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Alex Wang

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2024-06-12
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2024-06-12
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  1. “There's clear benefits to being a public company, for sure, but I think Stripe is an incredible company in that they can be incredibly profitable and they can accomplish all their core financial goals without needing to go public.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Hopefully doing something very similar to what we're doing now, which is continuing to be the data foundry for AI and serve the data pillar for AI progress.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I still think it's a toss up, actually. U.S. elections are so strange to think about because it always gets decided by the swing states. Frankly, I don't trust anyone on the coasts to have any fine-grained understanding of how the swing states will play out. I have no idea. I don't think anybody should listen to anybody who lives on the coast to understand what's going to happen. It always boils down to the swing states.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Went through this huge op, this big down, and maybe it's sort of like on the upswing again. I think this is one of the big concerns I have about generative AI, which is I hope not, but the same thing might happen again, which is that we have these really big promises that are starting to get made about the technology that get divorced from technical reality. And then that creates the sort of gap that is bound to cause a hangover.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I'm quite excited, but I think there's also reasons to be cautious. In autonomous vehicles, one of the things that happened in the autonomous vehicle craze, there were a lot of promises that were being made that were divorced from the technical reality. And so a lot of the prominent autonomous vehicle companies, a lot of the prominent organizations were making bolder and bolder promises to be able to raise money. And those were, at first, they weren't super divorced, but over time they became more and more divorced from the technical realities. And that resulted in this very painful trough, where it's sort of the promises weren't met, and so it felt like the entire industry was falling apart. And actually, at the end of the day, now we have way more driving around San Francisco, perfectly proper L4 autonomous vehicles driving around. Tesla autopilot has gone really good. If we had more measured promises along the way, I think now we would feel amazing about autonomous vehicles, whereas instead we”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “That's an interesting one. The interesting one is how my perspective on AI has changed in the successive eras. And I mention this because I saw the company in 2016, the first three years of the company were just full focus on autonomous driving and autonomous vehicles. And then in 2019, we actually started working on generic AI. We started working with OpenAI on GPT2. And so we are one of the few AI companies that I think has seen multiple eras of the technology and has seen the sort of the first boom and bus cycle with autonomous vehicles. I think it's an interesting one, which is like, what's the same in these success areas and what's different? That's an interesting question.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “This is a great question. You know, I think obviously, I don't think this is practical, but I do think Satya Nadella has been one of the most brilliant business strategists of the modern era, what he has accomplished at Microsoft is just staggering. And I think any board would be very lucky to have him.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yes I think it's actually everything about this hypergrowth stuff that we've been talking about. And it's really around divorcing team hypergrowth from company hypergrowth and extra investing into quality and excellence. What's the big thing?”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, yeah. But then if you look at core technical development at OpenAI, a lot of that is still driven by people who have been at OpenAI since before they became the hottest company ever. You know, another company that I think experiences or went through this is Airbnb. Brian Chesky, right? And I think that he's talked about this publicly after the pandemic, he all of a sudden realized like, hey, he had to kind of like rebuild the entire company. And he massively shrunk the team. He invested a lot more into talent density. And then he built the team to remain small. And I think that they're even now the most or one of the most profitable companies per head in all of tech. And that's because of this sort of this realization that he had that he didn't need to keep growing that team to see the financial gains or the financial output.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Difficult and it's much more about how do you develop an ecosystem of talent that is very self preserving, keeps a very high bar and always seeks out and searches for the best people and then independent of whether the company's hot or not hot because you will have to your point you'll have moments where you're hot moments where you're not hot moments where hot not hot and you need that talent ecosystem to be self-preserving independent of that to drive the best out”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “This is a fascinating thing, actually. I actually asked Patrick Carlson this question as well. And Stripe obviously is an incredible company that has, for a lot of their lifetime, I think has been one of the iconic Silicon Valley companies. And I asked him whether or not he thought that the fact that they were such an iconic company was beneficial in all the hiring they did. And he made an interesting point, which was that the best people they hired, he thinks would have been people who would have joined whether or not they were the hottest company in Silicon Valley. It was the sort of like off the beaten path people who were actually the best hires they could have gotten. And a lot of the people who joined because they were the hottest company in Silicon Valley, for one reason or another, weren't necessarily the most valuable employees. And so there's this element where I think the common belief and the common narrative is like you want to be the hottest company so you can track the best talents, so you can hyper grow so you can then go keep growing. And I think that's often so, so difficult.