The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
01:06:11 · Harry Stebbings, Thomas Sohmers
[01:06:11] S1: When we look at, like, the data economy that powers the larger models which you believe in, we see Merkur, we see Surge hitting 3,000,000,000 in revenue. How big do these companies become? Because Anthropic and OpenAI are 4 to $5,000,000,000,000 businesses. They... Feasible. It's wholly feasible, isn't it, that McCor and Serge are $200,000,000,000 businesses, which serve both Frontier Labs and some of the world's biggest enterprises be... Building their own models. [01:06:38] S0: I think my only skepticism there is on there being vertical integration by the Frontier Labs. I think the reason that hasn't happened is because Anthropic and OpenAI have better uses of their capital and mental power, etcetera, than doing all of the, you know, Scale AI, Mercor, etcetera work. But I I think that won't always exist. And let... Let's say that GPT seven or eight could be an effective replacement for Sam Altman in terms of being able to manage, you know, a a large business, why they wouldn't just have agents be taking over those tasks. [01:07:12] S1: Before we leave, I like to finish on a tone of optimism. What are you most excited about today that you think the world does not spend enough time on that we should spend time on?
01:07:21 · Thomas Sohmers
[01:07:21] S0: I'm very sympathetic to the problems that I think the the smarter set of the AI alignment, AI safety community are when it when it comes to thinking about how do you align incentives. Like, lot a of people just talk about AI alignment being a problem. I think there's... A a key part of that is human alignment. It's like how do we, society, you know, human race, align ourselves to have a good outcome that I think will be empowered by artificial intelligence. And so we discussed all... A bunch of the different problems that we're facing geopolitically and socially and how these different things are handled. And I think a lot of smart people are doing good work on the AI alignment problem and and thinking through how we solve that, but they may be gated in what can be done there if we don't get better human alignment on, be it regulatory frameworks and energy production, where we're going to put the data centers, etcetera, etcetera. And I I think framing it as this being a similar sort of technical problem that smart people can work and reason through will hopefully get more people thinking about it that way. And I think a core element that gets discounted by, I think, a lot of people in that sphere, there there are a lot of economic factors. And I I think it's the economic factors that actually will drive real decision making and and actions. And if we don't look at it from, you know, a rational, you know, self interested actors and and all these different things, you're just not gonna make progress.
01:08:50 · Harry Stebbings, Thomas Sohmers
[01:08:50] S1: Thomas, this has been the most varied discussion ever from education on, you know, unbelievable infrastructure evolution to Dario and Sam. You are a star. Thank you so much for joining me today. [01:09:01] S0: Thank you so much, Harry.
01:09:04 · Harry Stebbings
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01:11:24 · Harry Stebbings
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