No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
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?
00:34:42 · Elad Gil
[00:34:42] S0: Or what is the safety that's really needed that's actually protective of people? What is the risk? What is the outcome? That's kind of the Janssen from Janssen Pharmaceuticals. He's considered one of the best drug developers of all times. He has these great videos on YouTube where he's interviewed thirty, forty years ago talking about regulatory capture in pharma. And the reason things got so expensive and so slow is number one, regulatory capture, and the second is risk reward scenarios where the FDA, in his mind I'm not saying this is correct or incorrect. In his mind, the FDA focuses too much on safety and risk and not enough on benefit. And so there's no risk reward. There's only risk. So that slows everything down because you're only looking at one side of the equation. One could imagine a scenario where in the labs, a version of that is created as well. Right? Where the safety burden is so high even if the outcome is even higher, even if the positive outcome is dramatically higher relative to the risk. And so this is back to if you only focus on one side of the equation, you'll always constrain things. And if you constrain things but then push progress forward internally on an exponent, and a year is worth three or four years in normal time, then you're a year ahead internally, that's a massive advantage. And so it's this very interesting question of where do we as a society feel comfortable on the risk reward spectrum for different things? Like, if my email gets hacked, is that so terrible relative to better healthcare through AI models sooner? And so that's kind of the trade off. So yeah, these are all things we'll have to work through from a societal perspective.
00:36:18 · Sarah Guo, Elad Gil
[00:36:18] S1: I think part of the challenge here is it's not a comfortable stance for the regulators to for many policymakers to hear from technologists that you have to see what happens with the technology versus control. [00:36:32] S0: We've always said that. It's always been a tech thing. It's always been throughout history, hey, of course, this technology could be used in negative ways. Right? Every technology has both positive and negative applications. Biotech, you could create a virus, but you can cure cancer. Nuclear, you could have free, cheap, abundant energy. You can also create weapons. And if you actually look at it, you know, 70% of France is still nuclear in terms of its power generation. Right? 70%. Where are all the accidents? And where are all the kerfuffles? You know, nothing. Nothing's happened. US is 18, and we haven't built a reactor in forty years. Japan is 25%. Very safe, very abundant, but we had a safety lobby in the seventies basically kill abundant clean energy for us. Right? [00:37:19] S1: Well, we're making them now. We just need to make a lot of them.