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Matt Clifford

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2024-07-01
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2024-07-01
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  1. “But, you know, I think in a world where scale compute matters, that friction, that discount, if you like, on the Chinese system, it does compound. And I think, you know, if you want to be a China bear on AI, I think you have to believe that we're going to get very radically improved progress in the West quickly enough that they don't build their domestic chip ecosystem fast enough.”

    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

  2. “Yeah, so I think in the world where actually either my thesis that ideas really are going to matter a lot is wrong, or where it's just a very narrow window and then you find a new idea and then it's just scale scale, then yeah, I think China has a very strong hand there. But the other fact you talked about algorithms data compute, the other thing that is still a factor, and it really comes down to like timelines, is, you know, the US export controls on the semiconductor supply chain have had an impact, not a binary impact, but it is certainly true that it is harder if you are a big Chinese company to build a access $100,000 GPU cost. You can do it in February, Kaifuli was like going around Europe, including at Davos, saying like, oh, you know, I train my latest model on the Huawei design SMIC manufacturer GPUs. And, you know, he wasn't claiming they were as good as NVIDIA's, but, you know, he was like.”

    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

  3. “Well, I think one thing that's really interesting is the asymmetry in how we in the West learn about China and how they learn about us. When Leopold Ashenbrenner published his situational awareness thing, which obviously kind of blew up a couple of weeks ago, within three days, I hear from a friend who follows China very closely, there were five Chinese translations circulating in the Chinese AI ecosystem. If an equivalent thing is written in China, it does not get translated into English. It does not get circulated.”

    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

  4. “Well, I think if you look at why it's been so fascinating in the West, you know, basically because certainly open AI and anthropic and to an extent, especially now under unified leadership here in London of DeepMind, you basically just have this extraordinary permissionless to go back to that idea, explosion of like ambition. Well, Sam and Demis and Dario are doing is this almost untrammeled, very visionary ambition. As we've seen in other parts of the tech industry in China, CCP is very nervous about entrepreneurs being given that much room. It's not trivial to create the conditions in which a Chinese samalman or a Chinese demisobist can just go to the races in the same way because there's just much more, I mean, we all saw what happened to Jack Ma when it looks like he was too powerful. I think that's an important ingredient in building these sort of AGI concepts.”

    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

  5. “paranoia they have about it so there are two factors that make me think that maybe i'm not quite in alex's camp one is that actually it's a very highly regulated space there”

    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

  6. “I think you just got to see the CCP as being like fundamentally have an extreme priority on stability. The whole story of the CCP and its dominance is eliminate threats to stability. And whatever you think about AI, whether you're bullish or bearish, whether you care about safety, whether you don't care about safety, I think everyone agrees that it's like a destabilizing force. And so I think the last thing they want is either companies gaining a lot of power through AI or AI itself being destabilizing. So if you read the regulation that's already coming through, for example, if you train a large model, you have to supply random samples of the training data to the CCP or to the government. You have to show it's not going to undermine any of the stated positions of the CCP on various issues. So it's actually a very, very regulated environment. Now, that doesn't mean that ultimately the Chinese state won't try and harness powerful AI for its own ends as you're sort of talking about. But I think it's easy to understate the level.”

    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

  7. “One of the things that's interesting, and I think underrated, is that actually China is more paranoid about AI safety than probably any other government in the world. So if you look at Chinese AI regulation, it makes Brussels look like a soft touch. It's incredibly onerous.”

    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

  8. “I guess I would say one thing I learned during that job, albeit briefly, was that the UK's capacity in the space is high relative to most countries. I remember being on the initial kickoff call, you know, I was running this summit for the Prime Minister and there are 28 countries coming. We did this kickoff call on Zoom or Teams. The best way to improve productivity of government is just like allow them to not use Teams. And honestly, without naming names, there were countries where they were like, how could we possibly do this? We don't have an AI policy division. We don't have an AI minister. I think the UK actually has been ahead of the curve on this. But I do think China is a very sophisticated.”

    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

  9. “I think the Chinese government is very sophisticated on AI. For example, the guy I was mean to negotiate with was the Minister of Science and Technology, senior minister, standing committee of the CCP, he's a computer scientist. He knew his staff.”

