YouSaid · the spoken record

Eiso Kant

lines on the record: 73
first: 2024-10-07
most recent: 2024-10-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Realized that I'm not calm or at peace when I'm not working on the hardest possible problem that lends to what I care about in the world. My brain's never going to turn off. I'm always going to wake up at four in the morning. It's always going to be this constant going over and over of like what you care about. And when I've done that in the past for things that weren't the hardest possible, let me say the most ambitious possible thing in terms of like what mattered in the world. The thing that mattered the most, I just didn't feel at ease. And now probably never worked. I've always worked hard. I don't think I've ever worked as hard as I have at poolside. What's intense and it's stressful, I feel peace.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why do you do what you do? I think that says a lot about a person. And at the end of the day, in any race, in any ambitious endeavor, it's the people that make it happen. It's not the dollars in the account. Those are the resources and inputs that you need and it's the people. And so for me, the why is a really important question to ask people.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Surprised how I usually don't know what motivates you. And people ask about the business, they ask about the outcomes, they ask about the future you see. Very, very few people ask you about your why. And I think that's probably the most important question. When we talked about earlier about looking at those three companies, my first question to all of them, you know, and I have asked some of them, is the why when you...”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a race. If we stumble, we put our foot off the gas pedal, we lose. And I think in any race, there's 101 places you can stumble. We don't get the luxury of stumbling on the capabilities race or to go to market race. We have to be excellent in both. If we make a misstep on either of those, we can fall behind. And if we fall too much behind, we're no longer in the race and we don't matter.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. I was lucky. I went through it in my early 20s. I got a lot of stuff. And then I got rid of all of it. For me to sheer realization is that it's the journey with the people. The outcomes that we want to see in the world, they're part of the obsession. If you can see a future that looks like one that ends up being this incredible future, you want to build it. But that moment once you reach that, which will always be an ever-moving goal, is not the interesting moment. The interesting moment is every single day with the people. And I think for me, I just learned more and more over the years is that I love people and I love the people I work with, my team. I think in every single person there's something incredible. And if you cut all this stuff, you cuddle the money and you pick the hardest, biggest thing you could possibly, you know, focus your life on and then do it with amazing people. You get to have this incredible experience.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the person you love and your dog in a small space, and you've got your good internet connection and you do your work, all the other stuff doesn't matter, the watches, the cars, the houses, none of this stuff is ever going to be the things you think back on. It's the journey. And for me, a boat kind of allows for all of that. It keeps life simple. And it gets me, allows me to, you know, fully immerse myself in pool sight. And I have to admit, since I started this company, I've been home less than a month. And so it's been a lot of travel, but it's the journey that matters. It's not the material stuff.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think we have to put some context here. Several years ago, me and my better half and our golden retriever, we were living in a fancy apartment. We decided to get an old sailing boat to fix up together. We put this old sailing boat in the harbor. Ceiling was falling apart. Something we did together and we were passionate about and we loved being on the water. I loved being on open ocean in particular. At some point we were spending more evenings and nights on the boat where the ceiling was falling apart than the fancy apartment. And we looked at each other and we said, why do we still have the fancy apartment? Now, we got a slightly nicer boat after that and home became a sailboat. And I've gotten this question from friends. Never, I didn't even know how you know this, by the way. I've gotten a question from friends. From friends. For me, I think the same thing about living on a boat is exactly the same thing of wanting to move the world forward. And I think a part of it is the drive of freedom, right? The freedom of options, the freedom of what can adventure in the future hold. And then the simplicity of just being.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helps us to be able to take this special thing that we have, you know, humanity and spread it across the universe. And there is people who say this, and there's people who believe it and who understand how special this is and what it can mean. And Yuri's one of those people, but at the same time, he's been an incredible capitalist. He's been an investor that from what I can see from the outside that understood that huge technology waves were happening all over the world in different places. And it was a truly global investor. What he saw was happening in the US he would invest in India and he would invest in Indonesia and across Asia and all of these different places. And I think very few people from the investment landscape have taken strong conviction on what technology is going to bring in the next 10 years and then found a way to place bets all over the globe.