The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:14:36 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin
[00:14:36] S0: because you let it out of the fucking bag. Like, that... Sorry to be blunt. [00:14:39] S1: Well, I don't know if you just did. You are. You you you were the best at it. You are. You are. Yes. It's it's like I hate the atom bomb metaphors because they're like Nazi metaphors. They're just so crude and simplistic, and it actually, in this case, feeds the ego of all involved. But it's a really good metaphor here, Harry, unfortunately, because you can say, if these folks are all the Oppenheimers and The US invented the bomb, there's no doubt that the Russians had the bomb by, like, four or five years later... Three or four years later, and in part because they stole our shit. They had spies in Los Alamos from The UK, let me remind you, Hans Fuchs, and then they stole our secrets and they built the bomb too. But, you know, what are you gonna do? They probably wouldn't have done [00:15:15] S2: their own. Elon's been clear on that for three years. He said he wished that AI hadn't happened. He said, but since it did, I'm going to do it anyway because it's too late. He he's he didn't just say this last week. He's been saying this for three years that it's gotten too strong. Before XAI even got anywhere, he was consistent. I don't want to be doing this, but it's already been done. It's too late. I I I don't think we should have this much progress.
00:15:15 · Jason Lemkin, Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[00:15:15] S2: their own. Elon's been clear on that for three years. He said he wished that AI hadn't happened. He said, but since it did, I'm going to do it anyway because it's too late. He he's he didn't just say this last week. He's been saying this for three years that it's gotten too strong. Before XAI even got anywhere, he was consistent. I don't want to be doing this, but it's already been done. It's too late. I I I don't think we should have this much progress. [00:15:34] S1: And in fairness to the CEO of Anthropic, some of the most hyperbolic stuff he's not saying, but you have the pacing letter that a bunch of scientists signed. There's a lot of hyperbole that's not coming from him, he's a little more nuanced than what he is worried about, where the only one that's really meaningful is this kinda losing control of it. Right? [00:15:56] S0: But I think this is where his prime messaging has come back to bite him on the ass. Because to Jason's point previously in episodes where he's so dogmatic about what it's gonna do to jobs and employment, Now when things do come out, it's tied to him, sometimes unfairly, just because he's had that stance because of his labeling before.
00:15:56 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:15:56] S0: But I think this is where his prime messaging has come back to bite him on the ass. Because to Jason's point previously in episodes where he's so dogmatic about what it's gonna do to jobs and employment, Now when things do come out, it's tied to him, sometimes unfairly, just because he's had that stance because of his labeling before. [00:16:13] S1: Yes. And to to Jason's point, we're doing a spot on. My god. Is this unpopular in the rest of the world? I mean, because, yeah, it turns out if you... I mean, you know, we're building a technology. It's going to definitely cause 20 to 30% white collar unemployment. And my VP of Safety, whom I haven't fired, has said on Twitter, there's a 10% chance it blows up the world. I wonder why we're not popular. Well, let me give you a few quick clues.
00:16:38 · Jason Lemkin
[00:16:38] S2: Can I just say what I thought the best thing I read on all of it was on Twitter anywhere? It was Jay Kreps, who was the founder of Confluent, acquired by IBM for, I don't know, 12,000,000,000, just stepped down. This is the best thing I thought was written on all of it. Said a lot of people have fake fake and stupid takes. It's a lot of marketing said here's here's the captain obvious point. Most positive use cases for AI have a corresponding dark version. If you're superhuman at coding, you're superhuman at hacking. If you're superhuman at structural engineering, you're likely superhuman at finding structural flaws to knock buildings down. If you're even superhuman at designing drugs, you're superhuman at designing novel undetectable poisons. If you cure viruses, you can create them. Some of these are not that bad. They're manageable. Others are scary. It is a fact. Like, if you don't get guardrails right, and there are no guardrails in open weights models for all intents and purposes, dark Dark versions can be created... Your AI will be just as good, all things legal, with the dark version as the light version. It's a fact. We need to solve these issues, but it is a fact. And it is not even... There's so many opinions and anthropomorphizing and temper centers, but the dark versions will escape into hugging face.
00:17:42 · Rory O'Driscoll, Harry Stebbings
[00:17:42] S1: I do agree with what you said, Jason. Absolutely right. When people invented books, when Gutenberg invented printed books, the Catholic church were pissed because they really liked to have a control in all knowledge, and they just didn't like information dissemination. Ditto the internet. There's a reason every totalitarian regime hates it. I think it's great framing. Every technology has a positive side and a negative side. We're going to do what we do every time. We're going to roll out the positive and find a way to manage the negatives. But in the interim, we're not gonna sell chips to China, which of course produce a Jensen response like you've never... The usual Jensen response. So on these implementation side, not realistic. [00:18:20] S0: Do we see ripple effects in... Across the infrastructure layer, in publics, in privates?
00:18:20 · Harry Stebbings, Rory O'Driscoll
[00:18:20] S0: Do we see ripple effects in... Across the infrastructure layer, in publics, in privates? [00:18:27] S1: There was a one day minor hit on kinda the semi stocks on that first day. Separately, pleasingly, CrowdStrike and all the cyber stocks jumped 10%. So it's actually interesting. I looked at Monday, and we're recording this on Tuesday. It'll appear on Thursday, which is a whole lifetime away in the world we live now. But the instant response was slight markdown on semis and the AI CapEx, but not a lot. So no discern... I mean, it's maybe... Which implied some level of slowdown. Significant markup on the cyber stocks because it looks like that's where the actual reality of the problem exists. And overall, I always look at World Cloud, which is the software index, versus SOX, which is a semiconductor index. And it was a great day for World Cloud relative to SOX. Software up, semi slightly down, but not big. I mean, loved... Saw a tweet. Market moves point 1% on news of 10% probability of extinction. In other words, capitalism took on board the risk and said, it'll be fine.