the last one is, do you think there's a technological disruption that's possible? Like alternatives to transformers, does that still matter at all? Is there anything that would make the landscape look really different technically? I think there's always technology unknowns. And then I I think the idea of attempting to restrict model usage of models we already have or open source to dramatically constrain pace of progress, I think, is the other. [00:29:03] S0: Yeah. And I agree with the regulatory angle. What do you think is gonna happen in California? So they passed the billionaire tax. And then I mean, the Democratic Party in California came out in favor of it. You're a founder of one of these companies that you've backed that's now worth 10,000,000,000 plus. Is the founder gonna have a forced asset sale now next year, assuming it passes? Will dozens of founders have to sell big chunks of their companies?
00:29:03 · Elad Gil, Sarah Guo
[00:29:03] S0: Yeah. And I agree with the regulatory angle. What do you think is gonna happen in California? So they passed the billionaire tax. And then I mean, the Democratic Party in California came out in favor of it. You're a founder of one of these companies that you've backed that's now worth 10,000,000,000 plus. Is the founder gonna have a forced asset sale now next year, assuming it passes? Will dozens of founders have to sell big chunks of their companies? [00:29:33] S1: It's not clear the regulators have thought through the execution and compliance of this. But I think the immediate effect is that a huge number of people that are attempting to create value or do new things in California choose to leave. It's that's already happening. It's hard to move an entire ecosystem very quickly. This is the fastest way I can think of to chase the entire ecosystem out. What do you think happens? [00:30:03] S0: Yeah. I mean, way that law is written is, my sense is it's reasonably broad in terms of once it passes, they can reimplement it, they can lower the bar in future years, etcetera. Yeah. And my sense is in '28, there's increasing talk about also trying to add a exit tax in California. So if you actually try and leave, they'll try and take a big chunk as sort of a penalty for that. [00:30:26] S1: So is your prediction mass migration in '27 to Miami? Miami finally happens?
00:30:26 · Sarah Guo, Elad Gil
[00:30:26] S1: So is your prediction mass migration in '27 to Miami? Miami finally happens? [00:30:32] S0: I think it will take some time. I think the people who wrote the bill want the flight to happen. I think they want people to leave. And I think the two really negative signs for California were this bill and then the ballot harvesting initiatives. I think those are the two things that make it a potentially worse future for the state in different ways. So I'm hopeful, as usual, that California figures it out. But I think if there's any alternative that was easy to do, a lot of people would even more people would be leaving. I do think a lot of people are leaving. I know quite a few who are starting to go now or planning to go by the fall next month or so. [00:31:17] S1: What is your second choice ecosystem? [00:31:19] S0: I think that there's a few different places that a lot of people are considering. And the question is, what does critical mass look like in two years at each one of those spots? So I think a lot of these things self assemble and people talk about weather and they talk about all these other things. But the reality is Boston used to be one of the main startup hubs. It still is for biotech. They lost competitively in the early nineties. Right? In the eighties, Boston was sort of the counterweight to Silicon Valley. And the weather there was awful. And so I think it's more about where do you have enough smart people aggregated working on common things? And then that's where these renaissance tend to happen.
00:31:19 · Elad Gil, Sarah Guo
[00:31:19] S0: I think that there's a few different places that a lot of people are considering. And the question is, what does critical mass look like in two years at each one of those spots? So I think a lot of these things self assemble and people talk about weather and they talk about all these other things. But the reality is Boston used to be one of the main startup hubs. It still is for biotech. They lost competitively in the early nineties. Right? In the eighties, Boston was sort of the counterweight to Silicon Valley. And the weather there was awful. And so I think it's more about where do you have enough smart people aggregated working on common things? And then that's where these renaissance tend to happen. [00:32:01] S1: I think it's been really exciting to see the amount of, like, great technology migration and innovation in in Texas around energy. Because that is really like a reaction to regulatory environment and demand where I've seen a lot of people either move from Silicon Valley or move from other places because it is a place where you can experiment. And there is actually an ecosystem now that's super exciting.