20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 31 July 2024
⏱️ 69 minutes
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Summary
Ethan Mollick is the Co-Director of the Generative AI Lab at Wharton, which builds prototypes and conducts research to discover how AI can help humans thrive while mitigating risks. Ethan is also an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studies and teaches innovation and entrepreneurship, and also examines the effects of artificial intelligence on work and education. His papers have been published in top journals and his book on AI, Co-Intelligence, is a New York Times bestseller.
In Today's Episode with Ethan Mollick We Discuss:
1. Models: Is More Compute the Answer:
- How has Ethan changed his mind on whether we have a lot of room to run in adding more compute to increase model performance?
- What will happen with models in the next 12 months that no one expects?
- Why will open models immediately be used by bad actors, what should happen as a result?
- Data, algorithms, compute, what is the biggest bottleneck and how will this change with time?
2. OpenAI: The Missed Opportunity, Product Roadmap and AGI:
- Why does Ethan believe that OpenAI is completely out of touch with creating products that consumers want to use?
- Which product did OpenAI shelve that will prove to be a massive mistake?
- How does Ethan analyse OpenAI's pursuit of AGI?
- Why did Ethan think Brad, COO @ OpenAI's heuristic of "startups should be threatened if they are not excited by a 100x improvement in model" is total BS?
3. VCs, Startups and AI Labs: What the World Does Not Understand:
- What do Big AI labs not understand about big companies?
- What are the biggest mistakes companies are making when implementing AI?
- Why are startups not being ambitious enough with AI today?
- What are the single biggest ways consumers can and should be using AI today?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Open AI abandons products like crazy. |
| 0:02.5 | They want to build the machine God. |
| 0:04.0 | If you have any talented people, you're going to have them building the next technology for AGI. |
| 0:09.6 | If you have a compute, that's where you throw it at. |
| 0:11.2 | I mean, they're incidentally making $3 billion run rate this year, I think, by like just accidents. |
| 0:16.4 | But there isn't really a product there right now. |
| 0:18.8 | It's the chatbot and the API. |
| 0:22.0 | I think a lot of people in this space are just assuming scale solves issues. The real problem right now is every startup |
| 0:26.9 | in the world is betting against AGI, which I find really funny because all the funders are like, |
| 0:31.8 | yeah, AGI is coming in the next five years. If it is, why are you funding these startup companies? |
| 0:35.7 | None of them are survive in an AGI world. |
| 0:37.9 | Welcome to 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited to welcome our guest to the hot seat |
| 0:42.2 | today. Joining us, Ethan Molek. Now, Ethan is one of my favorite writers on AI and his blog. One |
| 0:48.2 | Useful Thing is an absolute must read for me. For those that do not know, Ethan is a professor and co-director of the |
| 0:54.6 | generative AI Lab at Wharton. Now, there's a lot in this show. Time to get the notebooks out. |
| 0:59.5 | Maybe take down the playback speed to a nought point eight X. It is quite fast, but it is an |
| 1:04.6 | incredible discussion today. But before we dive in, when a promising startup files for an IPO |
| 1:09.7 | or a venture capital firm loses |
| 1:11.8 | its marquee partner, being the first to know gives you an advantage and time to plan your |
| 1:16.6 | strategic response. |
| 1:18.1 | Chances are the information reported it first. |
| 1:20.9 | The information is the trusted source for that important first look at actionable news |
... |
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