"The Cognitive Revolution"
01:05:17 · Nathan Labenz
[01:05:17] S0: So do you not expect to see this drop in worker? Because, I mean, it does strike me that there's, like, several data points that I see pointing to big tech takes all. A friend of mine coined the term the big tech singularity. And I think that is basically my mental model of what's gonna happen. Not necessarily, of course, like, that they'll own every customer relationship or whatever. You know, when you... With Google and Facebook just on the ad platform, of course, they had, like, all these, you know, sort of local agencies and sellers and people, you know, kind of translating the platform value prop to the local business. But talk about a business that's had a lot of margin compression, you know, those facilitators of, oh, I can do Facebook ads for you, mister local business owner, that's been a really tough spot to be in. And, you know, in medical, for example, we've got, like, multiple studies that have shown that the AIs can diagnose better than the doctor and can even like prescribe better than general practitioners at least these days. There's been some that have shown that like the hybrid, you know, there's always this like refuge that people want to take and well, it'll be the doctor and the AI that'll work together, but there's been some suggestive evidence at least that like the AI is actually performing the best, then comes the hybrid, and then the doctor alone is worse. I just also saw a data point from Harvey the other day where they put out a a stack ranked leaderboard of... On their own, like, big law bench... Benchmark that their own fine tuned model has kind of fallen behind, like, eight other foundation models that just seem to be winning on the bitter lesson and generally, like, scale continuing to pay off. There is still this issue of like the drop in knowledge worker doesn't quite exist because it's hard for them to absorb all the context, but that to me seems like something that probably gets solved. I guess I wonder like, do you think that just never gets solved? Or if it if it does get solved, how do we not end up in a situation where it's like, okay. Now we're just dropping in these AI knowledge workers into this environment. And, you know, again, you sort of have a... Now you have a very literal complement versus substitute dynamic going on.
01:07:28 · Marc Bhargava
[01:07:28] S1: Yeah. I think for us, you know, it'll be a lot of individuals will manage teams of agents. And so then you can say, is that replacing, you know, the the folks they used to manage? Not necessarily. Like, I do think that the overall economic growth and GDP output can grow pretty significantly. And so we'll kind of have this land of abundance where people are still doing jobs but with teams of agents below them, but there are way more jobs to be do... Done because it's such a larger global economy. And I do think that pretty much every technology shift we've seen has begged the question of isn't this going to mean less jobs? And it has meant less certain jobs, but the overall economic output has grown. And with that, there have been kind of newer jobs and different opportunities as well. So it is very hard to predict and lay out exactly, like, what's the overall economic growth? You know, what does that mean in terms of new jobs? Which jobs are lost? Which jobs are gained? I think we absolutely have to be mindful of that. But at least as far as we're seeing in the cases of hybrid services, software, AI enabled, you know, the strategy we're doing is not around really replacing jobs. It's freeing people up to do other tasks. The number of tasks that can be automated certainly are growing more and more, but then there's other opportunities, especially like client to client services and lots of businesses. Need to have a relationship. Even the doctor example or the nursing example, you know, in nursing, we incubated a company called Hippocratic, which is an AI native nurse that we work with a lot of healthcare systems to get proprietary data to be able to help build this company with the founder and it's part of our creation strategy. There could be 10 times more nurses in this country than there are. Right now we don't do preventative medicine calls. We don't follow-up after surgery post six months or nine months. There just could be a lot more nurses and there's an absolute shortage. So many of these industries that we're going after, there's a shortage of people. We need to give them the tools to match that shortage, and I think a lot of that will be AI enabled agents, for example, working under them. And so that's the reality of the view we see on the ground today.
