AMD, Starcloud, Coatue..10 Hot Takes From The Biggest Names in AI

0:00raised raised raised raised raised де psychology Paris is beautiful, but it's hot as...

0:09Paris in the middle of the summer, middle of the heat. People are ignoring it. They're showing up. Okay, we have a very special guest. I know I've said that before, but we really do this time. Coming off the heels of the Jamin interview at KOTU, we have Max Cook of KOTU. Max, welcome. Thank you. Excited to be here. It's pretty nice. It is very nice in this very secret location in Europe, which we cannot talk about. Not disclose the official location, but you've got an old cement wall, which you have many of in Europe. So it might be anywhere. It could be anywhere. It could be a country that Philippe and Thomas know very well.

0:47True. That is true. Cannot confirm, though. No. Okay. So we have to get into this. I think you have a couple of big insights you want to share with us today. I hope they're insights. But yeah, I mean, I have a couple of things I've been thinking about. What's your hottest take? Hottest take might be that the keyboard and mouse are slowly dying. I think. Damn. I think Code 2, you've heard Jamin speak about it. You've heard Philippe and Thomas speak about it. We talk about big tech waves. You went from mainframe to PCs to networking, the PCs to desktop internet, which is where you get a mouse and keyboard to mobile internet, which is where the iPhone supremacy began.

1:29And with each of these big waves, we end up interacting with compute, interacting with computers in a different way. And it seems pretty clear at this point, I think there's a good stat that like the average person has 60 to 80 apps on their phone. They use 11 apps daily on average and 30 apps in any given month. Like it seems quite clear that we're going from a world in in which you have 60 to 80 apps to an agentic AI world where you've got a lot fewer than that, two, three, four apps where everything else plugs in as an API or an MCP. And in that world, it would only make sense that we reinvent how we interact with compute.

2:08It's not the keyboard and the mouse. It's probably natural language. Like if we're talking, we speak in natural language. If you're working with a coworker, you ask them what to do, you figure it out together and you go do it. So I think there's been a number of good discussions about this. Michele from Replit was talking about how natural language is how people communicate. That's clearly the direction we're going in. There's a Greg Brockman quote that I always think about. I'll butcher it. But he had a tweet about, we've always conformed ourselves to computers, like with data, by inputting specific data with a keyboard and a mouse.

2:44And now we're finally entering the era where computers have to conform to us. And so this microphone is reminding me it's already seeing it at Co2, like in the famous Co2 bullpen that you got to see. We've got a number of investors that are whispering into their collar half the day. Really? Because that's how to give models better context, better prompting, and ultimately produces much better work output. So that's my take. The keyboard and mouse, you should throw them away. And we're going to natural language interacting with agentic models. Sounds like bullish on humans. Bullish humans. Yeah.

3:20No, I agree. Yeah. I think, sure, we're building for like an autonomous agentic future, but also there's going to be a lot of that, which is just supercharging humans. That's what we see at Code 2 is all of our analysts, all the investors that are whispering into their caller are producing better and more work output because they're able to more fluidly interact with these models. Like I think the Thinking Machines interaction model demo that came out in May kind of went underloved. There wasn't enough hype around that. Really? Why? Say more. Yeah. I mean, to me, that Thinking Machines interaction model demo was like a bit of a peek into the future.

4:02You're going to interact with compute at all times. It's got to have zero low latency back and forth. It has to be able to input images, understand what you're saying in real time, respond to you. And so I watched that and said, of course, this is going to sit on top of every intelligence layer, every model, every app. That's how we're going to interact with compute. And I think people were excited about it at the time, but haven't necessarily put the dots together between speech to text, interaction models, and thinking about the historical context, which is that every single time we've moved from one era of tech to another, the device has changed and how we interact with that device and with compute has changed.

4:40So I think it's only logical that that's happening again now. Damn. Also sounds like you need Assembly AI's speech models. Definitely. Yeah, I know. There's Assemblies working on it. There's a lot of exciting companies that are working in this space. And I think we'll see what the device ends up looking like. But I think there will be a new format, a new way to interact with AI versus how we used to input data into a structured output via graphical user interfaces, GUIs, apps, keyboards, mice, like to me that we're going to look back in five years and say, of course, we're not using keyboards and mice anymore.

