20VC: Why Scaling Laws Will Not Continue | OpenAI vs Anthropic vs X.ai: Who Wins and Why | How Far Will Model Providers Go Into the Application Layer | The End State for Models: Many Specialised or Few Generalised with Victor Riparbelli @ Synthesia

22:49I think it's very clear we're going to have very capable AI that can produce software. I also think when I speak to a lot of developers that I mean, we're not at the point yet, right, where you just like sit down and say, hey, build me like get the next social network with these functionalities and just comes up with it. I think building software is a lot harder than that. And I think what we see a lot with I have seen the last two years, a lot of like cool demos. And that's great. That's a good start, right? But what we really want to see is this like applied mass scale in production. Because you can prompt like a Tetris game, the browser or something like that.

23:18That's great. But if you look at most software out there today, it's very complex. And it's not just technology, right? The humans, it's customers, it's feedback loops. And I don't think we're anywhere near being able to, um, to automate those things. But I definitely think that a great software engineer will be way more productive in the next six, 12 to 18 months. But there's like, there's some like podcast and point, it's basically 12, it 12 months ago. Also, friend, is that right? In the future, it's going to be, you're just going to go on to whatever LLM. You're just going to say, make me a copy of Monday .com.

23:46You're going to deploy it. You're going to sell it at one cent of the price. It's going to be great. All the existing content are that. And I think that's like a really, really naive view of what it's like to build a business. Technology and lines of code is super important. But as you know, you've built your company yourself. It goes way deeper than that. And I think it really, for me, that's things that people who've never built operate a company. But it also assumes that you're going to continue to see upgrade and improve them yourself. Can you imagine having to continue to see upgrade and improve 150 different internal tools?

24:14Oh, totally agree. Unbelievable. I've been speaking kind of rational and clear mindset around where we are today. I think everyone acknowledges that we're seeing the complete commoditization of foundation models. Do you agree with that from what you see? And how do you see the foundation model landscape evolving? For sure. I think we'll come back to as it always does like distribution this king and great products are king and of course There will be new lalms. They'll be better and more powerful than as everyone else excites you what gpt5 kind of has in store But I do think we are seeing the commodization of the text generation layer right for most of the use cases that We'll see lalms transform the world's we know it today.

24:56I think the current generation technology is good enough It's about of course improving the base models, but it's a lot about like building the product to scaffolding around it I definitely think we are seeing that right like if if we're seeing like X and Elon Musk catching up like pretty quickly And probably has a really great product a lot of people prefer those models over open a eyes Open AI has a huge distribution mode and I think they've really managed to capture like the consumer Version of the world here, and that's definitely going to be really viable But I think it's a lot of distribution product going on.

25:23So you've got 10 million dollars, okay? and you can put it in OpenAI at 160, Anthropic at 60, or Axe at 50. Which one would you do? I would do X because I think there's the most asymmetric upside if Elon delivers what he usually does. We've all heard of some of the data that he built like 10 days or something, right? I think I would just never bet against Elon and I think the upside potential there is. I mean, it's huge. And I also think that I think the fact that he owns X is really, really powerful. Opening it, I clearly manage to capture like the consumer as in like the destination that you go to to use an LLM.

26:01I think we'll see LLM being a part of like many different apps. And I think owning X along with building the LLM is actually really powerful, especially for the real time information that we have to feed into the models directly from X and the fact that X of course already has like conditional uses that, that in theory at least could start using their LLM rather than going to. What is the differentiator that will create the winner? Is it data? Is it, you know, a lot of people said to me, Axe because of Elon's access to compute. Is it distribution by OpenAI? I would win. Is it data where you could say OpenAI or ask for win?

26:35Which one is it? Clearly, there are still gains to be made from scaling. I think especially if you look outside the texture main, but like in video, audio, etc. 3D. So you agree that scaling rules will continue. I think they will continue, but I don't think it's just going to be linearly like whoever has the most compute is going to win. the world rarely works in those ways. Something will happen, right? Someone will come up with an algorithm that can, that is like 10, 100 times as efficient as what it is today. I think compute is important, but I actually also think data is, actually I would say compute algorithms and data maybe.

27:05I think algorithms, but everyone is trying to build into models in AI systems today is controlled, right? We've proven these things extremely capable at replicating the real world, producing video that looks real, audio that looks real, text that sounds real, But what we all really want to do is like get a deeper level of control over these things in my world Right, it's like you have some of the big video generation models I can't tell you anything what we do versus like what soror does of runways But the big soror and runway these models extremely capable extremely powerful right to type something in basically anything you type in It'll actually spit out and that's really really powerful and it's a great demo But to really be able to use this you have to be able to say I want this same character in a different scene I want the character to say this particular like there's so many like layers of control And those are very hard to build in because every time we try to build them in it decreases the overall like fidelity Because all of a sudden you're trying to make the model to do what you wanted to do rather than just replicate whatever it really kind of looks like And so I think getting those layers of control in is going to be difficult I think that is going to be a lot of algorithms figured out like to what extent is Grox slack of layers of control a problem or a benefit?

