YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Clifford

lines on the record: 77
first: 2024-07-01
most recent: 2024-07-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Scratch, and it's like some of the most fun that I think you can have. You can see them on my website, Harry, for your next in a podcast.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most of us have this itch that is very hard to scrap, which is to be in these completely alien environments where we get to be someone else and do something else in a way where no one is in charge. If you look at things like secret cinema and how popular that's been, I kind of feel like it's really interesting. People love dressing up and doing the thing, but like kind of like you dress up, you watch the film. I think most people have an itch to see like, what would it be like to actually have to go through this scenario but with no consequences? I've written a series of historical murder mystery games where you don't know it's not predetermined who or if anyone will be killed. There's 12 characters you each have a set of goals and relationships and the evening just unfolds and you decide what happens. And I love playing them. I love writing them. I think it's a sort of human itch that there are very few ways to”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you give me a pink ball, and like it's hard, you know, like it's not this linear journey. But what's amazing is it does compound like so many of the best things in life. And the moments when you realize you've built enough trust that they confide something something that's clearly been going around that little minds and they've not almost not been sure about how to articulate and then they say it usually in our case like when they're going to sleep going to bed and just like wow it's really totally worth it”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hardest part is that there are no shortcuts, like these are humans, and if you want to have a great relationship with them, if you want to be a great dad, you have to invest in that in exactly the same way you'd invest in a relationship or a friendship. And early on, they're less fond than your friends, frankly. A lot of people seem to like, maybe I'm not very good, but like it's this thing where you truly love them in this very deep way. It's hard work to invest very deeply in this sort of relationship where, you know, whenever I travel, which is a lot, I sort of have this idealized fantasy of when I come home and they're going to be like, Daddy, I'm going to have this like deep conversation about where I've been and what I've seen. And instead, it's like, yeah, basically, it's like, you know, I've pooed on the floor and like I'm going to scream because I wanted to scream.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've got two little boys, one six and one is three and three quarters, as he very proudly says. I do think fatherhood has been for me a real sort of exercise in humanity. One of the advantages of founding something is at least at work, people sort of listen to you. And you sort of earned in the sense that you started, but it's sort of on a day-to-day basis, it's somewhat unearned. Kids do not care. Like my sons have no like, oh, well, maybe it just means I'm a bad dad, but there's no sense in which, oh, well, dad's talking. So he must be right. And I don't want a sugarcoat. I think fatherhood is really hard a lot of the time. What's the hardest part?”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“12 months ago, if I'd been on here, I would have told you it's too late to build an AGI company like that ship sailed. There's going to be like three or four of them they already exist. I now think the most ambitious founders today should seriously consider whether that's what they can do.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can start a company with a stranger. I think a lot of the conventional wisdom on who you should start companies with is just survivorship bias. It's just that historically it was almost impossible to start a company with a stranger. So the only people that the venture community saw were people who founded companies with people they'd known for a long time and therefore of course it looks like that's the only way to do it.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So much from how the founder responds. A lot of people in Europe, and you know, Charlie Vest all around the world, but one of the things that he and I have discussed a lot is part of the reason it's hard to do investing here is that often by the time you meet founders, they've conditioned themselves to reduce the ambition in the pitch because they've just been so used to people being like, well, that's not very realistic. So what Charlie will do is he'll pitch back to you. He was one of the first investors in the athlete. He'll pitch back to you like what it could actually be. I think he's basically saying, does that excite you? Do you say like, yes, finally someone who gets it or do you flip? And I think it's an incredible skill.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but he's probably deployed more capital than most seed funds, I would say, every year. He could easily put a wrap around it and he would be a font. The reason I would say Charlie is like, I think Charlie has two things that I think he is very plausibly the best at in the world. One is I think he's just a great talent spotter. I think he's just really able to see the best version of every founder that he meets and decide how good that is. If you go back to my idea that actually what matters is the peak performance from the peak person, Charlie has an incredible way of very rapidly building a model of like, how good is this person at their best? That's an exceptional thing to be because he invests so early that it's like an amazing thing to be able to do. Other thing he does better than anyone else I know, he pitches back to the founder the most ambitious version of the idea they've just pitched him. He's just exceptionally good at that and he can learn.