    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

  10. “What Alex said. This is what Alex disputed, right? So Alex has become a good friend. I would put this again in the category of like, it's very hard to say. As you know, I spent quite a lot of time last year working on the geopolitics of AI in government and including spending time in Beijing and negotiating with the Chinese government on AI.”

    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

  11. “You have to maintain a set of quite radically different scenarios and just change the weight that you put on them. I can totally see a world in which everything I just told you about the value of new ideas is wrong. And actually, it really is just like we can't find anything that fundamentally is the next S-curve. Everything commoditizes, everything flattens out. And, you know, it's really race to the bottom on price. In which case, obviously none of these companies are going to make any money.”

    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. “Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, and there's a big opportunity in that. One thing I often think about AI is like anyone who claims they know what's going to happen, I think, is wrong.”

    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

  13. “I think I would not be. I mean, I'm a huge fan of open AI. I think it's extraordinary what they've done. But, I mean, on the other hand, if they're really doing whatever it is, three and a half billion a year and they can continue to productize, maybe it's not crazy. But I do think...”

    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

  14. “Yeah, that's certainly true. But I guess what I mean is that the knowledge around how to train, do pre-training on a very large model is now extremely well known. But I think it is now quite appreciated in the labs that if you can find an idea that has this disproportionate impact on capabilities, guarding that is going to be very important. Now, again, I'm not saying that that will remain secret forever, but I think in the short term, I think we're likely to see more divergence over the next couple of years than convergence.”

    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

  15. “Yeah, well, particularly because norms around secrecy around ideas have increased over time. I mean, it's easy to forget.”

    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

  16. “I think the pure LLM approach absolutely is commoditized either is or will be very quickly commoditized. I guess what I'm saying is I don't think GPT-5 is just going to be a bigger language model. I think it's going to involve something different. It's going to involve a lot of productizations, maybe search, as we already discussed and things. But these are not commodity ideas yet. It's not yet the case that everyone will be able to copy that. And so I think broadly, you know, I was talking recently to someone who was on the Lama 3 team and they were like, you're probably undering the extent to which llama 3 is literally just Lama 2 with more compute and more data. There's not a lot that's different other than NLA. I guess what I'm saying is Lama 4 will not just be a bigger Lama 3. It will have to be different. It will incorporate this.”

    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

  17. “Well, I think it's a race, as in I do think that if we can't find anything better than just trying to scale LLMs, then yeah, the flattening out will be brutal. If I had to bet, my bet is that the enormous amount of capital and talent that has been aggregated, you know, around this relatively small number of companies because of the hype will be enough to unlock the next S-curve. And so you'll see, you know, kind of further improvement. The returns to good ideas, I think, will be very high over the next few years. So actually another way of thinking about it is one thing you've seen over the last couple of years since GPT4 was released is actually a convergence of capabilities. When GPT-4 came out, it was very clear that OpenAI were in the lead. And now, like, there's quite a few companies that have a GPT-4-ish level model. It's in convergence, right? My guess is that you may see more divergence over the next few years because the value of ideas goes up because people aren't just scaling.”

    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

  18. “I don't think there's a lot further to go in just finding more text. I think we may be at the flattening out of the S-curve on text, but I suspect the next S-curve could just involve finding ways to use video, to use interactive experience in very different ways.”

    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

  19. “So, I think it's certainly true that data is the one of those that is least obvious how you continue to scale. At the moment, you can just translate dollars into compute relatively easily. And so, you know, you can imagine at least a couple of orders of magnitude of growth of compute quite straightforwardly. It's not obvious that you can do the same in data. That said, I think people probably underestimate what we haven't done yet, partly because of compute limits. You know, these models are not trained on all video, you know. In fact, mostly that hasn't happened yet. Some of the things that people like Andre Carpathy have been talking about recently is like the potential of thinking about video as being a really great way for a model to build a world model and to understand more about how the world works. So yeah, data is a bottleneck, but I wouldn't bet against smart people figuring out ways to either create or ingest new types of data. I guess what I'm really arguing when I say we're on an S curve is.”