5:17We've come up with a better way to interact with intelligence. All right. So we'll upgrade your wires to Neuralink chips. Yeah. Maybe that's it. I mean, obviously wearables is a place people are spending a lot of time. Neuralink is a place people are spending time. And I don't know what the answer is, but to me, it's a hell of a lot easier to see that the keyboard and mouse are dying a slow death. I can't tell you. It's for smarter people than me, builders, operators, founders, to figure out what the new format looks like. But I think that has to be the direction we're going, where you've got OpenAI coming out with a super app for the first time that's going to introduce almost a billion weekly active users to agents for the first time.

5:57It's going to change how people interact with their phone. and it changed how people want to interact with their phone, and we're going to need something new for that. And probably some MongoDB databases for all those apps. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you've seen it. You've seen it in some of the public software companies already, and private too, Snowflake, Databricks, Datadog, all of these businesses that are tied to growth in AI app production, AI app development, are doing great, and Mongo is going to be the exact same type of story. Amazing. Well, Max. I have one more. You have one. Just wait, there's more.

6:32What is the second hot take? I have one more, just because I've been spending a lot of time on it. Yeah. This one I don't have an answer for, so I'll just leave you with a question that I don't think people have thought enough about. Okay. There's a lot of discussion of open source models versus closed, the frontier, open AI and anthropic right now. A lot of the discussion I see is sort of there's either one is a winner and one is a loser, or the other is a winner and the other is a loser. I think that's totally the wrong way to think about this. I also think there's been some great posts. Jesse Zhang from Decagon posted recently on X about how, I don't want to get his numbers wrong, but I think 90 % of Decagon's workloads run on open source models.

7:14Damn. And that is because they are at kind of production scale. They need low latency. They need to be able to fine tune a model and use a small model for that low latency. That's not a product that Anthropic or OpenAI are offering. offering today. You can't do that with whatever their frontier model is. So they're on 90 % open source, yet at the same time, enterprise LLM spend was 19 % open source last year and it's 11 % this year. So it's dropped. Yet you've got businesses like Decagon telling you that 90 % of their workloads are done via open source. Jesse's explanation, I think is the correct one, which is that open source is good for production grade, like production scale workflows.

8:01Yet we're so early in this AI journey that there's not that many production grade workflows. And so if you are trying to discover a new use case, you want the smartest model you can possibly get. You use the frontier. And I think the question that I don't think is being asked in this open source closed frontier debate is clearly people want to do model routing. People clearly want to fine tune and customize smaller models. I don't think anyone's asking the question of what happens when Anthropic and OpenAI decide we can offer that as a product. I don't know that they're going to do that, but it seems plausible that they would see this opportunity to take their older, cheaper, more efficient, smaller models and sell that as a product.

8:48I wonder if OpenAI will open source. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, as of now, they won't, but model routing, I think will be in their best interest, maybe fine tuning of some kind. So that's like the question I don't think is being asked enough when we consider what is the end state compute ecosystem look like, X percent open, X percent closed. I don't think people are thinking about the idea that like a Microsoft who's saying they can help you build your own model and fine tune that, that Anthropoc and OpenAI could just as feasibly offer that product at some point. Damn. Well, we just had Matan from Factoryon, and he said within his enterprise customers, he saw in the beginning of the year, it was less than 1%, got to 1 % in January.

9:33Then I think it was this month or something like that. I could be quoting this completely wrong, but it got to 10 % open source. Yeah. I mean, you're seeing it on X, which is obviously one of the better places to see some of the people in the forefront and talking about what they're doing. I don't think that's a crazy end state of the world. End state of AI compute, AI inference would be, I don't know, 10 % open source. Like the Decagon, Jesse's article made a ton of sense. If you know all of the parameters of the workflow you're trying to execute, you've thought about all the edge cases, you've used a frontier model to hone that.

