No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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.
00:32:01 · Sarah Guo, Elad Gil
[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. [00:32:33] S0: Energy and hardware, actually. There's a really growing hardware corridor there as well, which is you know, it was originally all around El Segundo because that's where SpaceX was and then Andoril. And now, you know, SpaceX and I think part of Tesla and stuff moved to Texas. And so there's like this new ecosystem kind of emerging around sort of a part of Texas as well in addition to Austin. So I do think we are seeing these shifts, and these shifts are purely driven by regulation. They're not driven by is Texas a better or worse place to live? I mean, it impacts things. Right? But but it's regulatory shifts driving people out. [00:33:06] S1: You didn't take my bait on architecture and, like, technology. [00:33:11] S0: What do you think about architectures?
00:33:11 · Elad Gil, Sarah Guo
[00:33:11] S0: What do you think about architectures? [00:33:13] S1: I think we are going to, like, as an industry, consume all of the compute and power available, whatever the underlying architectures. So the idea that you are going to have a lot of pressure to find more memory or power efficient architectures is like more interesting than ever. But catching up to transformers and scale and match for hardware remains pretty tough. But I think people make that they will make that bet as they get more desperate in terms of more experimentation. I don't think it changes the direction of the industry. [00:33:50] S0: I think whatever it is gets copied and then it'll lapse to it and they have all the computing. That's the high probability outcome. It's not the only outcome. There could be some lower probability thing where some neo lab comes up with something, they keep it super, super secret, they scale on it, and suddenly their model is better than anyone else by far. And then they can afford all that extra compute and everything else and everybody rallies around them. You could always imagine a scenario like that. But you could also imagine a scenario where just one person from that team leaves for Anthropic or OpenAI and the knowledge spreads. And the next thing you know, everybody has it, which is what's been happening so far in terms of these models. [00:34:26] S1: Do you think if the dominant thing is access to compute then, and it's an oligopoly because of it, do you see the labs using that access to compute to control other verticals that they want to be in?