28:10Well, it is controlled to like content moderation and then there is like in controlling the output, right? So the thing that I'm talking about here is like it's a slot machine kind of thing. Type something in, you get something out. Then you try and change the problem, but you pull the slot machine again, right? And it's very frustrating for trying to get to something specific, because the model doesn't really put it out. You want to have something we have control in there. I think of the moderation, that'll be interesting to see how it's going to pan out, right? I think we're definitely in the middle of like a vibe shift with soccer, where I'm also pulling back moderation, which I think in general, I'm in favor of that.

28:40I don't think that like humans moderating content is the right way forward. I think community notes. Do you think that made the right decision to pull back on moderation? Well, it's in the statement. I don't have the actual details of it, but I think it is directionally correct that having humans sitting down and evaluating content is not the right way of doing it. I think what we've seen with products like Wikipedia, for example, is that the collective power of people working together to arrive at some sort of truth is really, really powerful. And I think community notes is kind of like taking that Wikipedia way of thinking about the world and trying to implement that into every single piece of content And it's not easy and it's not solved yet, but I do think that is the right way for us to have something to give control of like what people do and say.

29:19What gets really messy is this kind of like gray content. We have the product that's enthusiastic as well. We have a, we have a, basically a product internally for content moderation. The hard thing is you have the, what we call the green content. The content that everyone agrees is great. That's 99 .9 % of the content. You have the red content, HBG, violence. Most people will agree that that's bad as well. then you have all the gray middle and that's where it gets difficult. And then this is the content that Sock is talking about here where he's going to let off controls. This is essentially like you're making cryptocurrency content, for example.

29:48When is it like a really enthusiastic entrepreneur who just started a new kind that he or she definitely thinks got to change the world? When is it an outright fraud of like trying to get well -meaning people to put their dump their money into something they think is going to go up 10x? Those lines are very difficult to draw, right? Well, and like, bluntly, it's synthesized liable. are you the Arbitra of Justice or more is good or what isn't also if something is an opinionated rant that I put out there. Maybe it's right and fat but it upsats a lot of people. Do you see what I mean? A you the Arbitra of right and wrong?

30:18So today we are and that's a decision that we have made. We had a lot of discussion about this in terms of like how do you put our approach to this problem and for me again comes back to the customers right when enterprise product it's important that the avatar that we have are not seen to be used in all sorts of like wacky content online. We don't, as a company, have, we don't see ourselves as having to uphold any kind of right of free speech. And frankly, from a business perspective, having someone pay me $30 a month to create a very questionable conspiracy content, it's just not good business.

30:50So for me, all of those things kind of lined up right up our enterprise clients, they don't want avatar to be affiliated with content that doesn't kind of like match the brand and economic versus it just doesn't make sense. So we've taking a very strict approach, which means that we are actually going and being the arbiter of truth. And we definitely have people who are unhappy with that. Stay on models before we go down this rabbit hole. Just in terms of models, I obviously speak to many investors over the last 18 months and when syntheses come up, bluntly they've said like, amazing and amazing what they've done, but open AI are going to move into this.

31:20This is the most obvious play for open AI to move into this and customer service is always kind of the tea. How far do you think model providers go in the application land? How do you assess that? I think this is like classical VC brain. Too much focus on the technology, right? Like, you know, you speak to a, I think this big misconception about Tunthi's years that we're like an avatar company. And it's kind of a fair something to make because you go to a website if you like, you know, see about us online, like, advertisers are a headline feature for the company, right? It's one of things that made us where we are today.

31:50If you're going to talk to our customers, they don't buyers for the avatar model. They buy us for the workflow. Like the way we've taken the entire video value chain, we get an idea, so you make it fast for that video. You don't have to use a camera or a voice over artist, right, because we have the AI models. We give you a great editor, like using PowerPoint or Canva. We give you a distribution mechanic with an AI video player that's made to serve multi -langual content like Lyskukko on and on, right? Talk to our customers today. The reason we have a million dollar plus contracts is not because people are like, oh, I wanna make an avatar video.

32:19It's because they wanna convey a message to someone and I want to do that with the highest efficiency and engagement and in the best workflow frankly speaking. And that is so much more than just the models. So of course, we want to win on the models and we are going to win on the models. And our specific niche here is human -presenting content, right? Whereas all the other companies, yes, Sora, one way, all these guys are doing amazing AI video things, but they have a much, much wider merit of what they're doing. They're trying to build true foundation model video models. And maybe we'll be cost of those one day, maybe we'll be partners.

32:48The only thing I care about right now is voiceovers and humans presenting to the camera. And I think in that niche, and if you take the entire platform as a whole, that's how we win. I think that's something we're going to see the next couple of years. Is that the winning companies are going to be the ones that are not overly obsessed about the AI component of their platforms, but who build for workflow. And I think, you know, as I move into going to 2025, models, super important for us, but expanding across the value chain we increase the publisher of videos for our customers as well, which means that instead of like using YouTube or another kind of enterprise video hosting platform, they use us directly.