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone who joins us has like a huge opportunity cost. We were very lucky to have thousands and thousands of applicants to be able to pick really great people. And so I just think the worst thing we could do is say, yeah, do that, do that for the next 10 years. I don't feel guilty at all about people who want to see whether they should be found or they come and they find out it's not for them”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have two phases to what we do. So, like we have a phase where it's basically common C. We put you in a room with what we hope is like a really exceptional peer group of people that are equally ambitious, equally talented and say, take 10 weeks to figure out if there's something that you really want to work on and someone you really want to work with. And if there is, awesome, like let's do the next bit. And, you know, that bit's the sort of unique bit of EF. It's like not like an accelerator. It's really like about peer group curation. And so like, let's say for every 100 people that join at that stage, something like 80 of them will pair up with someone and come up with an idea that they're excited about. But we then do a cup where we say, like, do you really want to spend the next 10 years of your life doing that? And do we really think that's the best use of your time? And so we cut about half of that point.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Compare the CV of like a 31 year old who's actually good but not exceptional and a 21 year old who's exceptional but has no experience and choose the 21 year old. But you actually should choose the 21-year-old.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the challenges of this business, and you may feel the same, is that the feedback loops are so long. And so you do something, you observe a short-term metric, like, do they raise a seed round? Do they raise a series A? And then years later, you find out whether the company's any good. And so I think one of the things we got wrong was just overreacted to short-term data early on. So in the first couple of years, we largely funded people who were straight out of university. And then as the brand grew and the Charter Echo grew, we got more and more applicants who were like in the sort of like 30s. We were like, wow, this is great. We're able to move up the experience curve. And of course, the problem was they were more experienced, but they weren't the very best 30-year-olds. One of the things that I think we made a mistake on is that as we scaled, and particularly as Alice and I stopped making every selection decision, you got into the thing where it's very hard if you're new to what we do.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure. And, you know, I'm sort of deliberately being sort of reductive about it to money. And clearly part of the reason why actually really exceptional people do start companies in the UK is exactly that. I'm sure they could go work at Jane Street or wherever, but they want to do something. Whenever I'm in a conversation where we've offered someone a place at EF and they've gone off from James Street or similar, I'm like, I'm like, yeah, you could be an extremely highly paid crossword puzzle solver, which is sort of how I think about James Strait playing a zero-sum game, or you can change people's lives. Like, it's up to you. And actually, a lot of people, exactly as you say, are not just maximizing next year's income. That's where it comes from. My point, though, is that it's less at the individual level. I'm saying at the system level, our biggest challenge, I think, in Europe is still talent allocation.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is why it's a lot better than it was. It's a lot better than it was. When I started visiting university campuses properly when Alice and I started af, I think it was Imperial West 60% of computer science grads went into finance. That number is not that anymore. I actually don't know what the number is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was like a fraction of that number. It's changing.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's like just the belief capital. There is this sense that if you're a Cambridge computer science grad five years out, probably the richest person you know is the one that went to Jane Street five years ago. That's probably not true in the Bay Area. And so there's just...”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In year one, yeah, but by the time you were a few years in, if you're good, many, many multiples of that. So this is the point about this paper is what it shows is talent is somewhat fungible. It's really tempting for those of us that live and breathe the industry to be like, there are founders and there are non-founders. But actually what there is, is there's talent and there's ambition. And if that talent ambition is applied to trading, then those people will be great traders. If that talent ambition is applied to entrepreneurship, those people will be great founders. And this is the secret of the Bay Area. Why did Silicon Valley work? Because the most ambitious and talented people in that area confounders. If the same thing happened in the UK, in Europe, in India, we'd have very similar outcomes.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To make is even today in the UK, even with all the progress that's been over the last decade in the ecosystem, I would say the most aspirational job for a Cambridge computer science grad is to go work at Jane Street and be a trader. I think that's the number one job.