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really like Yuri. I got to know him through several occasions over the last year, but I never got to understand him till I read his book. Most people don't realize that Yuri has a book or a manifesto. You can find it online for free. And earlier you hurt me reference to looking from one top of the mountain to the next. And that's actually a metaphor that I took from Yuri. And because I think what Yuri has stated and said is that the sheer importance of scientific progress, what he often refers to as humanity's story, right? We have this incredibly special thing on this tiny little blue marble in the universe that is so immensely large. And I think he really embodied the notion of we cannot let that flame die out to him and to Elon's credit, you know, sharing the fact that the world is that one of the ways of doing that is to become a space-faring civilization. His whole view is that progress that's happening towards AGI”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“World is finding a balance, and the balance that I'd like to see that the world is, and I think it's moving towards it, is to regulate the end user application of AI. Just like we've regulated the end user applications of any type of technology before. It's not the database that does harm how it's used. And so for me,”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Regulation that fundamentally halts progress for small companies. The reality of regulation in many cases is that it becomes an expensive bureaucratic overhead. And that harms the most young startups. It doesn't harm companies that have raised massive amounts of capital.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mark Zuck I think we all should give a lot of credit to Mark Zuckerberg in terms of having built an incredible company with a lot of conviction on what the future would look like when most people didn't agree with him. If you look at what he's done on AR and VR in the last decade, right, from buying Oculus to where it is today, when most of the world just wanted him to stop, that required an incredible ability to have conviction for a future that's going to massively change the world, to get to AGI requires an incredible conviction for a technology to change the world. He's one of the people who has done that. And someone very different than the people I have currently on our board.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the question is what could I have been able to do continuing on source mission? Because Source Mission was the mission we're talking about today with Poolsight. And back in 2016, there were very few people who believed it was ever possible for AI to write code. But no, I don't think there's really no regrets there. I wouldn't be sitting where I am today, and I don't think I would have become the person that allows me to go build poolside today. And frankly, I'm really grateful that that event did happen because it's how I met my co-founder. It's how I met Jason. He was the CTO at GitHub at the time. And it started this many-year conversation on what the progress in AI looks like and its applicability to software development.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was probably the dumbest financial decision of my life, considering it was an all stock offering GitHub sold to Microsoft, I think, less than a year later.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should be careful in terms of trying to know what's best for the world and how to think about massive geopolitical conflicts and things like that. And so what I have said in the past is that the best thing that we can do as the West is to keep making it as attractive as possible where talent from China, who we consider as a competitor on a very large scale, to come to our countries. The easier we make it for one of those four major ingredients in the capability race, and frankly, one of the most important ones to help us accelerate, I think is probably the most practical advice I can give.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, they're not. There's a couple of interesting things that might not be as obvious unless you're in our industry is the research that still gets published openly, that doesn't get help back, that is most interesting, is all coming out of China in vast spades and majority, something that wouldn't necessarily be obvious. But if you think about the game theory optimal thing to do because they're not on the forefront of the world scene of AI actually opening up some of that research is the game theory optional, optimal thing to do to be able to continue to attract talent. Because that's really what opening up your research does it attracts talent to you. I think China is at an incredible level of capabilities and in no way should be discarded or thought of as yours behind on AI or AGI progress. We're working on technologies that we can see of massive societal impact. I think it's really important to be good stewards of that technology and that progress. And I think part of that is acknowledging that what we know about is the technology. What we know about is our users, our customers.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if we take the battery analogy, I would actually think a little bit about BYD. Started as a battery company, they is the largest volume of electric cars sold in the world. And I do think there is a lot to be said about deep vertical integration. Look at poolside. We're building foundation models with a mission towards AGI right now in the world focused on bringing more and more capabilities of AI to software development, building a truly intent business. Because I agree with you that the value is not going to only accumulate at the model layer. It's going to accumulate all the way to the end user. And so in our point of view, the way that we kind of, I think, get to avoid what the future plays out in your hypothetical scenario is just by truly doing it end-to-end. But I still actually look at this thinking that there will be more value built on top of us in the future than what we can possibly unlock only ourselves.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economic value that's going to come from that will, of course, surpass the economic value that we have. I think the economic value is going to continue to surpass on the exponential that we're on. But what I don't agree with the companies that are being built today will not have a set of companies amongst them that will become the giants of the future that have helped enabled us.