YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Seibert

lines on the record: 77
first: 2023-11-22
most recent: 2023-11-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Digits will be the new de facto accounting platform. We're really, really excited. We've built basically a completely object-oriented real-time AI-driven approach to finance to make it really intuitive for startup founders to understand their finances as the business happens, not three weeks late on a black and white PDF.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Keep in mind there's going to be some runaway climate change. I'm going to be off growing obscure wine grape varietals in a cold climate.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is where I go back to one of Bezos' letters, type one versus type 2 decisions. The vast majority are type two decisions, they're reversible. You can undo them. What I would say is uneth. It is way better for a startup to be moving in A direction than the absolutely perfect direction because you can keep refining that going forward. But if you pause on a decision and you're like, give me a week, what do you want the team to do? And this was one of the biggest challenges Twitter faced internally back in the day was just complete indecision from leadership.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“twenty four hour hypothesis When your team comes to you with a question, you need a decisive answer within 24 hours. If you're slower than that, you're not moving fast enough.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. It's like be really aware of the customer pulling you and like make sure you're going in their direction as fast as possible as a startup. Maybe if you're a giant Goliath, you should start paying attention to some competitors. But as a startup, the market is way larger than you could possibly capture this year. So like focus on your customers, I think a lot of product managers get too distracted watching the competition and they don't have a vision for their own product.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can you imagine being a math teacher back in the day with the advent of calculators? You would think your entire job is useless.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we like to be scared. We like to be terrified. So there's this concept in economics called the lump of labor fallacy. It was literally from the late 1800s. And you can look back. There's newspaper articles in the New York Times from the 30s being like, we are going to be replaced by robots within the next decade. And it's like, nope, that didn't happen. And it just marches forward every decade. There's a fear of the new technology coming in. People hated personal computers in the 70s because they thought it was going to take over and replace them. And so it's just this fallacy.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, so I would say actually AI won't replace many jobs, I think. It'll drive productivity, not replacement, and it'll be like other technologies that have come out. Like phones didn't replace people. Now you just use them and you can do business from wherever. I think AI will let you get a lot more done in a lot less time.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, well, this is for one day, so I would go be CEO of OpenAI just so I can see the roadmap, and then I'll know what to do from there.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly, and they haven't had the time to catch up and drive efficiency and technology and so on. The whole thing is unfair, yes”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, the impact is unfairly distributed and the cause is unfairly distributed. That's why it's basically a tragedy of the commons. And so economically, it's like, how do you motivate that on a global scale?”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't think you can't accept it. It's going to happen. And so the real question is, what are we doing about it? And which countries is it going to completely impact way more than others? So it'll be really challenging.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think we're too late. And like, I funded climate change films 15 years ago. It's still shocking to me that this is not like the singular top priority in any political campaign in the entire world.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh man, no, I don't have a good of an insight as you. I'd say looking at my portfolio, it's not even necessarily the most techie founders that are successful, but the most sort of customer obsessed and just like really deeply personally understand the market and really want to solve it and usually have some pattern in their background like their parents were in a sort of adjacent space or something where they've just felt this like personal identity come to bear on what they're doing. And I think that gives you an extra push, an extra drive, an extra grit to make it successful.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the problem. You're right. And that's probably the counterforce all of these big companies who raised huge rounds in 2021 have high salaries. If you switch, you'll get more equity but way less cash. And so that's probably keeping folks where they are.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And so it probably is safer than starting something new, but it's not safer than switching to an earlier stage sort of growing company where you're going to have real options and a real impact. I actually love sort of down markets because I think in the very hot markets, it's too easy to raise capital and you peel off all the sort of like fantastic second engineers or product managers or designers, whoever they might be, and they go get funding and start something and that actually blurs, it stretches the talent density across the entire ecosystem versus in down markets you can build higher talent density because it's harder to raise your own money.