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Companies. That's kind of like probably quite obvious. Everyone would sort of intuit that. What's non intuitive, and in fact, I think maybe even counterintuitive, is that not only do those people in start companies, they do on average better than the median person who was starting a company in a year without that recession. In other words, the forced entrepreneurs, the ones that go into it because the banks stopped hiring, do better than the people that chose the previous year. I realize this on the verge of being rude and controversial, is that in most ecosystems, it is not by default the very most talented and ambitious people that become founders. And it probably is in the Bay Area. The reason that I think there's a huge opportunity in the UK and in Europe and in India where we work is that you can find those truly exceptional people and they, it's not obvious, it's much harder in the Bay Area in a way because there's so many more opportunities for investors to meet those people. But the point I want”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think entrepreneurship is best to think of it as like nothing like medicine, but in the same way that I don't think everyone should be a doctor or could be a doctor. I think you should think of entrepreneurship as like a high skill, extremely high skilled profession. You know, I'm the sort of person that's inclined to want to read like the academic literature on something and on the basis that surely with a something we know and we can, you know, there's some alpha in learning. I would say in general the academic literature on entrepreneurship is not helpful for either entrepreneurs or VCs. It might be interesting, but there's no alpha in it. The paper I think about all the time called Forced Entrepreneurs, what it looks at is in certain markets when there's a recession, the dominant employers of high-skilled people hire a few people. Obvious example in the UK is financial crisis. The banks hire fewer bankers. And unsurprisingly, in those periods where the level of hiring of kind of highly skilled individuals into finance falls, more people”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think that's true. And I think a lot of that is about self-discovery. As in a lot of the time when that happens, it's actually about those founders learning what they really want. I think one thing I've learned having now followed hundreds of founders from kind of often before they even knew they want to start a company, a lot of the time, like, especially first-time founders, I just can't really predict what that's going to be like. It's just very hard for most people. And actually”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is something I've changed my mind on. I actually think more and more the synergies matter, but ultimately I do think entrepreneurship is one of the paths that most relies on the peak performance of the highest performer. So there are some walks of life where what really matters is average performance, like how well do you do the median day? And there are other walks of life where it's like, how well do you do at your very best? You need people in every company who are in the former category who can day in, day out, turn out excellence. Let's use Helsing as an example you already brought up. You also just need the peak performance of the best day from the top talent in the company to be truly exceptional. And so like, yes, synergies do matter, but probably the best predictor is how good is the best person at that best.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think our generation, if I'm allowed to put myself in the same generation as you, Harry, I think there is a real risk of complacency for us that we have like grown up in a world of relative peace where basically it wasn't really any sort of geopolitical threat to our value system. It's clearly no longer true. I think we absolutely need to think about how do we make sure that we have the power to defend our values and our way of life. And I don't think it's a given.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think it matters in what order tech is bill? And I think it matters who builds it. I think technology is ultimately values laden. And so when I look to the future, I see paths to the most amazing futures. As you probably tell from the discussion about UK, I find it very easy to be optimistic. But I think the only way we get to those futures is if we prevent very powerful capabilities, nuclear weapons are example, falling into the hands of people that would do us harm. And so one of the reasons I've really pivoted my time within EF to working on defensive technologies is I think it's an amazing commercial opportunity there. But I also think it's what the world needs. We need to build the technologies that mean that the negative consequences of the technologies we build are mitigated, not by banning them, but by building great defensive capabilities.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. But So I think probably the worst idea in the world that it's acceptable to hold impolite company is like degrowth. The idea that like, oh, you know, like the real problem in the world is too many people, too much stuff, too much consumption. We should shrink populations. We should shrink the economy. I could not hate that idea more. All human progress has come from growth. I want to see technological progress. I want to see people building amazing things and as using more clean energy to do more amazing things. I don't think that it's therefore inevitable that all technological progress automatically leads to great outcomes. I think you just have to look at nuclear weapons to see that, yeah, so far we've done pretty well, but there's some pretty terrifying stories about near misses. Russian relatively junior soldiers ignoring false alarms that looked like incoming strikes and as a result saving the world. That's not to say that tech progress inevitably leads to disaster. I don't believe that at all.