10:09then it makes sense that maybe you're actually seeing better capability with an open source model that's fine-tuned or the combination of a frontier model for your hardest tasks and an open source or previous version of a model for your kind of production -grade workflows. Like customer service is a great example of that. But to me, that's really just so early on in terms of what will be the kind of adopted production-grade workflows that are built on top of these AI models that the frontier is, I mean, everything's growing. And so I think that this kind of zero-sum discussion of open versus sourced is missing the point.

10:50And there are a lot of questions that I don't think people are fully thinking about yet. But it's interesting. It's fun to be sitting in a world that we don't know what the end state looks like, but it's our job to at least try to predict what it could be. Amazing two hot takes. And I think where we are, which is not a very large palace in the very random European country, is a good kind of, it's a good symbolism of how far AI has gone. We can now buy palaces. True, true. Yeah, I mean, this is just the early days of the AI. This is just the early days. This is literally just the early days. Look where we are.

11:30So, okay. A lot of room to go. Speaking to that and RAISE, what are you most excited about with RAISE this year? Yeah. I mean, I think the lineup of speakers is amazing. That cuts across, like, the compute layer, infrastructure layer, app layer. There's investors. There's venture investors, public equities investors. And so, to me, to have all these people in one place, to be able to talk about these questions that I'm asking around open source, frontier models, sovereign AI, power constraints, grid bottlenecks. That's what I focus on all day, every day with my colleagues at Cotu. But it's really, really damn fun to get to talk about it with founders, operators, entrepreneurs, and hear what they're thinking on these same topics.

12:13So having all these people in the same place is what I'm most excited for. Amazing. Great place to end it. Thank you so much, Max. Yeah, thanks, Molly. The sun came out for Henri. Henri, thank you so much for having us here in this very secret location. And I think we're in Germany, is that correct? Exactly. We are in the south of Germany. Thanks for being here, Molly. It's going to be a fun night. Thanks for being here and welcome. So tell us about RAISE this year. It's huge and very fancy. Yeah, it's fun. The idea was to bring the German savoir-faire. So we're not in Germany, we're in France.

12:45We can't really disclose where we are. That's part of the night and the whole deal. but it's kind of bringing like a very different iconic experience to a very tech events so we are all in our tech bubble token maxing on a daily basis but it's good to have a bit of a history in our north side right thanks for being here everybody of course I know you're the most popular girl at the party right now so we're gonna keep this really really short what is your hottest take right now so my oldest auto stake is Germany is actually extremely beautiful and we're extremely fortunate to be here. Perfect. Thank you, Henri.

13:19Thank you, Moni. Have a good night. We're here with Pim of General Intuition. Pim, welcome to Sorcery. Thank you for having me. Okay, so for those who don't know what General Intuition is, can you give us a little brief overview? As humans, we can talk or choose to sort of output text as one of the actions we can take, whereas an LLM is kind of the only thing they can do. So we train models that can predict lots of different actions where text is just a subset, which is a much more general approach in LLMs. And what is your hottest take today? Most of AI is just glorified data science. Damn. Say more.

13:56Good models mostly are downstream from good data and simple things. So what are you most bullish on in that respect? Really good data sets for the most part. Where do you store that data? I cannot disclose that. Well, if you need to store your data, put it in MongoDB databases. No, no, no, no. Okay. All right. Any other hot takes? Yeah. Jan LeCun is underrated. You think Jan LeCun is underrated? Why? The friends just told me to say that. I pulled into a room and they were like, you have to say this. And I'm saying, no more comment. No more comment? He's got to walk away now. I may walk out of here.

14:38I may not. Damn. Okay, see you, Pim. Oh my God. Hi. Okay, we're here with Mark, CTO of AMD. Mark, welcome to Sorcery. Thank you, Molly. Glad to be here. Amazing. We're in a very secret location in a European location. I just, we can't, you don't know where we are, but it's very secret. Okay, so I have to ask you. We're at the RAISE Summit. AI is booming. What is your hottest take right now? The hottest take is people don't even understand how transformational agentic AI is. It's just transforming how work gets done. Just entire end-to-end workflows are being reimagined. And I think it's starting to come out when you hear some of the stories this week at Ray's.