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It was kind of subtle. It was something where you would hire all these people in and then you notice it like the next year or the next six or six months later. You would notice it slowly and that the organization, you know, there were challenges that the organization used to be able to deal with and solve that slowly just calcified and we weren't able to get around. And so you'll notice from the end of 22 where I said we were 700 people to now we're 800 people, team has mostly kept the same size. But the company, the revenue of the company has grown dramatically.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “The biggest one was actually in the same era of like 2020, 2021, was thinking that hypergrowth as a company meant that you had to hypergrow your team. In those few years, we did what a lot of tech companies did. We like doubled, tripled the team year on year in 2020. We were about 150 people by the end of 2022. We were over 700. It was this insane amount of hiring and this incredible amount of hypergrowth as a team. What I found out is when you hire that quickly, it is impossible to do what we've just been talking about, which is maintaining this high bar and maintaining this feeling of excellence within the team.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Maybe on average 25 to 30 percent, like a lot, like a lot. And I think usually it's due to, you know, maybe there's a new hiring manager who, you know, needs to get calibrated or it's like an edge case of various forms. But to me, the way I think about this is like I, as the founder of the company, I have seen everybody who's come in and I've seen who succeeds and who fails. I have as an algorithm almost like developed the most fine grained data set of understanding what it looks like for people to be successful at scale and what it looks like to have the Navy seals versus the Navy. And it's my job as a founder to help ensure that we as an organization are actually utilizing all this knowledge and utilizing all this learning that's been happening over the past eight years in the organization and carrying that forward.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I think the answer is yes. You know, what we say law internally is how do we hire the Navy SEALs, not the Navy, not there's anything wrong with the Navy, but how do you have a really small elite group where you're really hiring the cream of the crop? And this goes down to process. For us, at this point in the company, still, I approve every hire. I will either indirectly interview or look at the interview feedback and look at the understand every single person who we hire to ensure that we're keeping an exceptionally high bar. And that way, if there's...”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “If you hire people who we say give a shit internally, but who really, really care, you know, they really, really care about their work product. They really, really care about the quality of their work. They really, really, really care about the organization. They care about making sure that the company has an impact. They just really care. And what that means, how that manifests is they're willing to sweat every single detail. And if they get roadblocked or there's like something in their way, they'll spend they'll go the extra mile to make sure that they get through those things. That's how startups work. These small teams of people who each care ten times more than the average employee, 10 or 100 times more than the average employee inside a big company, you end up just solving so many more problems than the big company.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “We began working with the US military and the USDOD. This is obviously long before the current defense tech hypewave and long before all that, but it was driven by an intrinsic belief that we had that I had and we had as a company that it's important for the United States DOD to have access to incredible AI technology. That was like a fundamentally important thing for the future of the world. And in the years after that, by and large, the traditional media engine actually tore us down for supporting the US government and supporting the military versus taking a broader view that maybe this is a positive thing actually to support the US military. This almost goes to what I was saying about the dichotomy and treatment and testifying in Congress versus with the media. I testified before Congress about AI's use in the military. I would say the treatment I got there, I think, was a properly broad one. It was, hey,”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “We've had, I would say that like almost precisely we've had this story where we had an incredible rise up and an incredible come up. Maybe we initially became a unicorn back in 2019. And for the few years after that, it felt like smooth sailing. And then starting in about 2022, when it was, or the entire median narrative, let's say, was tearing down tech companies. Because, I mean, in some ways, it was very fair. Many, many tech companies received very high valuations. There was an incredible amount of excitement in tech, and then the markets all crashed. In starting in 2022 was when I noticed for us specifically the tone entirely shifted, where it was the media engine pointed itself towards, you know, pointing out all the missteps from companies like us or a lot of our peers versus trying to point to a balanced perspective. And there were even, you know, another example of this is, so starting about 2020.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I would argue no. I would argue we're in an era now where they shouldn't. They should think about what is an interesting point of view they can have? What is the most pure way to get that point of view across?”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “That's fascinating. I mean, it probably speaks to a deep human need. I think we as people, we have a lot of circuitry to understand individuals. We have this ability to understand individuals. It's very hard to understand what an organization means. There's no intuitive.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Think this is true. I think there's like so few companies that can open AI is one where like I think open AI is an entity has like a lot of meaning as a brand, but very.