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. I think it was Mark Twain. I think that might be the mistake that we're possibly making looking at the past. And the reason that is because we're on the exponential in terms of technological progress. I think in 1996 with Netscape, if I'm getting the year right, there wasn't this amount of people and capital that understood what the future might look like in the next 10 years. And it took some time to get there. Now, I could be wrong about this. Another thing that could see as a possible avenue of why I tend to disagree is there's a big difference between what was required to be built in 1996 versus what's required to be built today. Bring it all the way back and try to steal man the opposite side of the argument is maybe it's exactly that and that the next couple of years are about these massive capabilities that we're moving the world closer towards AGI. And then when you look at the following five or ten years, it's true the huge”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A race, and so our view always has been the team that we build is a team that is deeply passionate to be in that race. And frankly, when you decide to join a race and you're upfront about it, you decide to try to become the gold medalist in swimming, that means that there are sacrifices that come with that. You don't get to have it all. And so that's something that we've been super open about with people from day zero. It's on our first intro call we talk about. Like, do you want to join a race? And frankly, I have found no shortage of people in Europe that want to do that. I think there's a stereotype about Europe, but the fact of the matter is the people who want to join races and do truly their life's work, they're built differently. And you can find them all over the world in every single country. You just got to do the work to find them.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a tweet, and if I recall correctly, it was from Aaron, Levi from Box early on in post-Chat GPT moment, and he wrote something along the lines of, if you feel like you're working extremely hard on reasonable hours as AI is now booming, you're probably right to do so because it's in these first years, and now I'm probably going beyond what the tweet said, but I think it's in these first years, it's where the table gets set. Who has earned the right to be in the race to AGI? The way that I've always looked at this is from a personal perspective, and so as my co-founder and so is Margarita, has put us in a place where we're going to look back on this moment 10 years from now, just like we would look back to the moment of mobile internet and realize that that was the moment where the table got set. And you do not want to look back on that moment and not have given it everything you've got because it's a race. And look, most startups are not racist. Most startups are against yourself. But AGI is...”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way to think about it is where has talent historically been even pre-Chat GPT moment and talent in AI? And who helped build that talent in the space? The number one company we have to give credit to is DeepMind. DeepMind built an incredible talent base. They built it out of London. Meta did some work in building a very incredible talent base, and it did it between London and Paris. But in terms of when you look at it from a numbers perspective and sheer size of people, Google separately and DeepMind as part of Google had made much larger investments. And then there's another talent pool that we often talk about publicly that is just absolutely extraordinary, which is Yundex. Yundex built an incredible company in Russia with some of the world's most capable researchers and engineers, many of which have since left Russia and have kind of become a diaspora all over Europe.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said, great, let's build up talent here on this continent in Europe as we will in the United States. And frankly, I'm very grateful that we did.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was striking for us that there was a huge part of that list that was not in the Bay Area. It was spread out across Europe and in Israel from the UK to Switzerland to Tel Aviv to Amsterdam, you know, Paris, like all of these different places. While we couldn't see a clear, deep talent concentration in one place, probably UK actually being the one with the largest talent concentration. We didn't realize that it was probably worth spending some time talking to people there. And so I went and had conversations and we realized one thing. We said there's incredibly capable people here who want to stay here geographically. They don't want to move to the Bay Area to join some of the other companies in the space, but they're not finding massively ambitious young companies that have huge visions to join. And so we saw that as an advantage to the things, the four things in that capabilities race, we need to build unfair advantages for every single one of those.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to set the records trait. We're an American company, and we've got incredible people from all the way from San Francisco to Israel. But a decision that we made early on, Jason and my co-friendly on building this company in the Bay Area. And we did the work in the first days of the company. And the work was let's make a list of everyone we think from both that we knew and also like externally, like, you know, on research papers and GitHub repos that we think potentially could be great for us. And the list ended up with about 3300 people. A lot of work done. 3,300 people that we saw ranged from having experience on distributed training to GPU optimizations to work on data to reinforcement learning experience with large language models. So, you know, the whole breadth of what it takes to build what we're building from a model perspective. In that list was a location column. And as you can expect, the number one represented geo in that was the Bay Area, not even United States, just purely the Bay Area. But what really...”