15:23And what is your biggest lesson that you learned in the last maybe two or three years of this boom at AMD? Well, AMD, we got ahead of it. We've worked to getting our CPUs and GPUs ready for this. And now with these agentic workflows, you actually need both. In fact, the ratio of CPU to GPU is becoming like one to one. But none of us anticipated how fast these agentic workflows would just take off. The last six months have just been amazing. And it's just a harbinger of what's yet to come. We're just at the early stages. How many agents are you using today? Every day I start with agents. They run my day, look at what's coming up.

16:01But what's really cool is how we do our chip design. We have thousands of sub-agents just doing incredibly complex chip design, speeding how fast we can get the next generation to market. Amazing. Okay, as the drums roll, what are you most excited about with RAISE this year? RAISE, well, it starts with the President of France and ends with Yann LeCun. I think we got it bounded pretty well here. No, it's great. It's really great speakers. I think we're going to really hear some insights across every facet of the AI ecosystem. Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Mark. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Molly.

16:38Okay, we're here with Robin of Black Forest Labs, again at a secret location in Europe. Robin, welcome to Sorcery. Thank you. Hi. Nice to meet you. Nice to see you. I saw you a couple months ago. Really? Where? In London at the Legends Gala. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tough night. Anyways, okay. So for people who don't know, what is Black Forest Labs? We are building multimodal visual models for content creation and for now physical AI. Amazing. And so we were talking about a couple hot takes earlier, but I'm really curious. What is your take on open versus closed? Open source versus closed?

17:27I mean, you can approach this from so many different angles, but I think the most important one is that open innovation is good for the world. And I think fear mongering around AI models is only going to lead to them being more close, and that's ultimately going to slow down all AI progress. And I think ultimately it's super important that AI is actually an accessible technology. It's also going to make it more safe in here. I think that's something that is a pretty fundamental principle. If you don't think about business models that you build around open versus closed doors and all of that, then you can start to be more elaborate.

18:05But I think fundamentally, open innovation is good for the world. Is it open rates? Is it open source? It doesn't really matter in the end, but I think having accessible AI models is key. So you're based in Black Forest, Germany. we're here in Europe and there's a nice convergence of European tech and American and Silicon Valley everything that's converging over here what should people know that aren't from Europe about what's actually going on in European tech right now I think it's getting better it's there's not enough going on yet I would say even though I don't know there's like a fancy event like this.

18:49Like it looks really nice, right? But I think like what really matters in the end is that Europe is not known for having like, I don't know, nice castles and stuff like that, but actually nice AI or nice technology. And I think that's something that, yes, it's changing. And I think like events like that where a lot of people come here, I think that's a good start. But ultimately, there needs to be like a fundamental mindset to really push AI innovation from here as well. I know you're super excited about the RAISE Summit. So what makes you so excited? I'm not going to answer this question. Seeing all your friends, maybe?

19:23No, it's great. Yeah. I mean, there's like so many good people here. I think it's fantastic. Perfect place to end it. Thank you so much, Robin. Great to see you. Thank you. This episode is brought to you by Brex, my favorite. You become what you spend on. And I refuse to spend my time on work that shouldn't exist. expense reports, receipt chasing, and manual closes. The companies building what's next from Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic, Granola, and Deepgram all made the same call. They all run on Brex. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that combines cards, expenses, and banking into a single stack with agentic finance built in.

20:04AI agents that handle expenses automatically, enforce policy before spend happens, and close your books in minutes. That's why Sorcery runs on Brex, so I can spend time on building and not busy work. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash sorcery. That's B-R-E-X dot com slash S-O-U-R-C-E-R-Y. Bye. We have a very special guest here today. We have Matan of Factory. Matan, how are the droids doing? The droids are doing well. The factory is growing. Very excited on things that have been happening. Are the droids in Europe with us right now? The droids are in Europe. They recently made the jump across the pond.