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, I think for us, we think a lot about how do we get the direct message out there and how do we develop to your point, like what are the purest ways that we can transmit and explain what we're doing? And this is a great example. You know, you'll ask me a question. I will answer exactly how I believe that I think, and this will go out to your listeners and your viewers. One of the purest forms of getting the message out there.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “It's pretty stark. You know, I feel like I received more fair treatment testifying in front of Congress than I have from various media outlets over the years. It feels like this totally ridiculous statement, but I think we're in this perverse state of a lot of traditional media where the system itself, you know, because of this sort of like very click-oriented approach versus a genuine educational approach, it almost has no way of being fully fair to the companies. And so I think the imperative is on the companies themselves to properly tell their story through direct channels and through podcasts and through avenues where their message won't be altered.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “At its core, the traditional press industry is not particularly conducive to great companies being built. And let me be more specific around that. A lot of traditional press is oriented around generating clicks. And so the traditional press engine will, it'll build you up and it'll generate clicks on the way up and it'll tear you down and generate clicks on the way down. This is in contrast to, I think, 20 VC and other direct outlets, so to speak, where founders and companies have a direct channel to get their message out and explain what they're working on.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yes, within maybe an asterisk, that there's some of these partnerships that I think it'll be interesting to see how they play out the OpenAI Microsoft partnership or the Anthropic Amazon partnership. One of the most interesting questions of this technology era is how do these partnerships actually end up playing out long term?”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I think at its core, what we've seen about the foundation model race is that it is incredibly expensive. And it is expensive to the level of, you know, these malls of gone from crossing hundreds of millions to a billion dollars to maybe multiple billions. I think in 10 years' time, maybe they'll cost tens or hundreds of billions. There's just not very many entities that have that much discretionary capital to invest into these AI models. So naturally what will happen over time is AI effort, the foundation model efforts will coalesce around nations or the large tech companies over time. Basically, you will see the most all these hyper-profitable business models, whether that's a nation state or one of the hyperscalers, those will be the only entities that could possibly subsidize or underwrite these massive AI programs. In the future, already it looks like a battle of giants, but at that point it's even more a battle of giants.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I think there's a bit of a dichotomy that must emerge. I think we need to think about the most cutting edge and the most advanced systems, those we will want to ensure are closed for geopolitical reasons, for military reasons, for whatever reasons. Like as we develop systems that are genuinely so, so powerful.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “The world, many of them for whom let's say China or Russia had AGI today in the United States didn't, I would imagine they would use that to conquer. That's a really scary outcome for the world writ large. And I think it's one that the Western world needs to spend a lot of our thought and effort towards preventing that outcome.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “It worries me a lot. You know, one of the elephant in the room topics, which I think is an AI community we rarely discuss, is that at its core, this AI technology has the potential to be one of the greatest military assets that humanity has ever seen. Let's say you had AGI and you have one country with AGI and another country without AGI, which one will win in a war? Well, probably the one with AGI is going to figure out all how to produce all the weapons or we'll figure out a brilliant military strategy or we'll be able to hack the other country systems. And it is potentially one of the greatest military assets the world's ever seen, potentially even more of a military asset than nukes. And so if you think about this, we're in a geopolitical environment that is increasingly tense. has been monitored increasing the past few decades. You're seeing these multiple wars being fought in the world and some of them without very clear paths to resolution. And there are totalitarian leaders right now.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Is incredibly good at taking very aggressive centralized action and centralized industrial policy to drive forward critical industries. And what we've seen even in the past few years or the past few decades, frankly, on solar, how the CCP has been able to make take industrial policy to the point of like being by and large the world's leader in solar. And then most recently EVs and how the CCP system and approach has been able to create very, very cheap EVs. You're seeing this pattern play out over and over again where the CCP approach to industrial policy is not the most innovative, but once an industry has been established and it's about turning the crank, they are better at turning the crank than any other economy in the world.