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An open question. I hope your listeners might send us their views. I think it's really interesting question. How does AI change the relative power of offensive and defensive weapons? It's certainly plausible to tell a story how being able to build cheap, smart drones benefits rogue actors, non-state actors a lot more than it benefits states. If you have very large, important assets, you don't want to be attacked, like aircraft carriers, you can make the argument that the ability to deploy very, very inexpensive but pretty smart explosive drones is really asymmetric. There's not much an aircraft carrier can do about that. One of the reasons I'm very interested in defensive technologies is I think we're going to have to think about problems like that and get ahead of them. I think there are a lot of scenarios where it's not obvious it actually benefits the current established powers.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People and it's an extremely compelling book. So, like nuclear war underrated. But to answer your question, I think AI changes everything in the future of war. I think that if you look at what do soldiers do, how do we think about their value and how do we think about the harm that comes to them?”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah. Have you tried a hydrogen bomb? I would say, as a slight side note, I think nuclear war is really underrated as a thing to worry about. If you've not read it already and if your readers haven't read it already, the best book I've read this year by Saunders is nuclear war, colon, a scenario, by this amazing American journalist Annie Jacobson. And she describes it as a non-fiction thriller. And what she does is basically just walk through step by step what would happen if a rogue country launched an attempted attack on the United States and all the things that could go wrong and lead to disaster. And it's chilling. I think I've ever had an experience with a book before where I had to keep taking breaks because I was like, whoa. But, you know, she didn't make this up. She went and she spent thousands of hours interviewing the top people in nuclear security in the US, in former Soviets.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we were joking before, you know, I've raised more money in Analba, Michigan than I have in London, and I won't name the name of the pension fund. But one of my biggest investors is a sort of state pension fund in Michigan. And they were one of the first pension funds that we pitched. So I sort of came out of it being like, these are the people we should be pitching. And the scheme in Michigan is $70 billion pension plan. And I remember coming to pitch a comparably sized plan in the UK and saying to them, what have you done in venture capital? And they said, we've heard of venture capital. But their allocation to venture was zero. And I just think that if private companies, if the most ambitious entrepreneurs are saying that they want to keep their companies private for longer, if theyPO at all, they want to do it when the companies are extremely mature, then most of the benefits from growth will come to pools of capital that invest in venture. And if UK pension funds aren't doing that, how do they expect to be able?”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they're right. The way I see is this is really a question about who benefits. It's not actually a question about whether we can build. What I mean by that is I would love it that when a 20 VC company or an EF company goes public, that the pools of capital that own that company are my mom and dad's West Yorkshire pension fund. Right now, that's not what's going to happen because they're going to IPO in places that the shareholders are probably American. It's Vanguard and BlackRock, right? And honestly, for you and me and for the entrepreneurs, who cares? It's all cash. But again, if you want to, from a UK long-term growth perspective, I believe that so much of our growth, if we make it happen, will come from entrepreneurship, big advances in science and technology. I think, frankly, capital markets are very efficient. Good things will raise capital. The question is, who's capital? And I think from a UK PLC perspective, we should want it.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So funny, right? Because you know, as you said, we're sitting here in London. And I would say, you know, within three miles of where we are, you have a top three global AI lab, arguably the one with the broadest research agenda, DeepMind. So if I'm right, the ideas will matter, then DeepMind's right up there. You're probably the top embodied AI company, private company in the world in WAVE. You have probably the best life sciences cluster, certainly in Europe. You've got a super biased in the chair, but you've got probably the most radical government R&D funding agency in the world in ARIA. We know how to do this stuff already. We just got to believe in it.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, if you read the Labor Manifesto, they say that they're committed to growth being the number one priority and they talk about things like planning. They talk about things like computer infrastructure. So we'll see. There is a window of time where this country has to decide what it wants its future to be. My very good friend in Hogarth wrote this great essay very presciently, actually now five years ago called AI Nationalism, where he talked about like, if you believe that AI is the defining technology of our generation, which I do, then at some point countries will have to decide whether they want to be AI makers or AI takers. And if you're an AI taker, it doesn't mean that your country won't use AI. It just means you'll be shipping dollars to California to use California models on Californian compute. We don't have to choose that. We can choose a different future and we have to decide. Or we can have beautiful views from railway bridges.