20:48A lot of the largest banks and enterprises in Europe are now automating their software engineering with droids and with factory. We're very excited about it. So we have a very difficult question for you today. What is your hottest take? My hottest take is that in the next 12 months, 90 % of tokens will be going to open models. Now, not all the tokens, and maybe not the most important tokens, but I think, you know, BigToken has been spewing some propaganda against Chinese models, which is, you know, how they're labeling the open models. And I think, in fact, these open models are incredibly performant, incredibly cheap, incredibly fast.

21:32And there is going to be a an important use for them in kind of the portfolio of models. I think still the frontier closed models will have a place, but I think that place will be shrinking at least in token share. Maybe not in cost, but in token share. Are you measuring the switches on your side? Yes. And at the beginning of the year, we saw enterprises were using less than 1 % open models, like less than 1 % of their tokens were going to open models. Then in around March, it kind of crossed that 1 % threshold. And then in May, it crossed the 10 % threshold. So it's growing pretty quickly because of the kind of cost optimization.

22:06And also, like, you know, not every task you need Opus 4.8 or like GPT 5.6 ultra high. And many tasks day to day you do are very simple. And, you know, at Factory, we will actually dynamically route you to whichever kind of open or cheaper model is better for that task. What's your prediction for percentage of open usage by the end of the year? By the end of the year, I think we'll probably get to, at least in the enterprise, we'll probably cross the 50 % threshold by the end of this calendar year. Oh my God. Breaking news. This is crazy. Okay, as we finish up, anything else you want to share?

22:44What are you most excited about for Raze? I'm most excited, honestly, about AI making its way into Europe. They haven't been as urgent about it, but I think this is kind of a sign that AI is making its way across the pond. People really care about it. There are a lot of businesses that can benefit dramatically from some of the kind of aggressive, sometimes too aggressive moves that people have been making in the United States. Excited to see more of that urgency in Europe. And there are a lot of great companies that it's fun to work with here. Amazing. Thank you so much, Matan. Thanks for having me.

23:17We have Philip Johnston of StarCloud, one of the hottest companies in space right now. Philip, how's it going? It's going great. Thanks very much for having me on the podcast. How does it feel to be in SpaceX's S1? Amazing. I mean, to be honest, I was not expecting that. And the article they quoted me in, to be honest, I'm very surprised they picked that one to quote me. What did they quote? So I had to write. As part of doing the World Economic Forum, like Davos thing, you have to write an article. And I basically very rapidly threw together an article on data centers in space. I guess because it was WEF they picked that one.

23:56But yeah, I'm surprised they picked that one. It must have been really good. Okay, so we have to ask you, we're here on Earth, but what is your hottest take right now? My hottest take right now is that the SpaceX IPO is going to be viewed historically as the most undervalued IPO of all time. I think they will tear through 10 trillion within, certainly within the next couple of years, and then have almost unlimited time for what they're building. So in historical terms, it will be viewed incredibly undervalued. This is not investment advice, but why are you so bullish? I'm not regulated by anybody, so I'm going to tell people, just buy this basic stock.

24:37I think it's a great stock to buy. No, but it's mainly because Space, not just because of Orbital Data Centers, which we're doing, which lots of other people are doing. They own what will be by far the most cost-effective launch vehicle. and then that opens up every industry in space that will be possible beyond that. So that's all of asteroid mining, lunar resource mining, all of the comms businesses that are going to be built. Everything else is going to have to go through SpaceX. Yeah, it's like owning the railroads. Lots of businesses will be built on top of it, like our business will be built on top of it.

25:10But the railroads are a great business to own, for sure. So there are a handful of chip companies here this week. We're speaking with Cerebris, SambaNova, we just spoke with the CTO of AMD. Do you have a favorite chip? We welcome all chips. We're actually going to be flying. We're speaking with SambaNova. We hope to fly the SambaNova chip. With Cerebris, they're an incredible inference chip. We hope to fly their chip. Within NVIDIA, the GroKar texture actually can be potentially well suited for space as well. We flew an ARM chip on our first space car. We threw three ARM GPUs on our first space car.