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are use cases that are commoditizing very quickly. Speech recognition. Think is one of them image generation is one already where we're seeing more and more commoditization over time.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think it depends on the use case. There's lots of experimental use cases still. And there's use cases that are far past the experimental side. AI for software developers. I don't think anyone in the world anymore questions that software development moving forward is going to be for the foreseeable future, a developer-led AI assisted world and increasingly AI assisted world.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was in high school in 2008, my very first startup was a virtual digital currency. My views on crypto have changed a lot over the years. The notion of decentralization and what it can mean for the world is our incredible ideals. The problem I think that we've seen in crypto is a quote that I learned. It might have been my high school economics professor. And he said, bad money drives out good money. And if you think about this in environments when bad actors come in, it drives out the good actors because we want to be in environments with other good actors. And I think the promise of crypto started from great actors and found itself due to the incentives of the ability to make money very quickly in lots of distorted ways to bring a lot of bad actors to it. The bad actors have driven out a lot of the good actors over time. There are still true amazing idealists in that space. Now, the thing in AI is that we don't have that. We have a set of people.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That shouldn't have the right to exist. Everything is against them. And I think Elon has done that not once. He's done it multiple times. And it brings me to another quote that I heard on an interview from him or about him was Peter Thiel. And Peter Thiel said, when we all worked with Elon, we thought he was crazy. We would take so much risk. And then he went and started, you know, Tesla and SpaceX, and we thought he was even crazier. And if one of those two companies would have worked out, we would have said he gotten lucky. But both of those companies worked out and beyond and to extremes. So there's something Elon understands about risk that the rest of us don't. And for me, that's the second quote that's been on my mind most of this year.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I think about a lot, to be very honest. And you're getting me even with it. It's probably one of the only things you could have said that would have got me a bit emotional because I think about it a lot. I saw it many years ago. And I think I understand what he means very well. I was earlier today with a founder. I really respect. And we were funny off talking a little bit about this is that building what we're building, it's not a choice, it's an obsession. And you bring everything you've got to it. We were talking about, hey, how do you deal with waking up at 3 in the morning and your mind doesn't stop racing? Going back and forth and then sharing each of our techniques and probably going back home tonight and trying them. I think Elon is one of the most impressive examples of someone who has done this for such a prolonged amount of time at moments in time when the entire world refused to align around his view. I think there's companies in the world that get built because they were at the right moment at the right time and there's companies in the world that get built.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Sam and OpenAI have understood the importance of compute and have understood the importance of data. What I imagine that $6.6 billion is going towards is exactly those two things, where from the outside, I think it is tricky to be SAM today. I think it's tricky to be Sam today because general purpose models that aim to be everything for everyone is an incredibly competitive market and you find yourself with incredible pressures from all sides. You're building a platform and a consumer product in exactly the same time. And more so than that, you're building a consumer product that from the outside is seeming to be for everyone. And I think that's a really hard thing to do.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forward, and so while I can see strengths in all three of those, it would really be a day with the leadership team of each to determine where I would put my own money”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is an unfair question, but it's a good question. I would love to spend a day with the current leadership team of every single one of these and then make a decision. They each have inherent advantages to them. XAI has understood that computered and built an incredible team there and did what no one really had done at that speed. They built a hundred thousand GPU, 332K interconnected clusters in Tennessee in the span of months. XAI showed up with Elon's strength, the ability to build physical infrastructure incredibly fast in the world. OpenAI had the incredible chat GPT moment and has built this incredible business around both ChatGPT and the usage of their APIs. And it's clearly ahead in revenue as others, like as publicly stated. And then I think Anthropic has incredible, thoughtful researchers in a very rigorous approach in what they do, a very rigorous scientific approach in terms of moving things.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I believe they're in Europe, mistraw. And I'm hard-pressed to think of more companies. I mean, XAI is very unlikely to be acquired, but they're a very capable player in this space. And look, and I focus, of course, on work in large language models and work towards AGI. So I think there's very few companies that today are sufficiently far along and that are still left.