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, I mean, there are various ways you can do it. Parliament can legislate to make data centers. There's a category of infrastructure project that doesn't get to be overridden locally, that national government can say this is a priority. We can choose to do this. I don't want to make it sound simple. It's hard and it will annoy the hell out of a lot of people. But, you know, planning is one. Energy is the other. I've spoken, again, like kind of with last year when I was working in government, I spoke to people that wanted to build enormous costas of GPUs in the UK and couldn't because of the limitations of our electricity grid.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the big things are actually levers that we can choose to pull. You know, one of the things that I found just really dispiriting when I was working in government last year was that it's an enormous privilege, but I got to go and meet Sachin Adella and Andy Jassy and, you know, these people negotiate with them on this summit. And I was mainly talking about AI policy. But obviously they wanted to talk about the full tech agenda with the UK. And the number one issue that these companies had, and I'm really not exaggerating, was we want to invest billions and billions of dollars to build compute infrastructure in the UK and your local county councils in the middle of nowhere keep vetoing our data centers because the obscure of you from a railway bridge. That is a choice we have made as a country to not let the most sophisticated companies in the world invest in sophisticated technology infrastructure in the UK. They want to. So all we have to do is decide.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I'm going to do a spoiler. I know one of the questions you're going to ask later is what do you believe that people around you don't? And I thought a lot about this. And I was like, oh, maybe I can say something about AI. And I realized the thing I really believe that almost no one believes is I think the UK can go back to being pretty much the richest country in the world per capita. I really truly believe that. I think we can be at least as rich as the United States on a per head basis. I think we've chosen not to be and we just need to choose to be. We should be the obvious place in the world to build and scale technology companies as we can be.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's say you really believed that you could build, as I framed it and you quoted an anthropic or open AI scale company in terms of ambition. I actually think one of your biggest challenges building that in the Bay Area today would be building and retaining the AI research talent that makes that. And people always talk about hiring. Much less often talk about retention. But like the packages that Sam Altman will offer to your best people the minute you get your first like, you know, demo, it's really hard. In London, it's much more plausible that you build a truly world-class research team and keep them together for long enough to really see the impact. And, you know, like here in London, we have DeepMind, we have the London Office of the European Office of Anthropic, the European Office of Open AI, we have WAVE, we have Oxford, Cambridge Imperial, UCL.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's one of the factors. I think the other is just the extraordinary talent base. If you go back to the thing we start this conversation talking about, let's say I'm right that there's going to be like a strong return to ideas, to new ideas over the next few years. I think it's very likely that of people in Europe who might have those ideas, they are disproportionately in the UK.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, this that he basically tries to anticipate the future labels a bunch of things high risk and creates an enormous burden for companies trying to innovate in those areas. I think actually this is an area where the UK has done a lot better job than Europe.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My view would be, and I think you see this already, I didn't vote for Brexit. Broadly, I'm not a fan, but probably the first issue where I'm like, huh, maybe there are some benefits to this, is just looking at the difference in approaches to AI regulation. I mean, I do think the EU AI Act is a mistake. My basic model of how that legislation gets written is like a bunch of old dudes sit in Brussels and say, let's imagine everything that could go wrong. Okay, you're not allowed to do that.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the good things is people benefit from technology even when they don't understand it. I think that's like one of the big lessons in the history of the last 200 years of capitalism is that technology is the engine of prosperity. And people whose jobs involve very little technology today make a whole lot more than their ancestors 200 years ago and have a much better quality of life because of the benefits that technology brings. I do think it's true that so far, and the broad trend is that technology is what I guess economists call skills biased. It benefits people with more skills more than it benefits people with fewer skills. That is a big challenge for governments, also probably a big opportunity for entrepreneurs. But I think in general, the story of technology is an extraordinarily positive one. I'm not saying that people shouldn't, including policymakers, look at this and say, right, how do we plan for this world where relatively few people understand this, but it's a huge factor in everyone's lives. But I worry about that because I worry that.