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Two years ago there were probably more than two years behind when OpenAI first produced GPD4 in the lab, China were nowhere near that. But just even the past few months, there was a Chinese company zero one zero one dot AI that produced a model y large YI large that is one of the best models in the world. I think it's just behind, so it's behind GPT-40 and Gemini and Claude 3 Opus. And it's the next model right behind that in the leaderboards. So it's one of the best models in the world. So we've already seen them meaningfully catch up. They are like Chinese LLM and AI capabilities are, I would say right now pretty close to neck and neck with US capabilities. And I think if you plot the path ahead based on everything we've talked about with data, they have a clear shot at racing forward and racing ahead of us. It comes down to at its core the CCP's system”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Here is actually HIPAA in healthcare and all the PII and other limitations. Right now, HIPAA and PII and all the PII regulations will more or less prevent patient data from being used to train AI models. But I think we can agree as a civilization, as a human race, we really want to learn from all of the existing medical data on how do we cure human diseases going forward. And so we need to figure out how are we going to make it so that there's very clear anonymization provisions or there's a very clear and obvious way in which you can use existing patient data to improve future health outcomes.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “I think there's a few things. I think first there's large data sets that do not lend proprietary advantages to specific players that need to be sort of centralized and made accessible to whole industries. So simple examples, safety data in, let's say, aerospace, which is a hot topic, obviously. But safety data in aerospace should be collectively pooled for the purpose of advancing the entire industry forward. Or the data I mentioned before, or the example I mentioned before, fraud and compliance in financial services should be pulled together and should build forward capabilities. So I think there's like entire industrial sectors where there should be some degree of data pooling to just push forward the overall industry. And I think what you need is in a lot of consumer facing areas, you need to work through a lot of the existing restrictions to make sure that those don't prevent AI progress. So one great example.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “How do we think about ensuring that as countries we're not tying one hand behind our backs for future data production for these models? Do”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “It's a really important point. And I think that certainly what we've seen in the EU is a very restrictive approach to data. My personal belief, I don't think that more permissive regulations around data are at odds with being a liberal democracy, more sort of liberal data access provisions are in fact very compatible with being a liberal democracy. And I think that we as a society need to figure out what the right balance there is and how we sort of square the circle. But I think this is a very important question because it's almost like I think in the United States there's been a huge amount of effort and real regulatory effort in terms of how do we ensure we do not slow down chip production? How do we make sure that we can keep manufacturing huge amounts of chips and the U.S. won't be disadvantaged from that perspective? We need to take a similar lens to data. So how do we, from a policy standpoint, both in the US and in the UK, frankly,”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “The reason that Percy Pricing doesn't make sense going to the future is that at an enterprise today, certainly most of the productive work is done by their employees, done by people. But in a future where you imagine more and more of the work is done by AI agents or AI models, then Percy Pricing doesn't really make sense. As a provider of software, provider of solutions, you want to make sure that you're capturing the value”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Yeah, well, I think software engineering in general is going to change dramatically. A lot of what developers spend a lot of time on today, they will not need to spend time on going to the future as the models get better and better at coding. But there's certainly big parts of what they do which are irreplaceable. And over time, I think that the part in particular that's very, very valuable is this sort of like general process of going from what are my customer problems or what are the sort of like problems I need to solve and like translating those into engineering problems and scoped sort of like tickets almost that can be solved by an AI engineer.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Tools that are going to make this motion a lot more feasible. But I do think there's an element that this is the way the world is moving, which is now especially that the software production cost and software creation costs are going down so dramatically, we're going to end up moving towards a world where more and more of the software that enterprises consume are going to be customized and custom built and purpose-built for exactly their problems.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “It's intentionally provocative, right? But I think one thing that is true is I do think that enterprises and the world writ large are going to demand greater levels of customization. They're going to demand greater levels of personalization and stuff that is really purpose built for their business like a glove. The first tech company that ever did something in this direction was Palantir. You know, they got a bad rap for a long time because everyone thought the Palantir, oh, they're just a consulting company. But Palantir's point of view, which is provocative as well, was like, no, what we're going to do is we're going to go into enterprises. We're going to understand exactly what their problems are, and we're going to help them build the perfect application for them that's built on the Connects all their data and all that stuff. And if we can do that, then we're going to build something that's far more valuable for them than what any other software provider is going to be able to produce. And they did this, obviously, before Generative AI, before all these.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “They're going to have this constellation of all these different apps and point solutions and this sort of portal to that constellation of various software providers and this sort of like we're going to move from this current world of like smaller number of walled garden SaaS apps to this sort of much more decentralized universe.