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was deliberate from us because I think right now there's a future we see ahead of us for the world. And right now we see a path towards that future that we can do as a standalone company. And we have to acknowledge the fact that we're all in the same race. And so to me, you can make strategic decisions along the way where you decide to say, hey, we're partnering up together in one way or another, like you refer an equity relationships. It wasn't something that we had to do at this point. And it's something that, frankly, we very consciously decided not to do right now. There is one corporate that became part of our round, and that was very deliberate. It was NVIDIA. And it's because we collaborate really closely with them. I think that the nature of large technology companies choosing to invest in frontier AI companies is frankly the game theory optimal thing for them to do.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at our capital raise, our last $500 million round, you'll see that there's none of the big hyperscalers, Google, Microsoft, Amazon were part of the round.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we come back to the ingredients of the capabilities race, compute, talent, data, proprietary applied research, what we are going to find is that for compute, dollars have a direct one-on-one effect. But when we look at data, when we look at proprietary applied research and we look at talent, it is not as straightforward as dollars in magic and success out on the other end of it. I think we've had lots of examples in technology history already where we have seen these giants that seemed unbeatable, IBM in the early days of the personal computer. And so if we live in a world where we could perfectly translate dollars to successful outcomes, whoever can put more there is going to win in the race towards AGI, dollars are critical for compute. And remember, there's still time constraints. There's real world physical constraints of how large we can make these compute clusters for training.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“GPT 5 water won't deliver isn't a question we're going to look back on in a decade from now. In a decade from now, we're going to look back to this moment, and it's similar, I think, how we look back to the early days of the computer, the early days of the internet, the early days of Google and others, and realize that we didn't fully internalize yet how much the world is going to unlock in value and abundance. We wrote this blog post when the fundraising announcement came out. We said, look, probably in this century, there's three mountains that humanity is going to climb, AGI is one of the mountains. The other is energy and the other is space. And so I think as we're going to keep progressing, we're going to keep looking at the next mountain. And from the top of that mountain, we look back. We're going to realize the ones before were exponentially smaller”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way we think about this, and I think the way to think about it is that these chips, when they come two times more efficient, the operations we're doing on them is still the same. It's matrix multiplications and additions and such. It's math that we're doing on these chips. The Blackwell generation, for us from a training perspective, doesn't unlock anything new. It just means that we have to, we can do more with a certain set of chips. My H200s become less valuable in the world, but it does not necessarily mean I have to go upgrade to the next generation.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to say that I was quite happy Blackwell was delayed Because I'm training on H200s, and so the compute that I brought online at the end of August, these 10,000 H200s, mean that the longer the next generation chips is delayed, it helps me in a competitive nature in the world. But also there's a lot of marketing around the next generation of chips. And again, we have to separate training and inference. Pretty much what we've seen consistently with every two-year generation of training from Nvidia is about a 2x performance increase. But training is about 2x every two years. On inference though, I think there's a lot of hope on Blackwell because it looks like for inference Blackwell might potentially unlock a much, much larger gain.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now we have some other companies in this space, AMD, right? Competitor NVIDIA doesn't have their own cloud, is reliant on being in this competitive nature from a price perspective with NVIDIA. And so their ramp up is entirely determined by the demand of the world wanting to use their chips. The demand of the world for AI, for a Google and an Amazon with their own silicon is not the demand for chips. It's the demand for AI. The way I look at this is that we're going to be in a world where those three and possibly new entrants or possibly AMD may be catching up, but I think really those three and Microsoft with their own Silicon one day are going to be the driving force in this industry.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dynamic that exists in the world today. We all owe a depth of gratitude in NVIDIA. When I started in this space in 2016, we were stacking 1080 TI chips in racks of servers at our office. And Nvidia already back then understood that AI was going to be world changing. And no other company, the exception of maybe Google, had that deep of a realization. But Nvidia had massive conviction on this and continued to double down here. And it has made more and more incredible hardware. The company that fast followed on that was Google. That's why we're on the fifth generation of TPUs. And the company that fast followed on that was Amazon. The reason I mentioned those three specifically is that they are all building extremely large volume of chips and constantly iterating on faster and better and better generations of chips for training and for inference. Just from sheer volume of what they're producing in the fabs versus what they're bringing online to end users.