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is a great question because a lot of folks, you're right, are trapped in companies with high valuations where their options are likely underwater?”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think a lot of valuations will still crash from here dramatically. And there's probably going to be huge layoffs going into Q1, Q2 as well. What will be really interesting is the number of companies that raised and have sort of struggled through 2023, but now are down to six months or so of cash. I think next year could be very tough because they're not all going to be able to raise follow-on rounds.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. So I am biased obviously by the founder side, but I think it's very scenario dependent. So if the founder is still excited, the team is there, they have grit, like, I don't think you can ask for cash back. I think like you want to bet on the founder, like let's see where it goes. If the founder is clearly wavering, if there's performance concerns, if there's been a pattern of bad decisions, then maybe there's a clear scenario and case for it. But in general, I would biased towards supporting the founder.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and getting in very early at a very low valuation. That's another great lesson learned for folks, actually. So I had the opportunity to take some money off the table in a deal. So I got a 3x return.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so that is why on paper and in terms of cash returned, I'm actually in pretty good shape. But yeah, it's remarkable how the outliers outclass the rest.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lesson learned there, nothing. It's all about a founder's grit and mentality, and you can't back the early idea and think that that's going to be it.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, okay, so this is all true. This was 10 years ago. A college friend of mine was prototyping what was going to be a new teenage social network. And I invested 10K. I was like, the guy's smart. Let's see what happens. He eventually pivoted that into down to lunch, which did well for a bit and then failed, unfortunately. Then he pivoted that into crypto, but not the coins. He started and launched alchemy, which was like an Ethereum dev platform dev tool thing. And at the height of the Bitcoin boom, I exited on the secondary market for 200x.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is very key advice. Yes, totally agree. On the consumer side, I'd say real traction on enterprise software, okay, potentially more sustainable.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was seemed to be a very impressive founder, to me a very obvious market. I won't name their names, but I was like, hey, just like solid execution here should be a clear, good outcome. And there's just too many variables at play over the course of the startup journey. And you don't know everything. Like as an angel, you don't do that much due diligence. So it's hard to fully understand. And so my advice would be just like be very disciplined. It's like do a bunch of deals because you need a portfolio and put the same amount in every time an average it out.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, big lesson learned is no matter how great you think the company is, how great you think the market is, how great you think the founder is, it is still damn hard. The odds of success are very low and you can't get too cocky. So on two of them, actually two of my biggest failures, I was so convinced. I was like, this is a no-brainer, this is going to be a huge home run. I'm going to put in way more than I usually do. Usually I try to stay pretty disciplined on check size. Both of them went to zero. What can you do about it?”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is crazy. I mean, I understand why, but I don't understand why small time angel investors should be locked up for six months.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have actually. So I've done secondaries over the time, and that's actually been my most successful outcome so far was via secondary. It's like waiting for them to sell. I've unfortunately had the opposite happen where a couple of my early investments went on to IPO. And so we're extremely successful. But then during the six-month lockup window went almost to zero and I couldn't exit almost anything. I've actually had more success selling on the secondary market pre-IPO than I have had actually waiting the whole time.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a really tough position to be in. And I think you don't want to get there. Like, my advice has always been be really disciplined about each round and what you give away and terms and so on. If you're in one of these boats, I would look to like recap if you can, really focus on growth, trim expenses, length and runway. It's going to be big shoes to build into.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do not know, and I think a lot of them are basically holding at their 2021 valuation whenever the last round they raised was, and it's nowhere close to the reality. I do get data from the secondary markets, and so I can see with some of them, like where they're trading versus where their last preferred round was, it's a bloodbath. It's like down 80% for many of them. So I think it'll be really interesting.