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I thought it was like a brilliant comparison, but he basically drew this comparison of software companies today to media companies pre-social media. The rough comparison was in the older days of media. You had all these incredible media companies. There were these high-end shops where there were like all these experts producing this very differentiated content. But then it got disrupted by social media and the internet broadly because all of a sudden you just had the content distribution costs came down dramatically. The world of media consumption turned into this like very broad constellation where you would consume whatever media was produced by anybody that was interesting to you and was sort of like much more on demand versus being the sort of walled garden of large media producers. And basically this comparison to that's what's about to happen to software, which is now the enterprises live with this walled garden of some small number of software providers. And what's going to happen now with Jenner VI and all these other trends is”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “And Saudi ARMCO. I mean, it's really NVIDIA is an incredible, incredible company. And that's below the model. And then above the model, you have all these apps and these services that are going to be built on top of it.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “There's these chapters around, oh, for Intel, first we thought that this is where the value capture is going to be. But then we realized it was going to be in this other part of the stack. And so we had to migrate to that part of the stack. And then we had to migrate again. And it's this incredible case study. You know, I remember reading that and I read it maybe a decade ago in a different era of tech. And I was like, this is weird. This doesn't feel very relevant. And then now in AI, you're seeing it once again where it's so new and so nascent where exactly where in the stack value will accrue feels like it's constantly moving. And I agree with you. I think that the models themselves, there's so much competition there. I don't know how much value accrues at literally the model itself, but everything above the model and everything below the model, I feel very confident there will be value accruing. So for the infrastructure, I mean, NVIDIA's the biggest company built on AI today. Like they're the third most valuable company in the world. NVIDIA is more valuable. You know, their market gap is higher than Meta and Google and Amazon.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “First of all, I think you're right. There's so much value to be generated from AI for sure, but then there's this natural question of where's the value capture going to be, right? You know, there's this fascinating thing. You know, if you go back and read high output management by Andy Grow.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “I think when we talk to these large enterprises and the leaders within these enterprises, they are very quickly realizing this fact that you stumbled upon, which is that”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Yeah, different labs need to have strategies to produce their unique data sets. Let's say entropic, for example, has focused a lot on enterprise use cases. And maybe they need to develop a data strategy that enables them to have a very differentiated access to new data to support those enterprise use cases. Or maybe OpenAI with ChatGPT needs to develop a unique data strategy that lets them leverage the fact that they have all these users and all this reach. The various labs are going to need to lean into where they're going to be able to get proprietary and differentiated data going to the future.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “There's two futures. One is that even data strategy becomes something that very quickly commoditizes and different labs sort of copy one another or they all end up converging to the same direction.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Primary plane of competition in the future versus just, okay, Jensen's giving me however many, hundreds of thousands of GPUs.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Yeah, exactly. And I think this is the start of this form of thinking of sort of data as a moat. There's the FT, there's Akkal Springer. These are the first indications of this. But in the future, these labs are going to be thinking a lot about, okay, was the data that I'm going to use to differentiate relative to my competitors and how am I going to produce that data? And what is the long-term durable advantage created by that? I actually expect that everything we've been talking around model commoditization, we're going to see companies start building data strategies that drive more differentiation in the market over time. I mean, another way to think about this is, you know, right now in San Francisco, researchers and the big CEOs brag about how many GPUs they have. The biggest indicator of how serious they are about AI is how many GPUs they have. But I think in the future, they're going to brag about what data they have access to, how much data they're producing, and what are their sort of unique rights to different data sources. And I think that's actually going to be the”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yeah, well, I actually think to your point, if you think about the competitive playing field of these different model providers against one another, there's three pillars, right? There's algorithms, compute, and data. And data, I think, is actually the primary pillar that you can imagine a real durable competitive advantage emerging. So if you think about where their moats in this LLM race or where their moats in this foundation model game, I think data is one of the few areas where you can produce a sustainable moat because the issue is algorithms, that's IP that at some point the rest of the industry will learn about, you know, you can have more compute than other people, but other people can just spend more money and buy that compute. And data is one of the few areas where you can actually produce a long, term sustainable competitive advantage.”

    2024-06-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scale's Alex Wang on Why Data Not Compute is the Bottleneck to Foundation Model Performance, Why AI is the Greatest Military Asset Ever, Is China Really Two Years Behind the US in AI and Why the CCPs Industrial Approach is Better than Anyone Else's · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source