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One setting that protocol is the equivalent to building an operating system or a protocol. It's basically saying if you want agents to transact with each other, we provide the tooling that allows you to observe that, govern that, turn them off when they're not working, handle the edge cases. But imagine that a large chunk of the economy over the next decade ends up being transacted by autonomous agents. I don't think they're going to interact in the way that humans interact. There's going to have to be infrastructure that allows them to interact. And whoever owns that infrastructure, and that's going to be a huge asset.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think governments should set the standards, but I just don't think government has a great track record of building important scalable software.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ax Yeah, so I'm certainly not saying that we can just copy what we have, but I think it gives you, to me, it's like an intuition builder that like, let's say we're going to send out lots of agents to do economically valuable work. We need to govern things like how do they interact with each other? What are the rules for that? How do you handle the edge cases? How do you observe what they're doing? How do you govern what they're doing? How do you let them keep to the rules? And so it strikes me that whoever builds the protocol that for key slices of the economy actually allows agents to come together and do business together, that's going to be an extraordinarily valuable company.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me give you an example. There are an area of the economy where there's already a lot of autonomous agencies, high frequency trading. In trading, a lot of the work is now done by, I think you can only describe as autonomous agents. But we don't let them just go wild and call their broker. I mean, facetious, but like if you look at the complexity of the infrastructure we've built.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not one where like many millions of instances can be run and they can operate at like nearly human level. Now I don't think that's what GPT5 will be, but like one of the theses I'm really interested in right now is I think we'll get really good agents in the next five years. And I think if you look at parts of the economy where we already have a lot of automation, it's pretty clear that that requires a lot of infrastructure, requires protocols for agents to interact. I think we're going to need that for AI agents. We're going to need to build great infrastructure to maximize the economic value of these agents.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the one that people are talking most about, which makes sense to me, is just agency. I mean, like GPT 3 wasn't good enough really to do anything remotely authentic. People have obviously built agents on GPT-4, but people doing that have said like, you can build great demos. You run it 100 times, you pick the best one, it looks amazing, but robustness is very, very huge problem and they're not reliable. But I think if GPT-5 were good enough that you could get much, much more reliable agents, I think that would feel like a qualitative change that was really impressive.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my favorite tech essays that I find myself referring to all the time is that, you know, Jill Spolsky thing on commoditize your compliments. And, you know, that's what's happening in AI right now. Everyone is saying, what are the compliments to what I'm doing? And how do I commoditize them? It's interesting. The reviews of NVIDIA's model are pretty mixed to put it mildly. I think you'll certainly see people trying to figure out which layers of the stack do you need to own and what do you have to commoditize in order to really protect your core business? Maybe we'll always say this, but it really feels to me like we're going to learn so much in the next 12 months. To me, the key question that until we resolve, we're all just guessing is sort of how good are the GPT-5 era of models? If then like wildly better, if it's as big a gap between four and five as it was between three and four, that is a very different world from if it really feels like we're eking out these tiny improvements despite having invested truly colossal.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Either like it takes longer, and this sort of the domestic ecosystem because they can't buy ASML machines, they eventually make their own, and then we have no levers, right? You know, it doesn't matter what we band, they've got their own. And at which point, you know, your argument that when they turn on the industrial policy tap, it really turns on. At that point, I think they're in an extraordinary position.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the best case for China is that the gap matters, that actually they can't harness the same level of compute over a relevant time period.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although I would say there's been fascinatingly the one bipartisan issue in Washington is screw China. It's certainly true that I remember writing about in 2018-19 about Trump export controls and it was interesting is that the Biden White House has been as aggressive on exactly the same thing. There's been a remarkable continuity on this. And so yeah, you're right. I think whoever wins the election, they're going to continue to see NVIDIA and others as a key national security asset.”
2024-07-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: LLMs Are Reaching a Stage of Diminishing Returns: What is the Next S Curve | The Bull & Bear Case for China's Ability to Challenge the US' AI Capabilities | How AI Changes the Future of War & How Agents Will Reshape Society with Matt Clifford @ EF · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source