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I actually have some data for you. I'm more than happy to share this publicly. So, since 2014, IAVANGL invested in 97 startups. And I just did the count so far, 30 have failed outright, about a third. Another 19 are still at 1x, so basically haven't gone anywhere. And if you look at the overall portfolio, really, it's like 10 of them matter. But what's crazy to me is, again, 2014, nine years of data, still the vast majority of the gains are on paper and it depends how these 10 do on how successful the portfolio is.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is fun though is obviously it's a lot of experimentation, so all these companies are trying things out and seeing what works and what sticks. And so the industry is going to learn a ton over the next 12 to 18 months on like where it's appropriate to use AI and where it's sort of just a useless add-on.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They really are. And one of the funnier ones to me is Dropbox. Dropbox has a built-in AI, and I don't know. I mean, I'm sorry, Drew, but I just want Dropbox to store the files. So I think there is a bit of a sort of bandwagon ride-the hype wave aspect.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Google's by far the most vulnerable because, again, their business model is pretty binary, right? Search is all their revenue. And so if that gets damaged, they're in a huge problem. And they've been slow to react. They combined two different MLAI teams. They've just punted Gemini into Q1, which tells me it's not doing very well. So I would be nervous.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is super interesting. I would be very nervous about the OpenAI Azure Partnership, and of course Meta just made a big deal about partnering with Microsoft as well. So I think you're right. I would look to aggressively move into the space and acquire something to bolster AWS.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's step back for a moment because it's not entirely a joke. So Google Photos potentially one of the most strategic products ever launched because it allowed Google to collect the world's largest library of photos ever assembled. And that's how they were able to train their early vision models and so on.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You do, and this is usually sort of broadly captured in the terms of service, having access to your data to improve the product. And so we do not share any of that data externally. We train our own models internally on the data, but that does allow us to improve the product for you and make your accounting better.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is extremely challenging, and what's interesting is the counter reaction because you're seeing Reddit, Twitter, et cetera, shut off APIs, put in more strict rate limits, et cetera, et cetera. And so the whole world is starting to lock down data, which was counter to the trends over the past 20 years. When everything was being pushed more and more open and API accessible and so on. And so I think there's been a clear realization that the data is valuable. And that's one of the things we've been really focused on at digits is we have a proprietary data set of 100 million financial transactions. And that's what we can train on and make sure our finance and bookkeeping AIs know what they're doing. So I do think the data is really, really important.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this may be just me, but I very much see AI as a tool, not a product. And so it's a technology. It's like your database. It's like Memcash back in the day. And so because of that, I don't think it'll change how people price in specific industries. Like if your market does Percy pricing, that'll probably stay. If your business and product does consumption pricing, that'll probably stay. And you'll have to work that into how you use the AI. I think it'll be commoditized and seen as technology within a couple years.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What has been interesting to see is it's very clear the top models are memory bound as well as CPU bound, so you can't just make the CPUs, the GPUs, faster. You need to increase memory bandwidth on par with that. And OpenAI actually shared a tech talk a few weeks ago that talks about how they were tuning their data centers like this. So it's going to be new challenges for NVIDIA, for ARM, for these chip companies to really unpack. I would bet on the pace of technology. It will get a lot faster and a lot cheaper, very, very fast.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They need to go all in on it. I don't think they have a choice. I agree with you. I think it's existential for them. Because if AI replaces search, their golden goose has been killed. It is way more effective to kill your own golden goose than let and watch someone else do it. And again, I mean, going back to Apple, it reminds me of the iPod Nano. Apple killed their most popular product, actively killed it because they knew there was better tech coming. And I think Google needs to get bold and do the same”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll be faster for a couple reasons. So if you look back at mobile, so the iPhone came out in 2007, they opened up the App Store in 2009. By 2011 to 2012, a lot of people were using and building apps. And then enterprise adoption even lagged from there. So call it five to seven years. With AI, there's no new hardware to buy. So you don't need this huge purchase price, right? Locking out enterprises and people all around the world. You can just instantly benefit from it online. And there's no new UX pattern to get familiar with, right? You don't need to be used to carrying something around in your pocket, looking at a little screen, squinting at reading things. There are chatbots. It's a very fluid interface. It does things for you. That makes sense. And so I actually think the adoption curve here will be radically faster and industries will be disrupted probably way quicker than prior tech waves just because the barriers are so low.