    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

  20. “Yeah, I mean, look, my point's not that the big guys won't be able to do this. I suppose my point is really that our value ideas over the last five years has been relatively small. The question was, could you get the scale compute? I think the value of ideas over the next few years might be high, and it might be enough to unlock. I'm not saying it's suddenly going to become this low capital game. I think if you want to build an AGI company, you're going to need a lot of capital. But I think until now, the only way to do that was to have trained a large language model at one of the labs, come out and raise a bunch of money, and say, we're going to carry on doing it. I think there may be a new approach that's possible today where you actually just have an idea that's really quite different from what people have been doing, and you can use that a little bit like T-Mine 10 years ago to do a demo that makes people say, ha, and that unlocks the capital that allows you to go up against the big guys.”

    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

  21. “It could be, I mean, I think the things that I'm excited about and I'm looking at pretty hard right now are search. And there's been a lot of buzz about this recently and the sort of AI research community, like how do you use search? The techniques that actually made things like AlphaGo work, how do you kind of mix those with LLMs to get better results? I think clearly there's this big moment around multimodality that is just getting started where if you can figure out very smart ways to think about different data types than text, that might be another S-curve.”

    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

  22. “I was very lucky to start investing in AI about 10 years ago, a bit more than that now, when the first sort of deep learning wave kicked off. What's really interesting is that really, certainly the last five years, but arguably longer, the story of AI is really a story largely about the deployment of just enormous amounts of compute and enormous amounts of data. And not that many new ideas candidly. You know, I mean, like, I'm not saying there are none, but like broadly, if you had to do a pie chart where the processes come from, it's largely come from massive investment in compute and application of 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

  23. “company before, but what I'm doing when I'm interviewing you is figuring out what is the behavior, what is your equivalent of the story I just told you? What is your equivalent of that entrepreneurial activity that is a predictor of you being able to succeed in an unstructured environment? That's what I care about.”

    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

  24. “We believe one of our kind of cool ways that we evaluate found is entrepreneur first is that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. So we absolutely think that it's very unlikely that you rock up with a perfect CV, but like no sign whatsoever of ever having done anything that you weren't told to do by a teacher or a boss. And suddenly you're going to figure out how to do things that you aren't told to do. So in that sense, I think I very strongly agree. I guess what I would say, though, is that culture and default paths really matter. And so one thing we've learned about evaluating talent is what it looks like to do something that your parents teachers bosses didn't tell you to do in the Bay Area is very different from in Singapore. You know, like if you grew up in the Bay Area, go to Stanford and you graduate and you've never thought about starting a company. That's a very negative signal on you as a founder. If you grew up in Polani in rural India, I don't think I need to have seen that you started a”

    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

  25. “I never went to work at Greg's. I ended up sort of like building a little business sort of age 13, fixing and building computers for first my parents' friends and then their friends and then sort of like branching out into building them websites and taking spyware and malware off their computers, which this was like the early days of the consumer internet where everything was horrible. I think just realizing you can do stuff. You can just say yes and figure it out. You don't need anyone's permission. I think life was really life-changing for me. I think so much of everything I've done since comes from believing you can just say yes and you can just do stuff.”

    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

  26. “I was a very fortunate childhood. I grew up in a sort of ex-industrial small town in the north of England. My mom was teaching a system. My dad was a social worker. I have three siblings. It was like a big, happy sort of family. But I think probably the formative experience for me, at least in retrospect, was where I grew up. If you were a teenager and you wanted to make money, you basically could work in Greg's. That was the option. And I really didn't want to work in Greg's. I think like a really formative thing was I remembered that there was a lightning storm in our village. And one of my parents' friends, it sort of somehow damaged their computer. And I remember them saying to me, do you think you could fix this? I knew nothing about fixing computers. But I was like, yes. I basically just bought a new motherboard and plumped everything back in. And then, sorry.”

    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

  27. “I think that we are seeing the flattening off of the value of just adding more compute and more data to language models. I think nuclear war is really underrated. I think AI changes everything in the future of war. China is more paranoid about AI safety than probably any other government in the world. The US export controls on the semiconductor supply chain have had an impact. It is harder if you are a big Chinese company to build a access a hundred thousand GPU cluster.”

    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