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's a good question. When we're scaling up the size of these models and we're training them on more and more data and we're using more and more compute for it at every single step that we're taking in the learning, every set of samples of data that we show the model, we need them to communicate with each other and share what they've learned across the optimization landscape. And so this means that if I would have two data centers that sit far away from each other, the amount of information that they have to share with each other, all of the different servers, and we're talking here thousands and tens of thousands soon of servers, would make it so slow that it wouldn't be economically viable to train these models. Once I'm running a model, I'm using a lot less servers to run it. So think of it as having lots and lots of copies of the model during training over lots and lots of machines. So at every time they see data to learn, they need to communicate with each other to continue to improve in their learning.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're in a world today where the amount of data centers that can hold and power and have enough energy to power increasingly magnitude order largest of clusters is a very small number. I think he's absolutely right in this sense. Now, you know, the data centers from two years ago versus the data centers in terms of size and power requirement that we're going to see in the next two years look radically different, not just because the scale of number of servers and nodes that were interconnecting. This is the difference between inference, right? For inference, we don't need all of the machines to be connected to each other in the same place. For training, we need them all to be connected to each other in the same room, in the same place. And so that massively changes what a data center looks like.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same thing. They're not the same thing. Because if you look at these models as investments that we're making to get intelligence out on the other end that needs to be economically valuable to end users, with lots of layers and applications and things in between, the model, the creation of models is CAPEX. The operating of them, the inference, the running of them is OPEX. But the OPEX to run them requires extremely large scale physical footprint in the world. Very simple. If we would spend a hundred dollars making a model and it will ever return two or three dollars in terms of value to the world, it makes no sense, right? The world will punish it. It won't exist. The huge scale out that has to happen in the world for AI to become something that can tackle all of our world's problems and can feed in all of our software to our daily lives requires huge footprint to run these models. It requires massive inference. And that means it requires data centers all over the world close to end.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we need to separate spend from getting the world's most possible capable AI, closing this gap, getting to AGI, closing the gap between human and intelligence.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to become a hyperscaler that is able to put data centers all over the world with GPUs in it that are going to allow you to serve these models to everyone, an infrastructure player, that's probably it. And that's probably just the starting point, right? If we look at the massive capex investments that all of the cloud companies are doing, they're far above $100 billion when you look at them over the course of a couple of years. Now in the race towards more and more capable AI, closing that gap between human intelligence and machine intelligence, I think we are all pushing the frontier more and more possible. And we're seeing how that gap closes as we're scaling up our models and scaling up our data. I don't think anyone has a definite answer of how many dollars is it going to take from here to there. If we knew that, we knew the outcomes. We're all on the frontier of what's possible right now.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Impact us on compute in 12 or 18 months from now. It's very rare to be at early stage companies where you have to make decisions right now that impact you on physical infrastructure a year and a year and a half later.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think again, it depends on how much cash and how much compute. About a year and a half ago, when we started as a company, there was a true imbalance between supply and demand in the world that even as frontier AI company starting, everyone wants you to win NVIDIA's incentivize, the hyperscalers. Everyone is incentivized actually to make early stage companies succeed with compute. It's a lot easier when you're in early stage AI company to get compute than it is when you're an enterprise because they understand this is where the future is heading towards. But even then, there was a real mismatch between demand and supply and we had to do an incredible amount of work of understanding the market, building relationships and having plan A to Z to get there. In the last six months, the world has still a huge supply shortage and we can see this if you're an early stage startup, there's lots of paths for you. If your frontier AI company, you need to make decisions about who do you partner with, who do you work with, how much do you do yourself? You need to, I'm making decisions today that will”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A very good question. There are real physical real world constraints behind this. We've seen crazy numbers thrown out in our industry of compute cluster sizes and things like that, but the world actually still needs time to catch up. But the real ability to do so. Today, interconnecting more than 32,000 GPUs is extremely challenging. We're starting to be able to possibly interconnect 100,000. But right now a million GPU cluster, a 10 million GPU cluster for training of models has both true algorithmic things that we have to overcome to be able to do this and also has actual like physical limitations still in the world. So we're not living in a world right now where like unlimited money can buy you unlimited advantages. It's why we get to exist with 10,000 GPUs.”
2024-10-07 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI | Will Scaling Laws Continue: Is Access to Compute Everything | Will Nvidia Continue To Dominate | The Biggest Bottlenecks in the Race for AGI with Eiso Kant, CTO @ Poolside · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source