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you're probably right in that it's a large market. To me, it's not a very interesting market. Like, yes, there'll be a lot of consulting to help enterprises adopt AI, and the products won't be that great, and they won't really make that much of a difference. What I see when you come to platform shifts is, again, this opportunity for sort of a net new approach to really take over fast. And what gets me excited is like, let's build real workflow automation for real people in massive industries that are outdated, like, for example, accounting. Like, are you going to trust into it to adopt this and totally disrupt their own product lines? Or do you think a new upstart is going to come in and do it better? And that's where I'm excited to say in like poor energy into it.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, two different thoughts here. This is a really good question. So they had the exact same reaction to cloud. If you go back 10 years, they were like, I would never put stuff on AWS or Google Cloud or Azure or whatever. That's ridiculous. Why would I share my data with those companies? Right. Now it's just not only do they all do it, but it's actually better because those companies core competency is running data centers. Most enterprises have no idea how to operate a data center. I think this will go in the same direction. You'll have very clear guidelines around how the companies use the data for model training and it's”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, yeah, so Apple, of course, is super focused on privacy. They don't want your data to leave the device. The only way to do that with AI is if you can fit a machine learning model on the device and keep all the data there. I bet Apple can and will. And so if you project forward five years, if they get to the point where they can run a sufficiently large LLM on your iPhone, then OpenAI is out of the picture. You don't even need to hit their servers. It's just on your phone.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like OpenAI is going to need to solve within five years in order to scale, that's not a great investment, and that's not a good use of your time as a founder.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably more startups. The one thing I would say is I view OpenAI probably evolving more into an infrastructure company like AWS. They will host these models. They'll allow you to fine-tune them. They'll give you all these base capabilities like you get with EC2 and S3 and so on and so on. The big companies, the big incumbents that will be able to leverage that tech, I would doubt if OpenAI goes and builds like a notion competitor or an HR or a Salesforce competitor or so on. They probably want to stay at the more generic level. From the startup side, a lot of startups are getting killed. It's funny. I use the term Sherlocked. I'm an old school Mac programmer. Back in 2002, Apple killed Watson with its Sherlock tool. And so the name sort of stuck. There's a lot of companies getting Sherlock because they're pretty incremental and they're filling gaps in OpenAI's current product without realizing that like, yes, they're just on the roadmap. They haven't gotten there yet. And so if you're working on a use case that's pretty horizontal,”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is the real problem you're heading on. So startups are going to get killed because they're very thin rappers. And I agree with you. Most of what I'm seeing on the Angel side right now are these very thin rappers on top of OpenAI. If your primary product value is scripting GPT, that's a thin wrapper. If you've built it in two to four weeks, that's a thin wrapper. The key thing to me is like, we are in a hype cycle around AI, much like potentially the hype cycle with crypto and other tech before it. All of these sort of fake use cases are going to get quickly washed out and replaced and commoditized. It's really important to me that people view this as a technology. Like your MySQL database. MySQL was very popular 20 years ago, right? Like it was super cool what it could do. It's still cool, but if you try to go raise money on you've built a form on top of MySQL, you're not going to be successful. In five years, that's what a lot of these are going to look like. You need to really focus on the market and like solving a core problem.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And look at apple silicon, right? They've done an amazing job like, yes, they're fast, but instead of pushing the bounds on pure comput, they're pushing the bounds on energy efficiency, which for Apple's use case is critical. And so I think there will be a lot of really interesting R&D on how do you make these models maybe smaller and performant in certain use cases.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, at the base LLM layer, the data size so far has been very correlated with performance. And so, right, the bigger the models, the more data, the more parameters, et cetera, the better they do. Now they're starting to be this counterpush of like, okay, can we compress them? Can we pull that back? Like, how do we maintain the performance improvements without the size? So I think that's a super interesting part of our R&D. What I'm talking about is sort of the next tier of how do you fine-tune the models. And that's where actually I think the quality of data is most important.”
2023-11-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source