01:09:29 · Marc Bhargava
Can we debate if, you know, robotics is certainly getting better and enable robotics is getting better? Are we gonna eventually go to this other world, etcetera, etcetera? I mean, that's a very hard question to ask, and there's all kinds of technology and automation improvements. I would just say, me personally and General Catalyst, we are very focused more on what are the opportunities in front of us today. And we have been really mindful of the companies we back. We're a large investor in Anthropic. We think they do an excellent job of thinking about the risks around AI and AI safety. And so, you know, responsible innovation, AI safety, those are really key to our mantras and the companies we're investing in. And we think like every other technology, as we adopt this, there will be challenges. It's the mindset you bring to those challenges.
01:10:16 · Nathan Labenz
[01:10:16] S0: Yeah. I sort of have a vision of that classic Simpsons episode where Homer's just, like, hitting the enter button at every prompt as the nuclear power plant birth... Bill... Boots up until such time as he finally decides to put the the dippy bird in to be hitting the button, and then he kinda just leaves. The plant, I think, does end up having a meltdown as a result of that. But this sort of managing agent future, I'm a little bit like, you know, we... We're talking the morning after the Grok four presentation. Right. Mhmm. And I don't know. It feels like it's coming at us really fast. I mean, I'm like, I want everything you're saying to be true. I... And I genuinely believe that the consumer surplus is gonna be amazing. Just the quality of service, the access to expertise, the democratization of that, I think is all, you know, just super exciting upside. But then I see Elon saying things like, new science next year. And I'm like, I don't necessarily think I can count this guy out because for one thing, you know, they keep climbing these... You know, the... There's no benchmark seems to be, you know, immune to their ability to climb the hill. And as they make this transition from other training signals to just, like, learning from reality itself, you know, and they start to equip the models with, like, the same high powered simulation and other tools that their best engineers at Tesla and SpaceX and Neuralink are all using, and it starts to actually compete with them to, you know, redesign a part, you know, or, like, find a find an efficiency or, you know, can we eliminate this part? If the... If those systems can start to do that in the next year, it seems like we are in for a really choppy ride even if the, you know, even if the consumer surplus story, you know, is is totally true, which I I do think it it is. Is there a ratio of, like, how much you spend on AI to to how much you save on labor that you... I usually tell people expect 10 to one. But do you have a rule of thumb for, like, if you can take some task and automate it, like, what's the savings? And of course, that could be. You could do 10 times as much at best. But what is that ratio?
01:12:32 · Marc Bhargava, Nathan Labenz
[01:12:32] S1: Yeah. We're not really focused on the savings, to be honest. So we're focused on grinding up. No. If you [01:12:37] S0: flip it and say, how much more can you do with the same inputs? What Yeah. Average. [01:12:40] S1: There we there we have an objective. I think ideally in a three year period, we would like folks to be with the 20% cost increase, be able to double your revenue. So that would be like a broad target. But in three years, if we come in, we spend 20% more than you spend today to make sure you have the right software, the right engineers, the right AI tools, increase the cost 20%, can we increase the revenue a 100% in a three year period? And if we can underwrite, yes, we think that is a plausible case, then we think buying that company could be a good investment. But we are not looking at AI as a cost saving even though it of course can be that. That kind of limits your upside. We're looking at it much more how do we grow and have venture like returns and fast growth and scale by AI enabling our workforce to take on more revenue. So that's... So maybe our mindset is a little
01:13:28 · Nathan Labenz
[01:13:28] S0: bit different on that metric specifically. Is there anything that big tech could do that you are afraid of? I mean, one that I always point to is, and they swear they'll never do it right up until maybe they do it, is not allowing... You know, basically, using their best models for their own products first. Right? Like, so far, we've had this sort of generally even playing field of ChatGPT as a model and the API gets it roughly the same time, maybe even a little before, whatever, but it's, like, pretty much parity. But you can imagine a world where Claude five and Grok five and GPT five are all proprietary products only for some significant period of time, if not indefinitely. And that could potentially really shift the power. Now from a consumer surplus side, like, they probably still can only charge me so much a month because I've got four or five of those options. Of course. Yeah. How do I... How does that play into, like, the app layer? It seems like it could be a real problem for the app layer.