20VC: Why Foundation Model Performance is Not Diminishing But Models Are Commoditising, Why Nvidia Will Enter the Model Space and Models Will Enter the Chip Space & The Right Business Model for AI Software with David Luan, Co-Founder @ Adept

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The Twenty Minute VC

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4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 24 June 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Luan is the CEO and Co-Founder at Adept, a company building AI agents for knowledge workers. To date, David has raised over $400M for the company from Greylock, Andrej Karpathy, Scott Belsky, Nvidia, ServiceNow and WorkDay. Previously, he was VP of Engineering at OpenAI, overseeing research on language, supercomputing, RL, safety, and policy and where his teams shipped GPT, CLIP, and DALL-E. He led Google's giant model efforts as a co-lead of Google Brain.

In Today's Episode with David Luan We Discuss:

1. The Biggest Lessons from OpenAI and Google Brain:

What did OpenAI realise that no one else did that allowed them to steal the show with ChatGPT?
Why did it take 6 years post the introduction of transformers for ChatGPT to be released?
What are 1-2 of David's biggest lessons from his time leading teams at OpenAI and Google Brain?

2. Foundation Models: The Hard Truths:

Why does David strongly disagree that the performance of foundation models is at a stage of diminishing returns?
Why does David believe there will only be 5-7 foundation model providers? What will separate those who win vs those who do not?
Does David believe we are seeing the commoditization of foundation models?
How and when will we solve core problems of both reasoning and memory for foundation models?

3. Bunding vs Unbundling: Why Chips Are Coming for Models:

Why does David believe that Jensen and Nvidia have to move into the model layer to sustain their competitive advantage?
Why does David believe that the largest model providers have to make their own chips to make their business model sustainable?
What does David believe is the future of the chip and infrastructure layer?

4. The Application Layer: Why Everyone Will Have an Agent:

What is the difference between traditional RPA vs agents?
Why is agents a 1,000x larger business than RPA?
In a world where everyone has an agent, what does the future of work look like?
Why does David disagree with the notion of "selling the work" and not the tool?
What is the business model for the next generation of application layer AI companies?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	What opening I realized before basically everybody but deep mind was that the next phase of AI after
0:05.4	Transformer was not going to be about research paper writing. It was going to be about let's choose a
0:11.6	major unsolved scientific problem and just try to solve it. The second way of improving model
0:16.9	performance is just starting to be tapped now. And that's also going to absorb a boatload
0:21.1	of compute. Because of that, I actually am not worried about the diminishing returns to the compute
0:25.6	over time. I think every Tier 1 cloud provider existentially needs to win here.
0:30.2	This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And today we're joined by one of the most prominent
0:34.2	founders in the world of AI, David Luan, CEO and co-founder at Adept,
0:39.0	the company building AI agents for knowledge workers. To date, David has raised over $400 million
0:45.2	for the company from Greylock, Andre Capathi, Scott Belski, NVIDIA, service now on work, data, name
0:51.7	a few. And before co-founding Adept, he was the VP of Engineering
0:55.2	at OpenAI, where his teams shipped GPT and Dali. Before that, David Lagg Google's giant model
1:02.2	efforts as a co-lead of Google Brain. This is an incredible in-depth discussion. Some very controversial
1:08.4	actual opinions here that go against quite a lot of the views that we've heard in recent weeks on the commoditization of models and also on the future pricing model of AI software.
1:17.6	But before we dive into the show today, we're all trying to grow our businesses here.
1:21.6	So let's be real for a second. We all know that your website shouldn't be this static asset. It should be a dynamic part of
1:28.8	your strategy that really drives conversions. That's marketing 101. But here's a number for you.
1:34.8	54% of leaders say web updates take too long. That's over half of you listening right now.
1:41.0	And that's where Webflow comes in in their visual first platform allows you to
1:44.9	build launch and manage web experiences fast that means you can set ambitious marketing goals
1:51.1	and your site can rise to the challenge plus webflow allows your marketing team to scale without
1:56.9	relying on engineering freeing your dev team to focus on more fulfilling work.
	...

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