33:24And I think that's where you're gonna see a lot of the value being created. There's gonna be a few foundational companies, they'll be very big, they'll power, they already power us with, of course we use OpenAI, we use FraPick. What do you use most and has that changed over time? We're most using OpenAI. Is that shifting mode of anthropic? Yeah, we shift some workloads to Anthropic. We're also using Gemini actually. I think in general sense is that it's a lot about pricing. Some models are definitely better at things than others, but we have a lot of workloads that have big workloads, moderation, for example, one of them.

33:55So I think pricing is important, and again, like the scaffolding infrastructure around it. How did you think about the question of whether to build your own models? How do you think about that? We only want to build models if we think we can be the best in the world at it, which in general for us means that it's a narrow domain and that it is directly tied to a bigger workflow. And so we always work backwards from what our customers are trying to do. If we think we'd be the best in the world at it and we think there are compounding advantages of building that model, then it's great for us. And what that means very, you know, specifically is that for humans presenting to camera, the dialogue driven content, that's what we want to be the best in the world at it.

34:31Do you think in the future we will have a world of many smaller models that are specialized? Or do we have as three general massive models? I think there will be some concentration for sure in the big companies, but it's kind of interesting because like specialized models, right? It's still very technology -centric. I think there'll be many, many, many different products that people use in their daily lives to run their businesses. And a lot of those will probably use models that are like an open source thing that's kind of like tuned specifically for something and integrated into like an overall platform.

35:02And if you think of that as a specialized model, then yeah, it's a big build, see a lot of specialized models, but it's very like tech industry to talk about models all the time, right? Like, I think most people, we will interact with models like we do in in chat, GPs, you whatever today for sure. But a lot of like the things that you want to notice as consumer when you're just like using someone else's platform or product, there'll be a lot of like workflows in the background that also driven by LLMs. You'll definitely see a lot of companies building their own specialized LLMs, right? But I think we should think more about like products than models.

35:31Final one on models then. We're too much by models. Final one on models. GPT -5 has taken so long, dude. Everyone is like, ah, when's it coming? It's been delayed, delayed, delayed. How do you think about the delay? And do you think it will support expectations or fall beneath the money it does release? I think it's going to be incredibly difficult to do anything that can mirror the chat -gifty moment when it first came out. As humans, I think we saturate incredibly easy. We often forget how crazy, just like GPT -3, actually is when you use it right. So my sense is that when they release something it'll probably be good and it'll probably be a whole bunch of Technos will be very excited about all the things you can now do and maybe I'm wrong and it's just like Super Intelligent thing they'll just like self -improve and save the world but I think it'll come out It'll be like good will be definitely better than the previous things But I think most people will not like care that much because the bar for someone to really care that much is incredibly high right and And there's all this talk about is it like a AGI is not a GI and I think all those things kind of riddle but like what's the definition of of AGI, right?

36:36If you took chat GPC 200 years back in time, right? In England, and you showed someone this magical thing you've built, you'd be burned at the stake. If you did it 50 years ago, people would death rethink, this is AGI, I am talking to a computer that knows everything about the world, this is absolutely batshit, right? And then today, we'll be like, ah, it's just a stochastic parent. And I don't know where the, what's true or what's not true there. I think it'll be very powerful. I don't think it'll have as much as kind of like the, the cultural moment that chat -duty created initially. And as I said earlier, I think elements of this that there'll be like a small group of people who really can't deeply about what benchmarked as it worked again, then it's like slightly better in this area and in this area.

37:14And I think that's awesome, but I think for the average business around the world, the current models are already pretty good, I can solve a lot of problems. One of my favorite quotes is Eleanor Roosevelt. And this is what I aspire to, not necessarily what I am clearly. But she said great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and small minds discuss people. But I want to discuss the future across a couple of different segments with that in mind and like discussing ideas. When we look at the future of content creation, this is my life, dude. What is the future of content creation that like in say five years?

37:47I think when it happened in very broad strokes is that we democratized distribution with the internet. There are no gatekeepers, anyone can make a website, everyone can share that content online. That's been really, really powerful. Then we saw, to some extent, the democratization of content creation, because all of our smartphones have cameras in them, the price of camera equipment dropped, and all those things, which, I mean, this set up like 30 years ago, would probably have been like 100x the price. What is this today? What's about to happen now is that we're truly going to democratize content creation.

38:15We're going to change the world of making content from something that you need to, where we capture things with sensors in the physical world, to being able to generate everything digitally, right? And that's gonna have huge implications. When you think about text, that's just like a fabric of society. You don't really think that much about text, right? But text went through this journey of like, you know, the printing press is like one of the first really big inventions around text. Then we went to the keyboard, the computers, and now text is everywhere and everyone can create content all the time.

38:39It's entirely digital, right? And that's really powerful. With something like music, we've somewhat also seen that go from being something we generally do in the real world and capture what senses to something we can do digitally. So most music today is not made with real instruments. right, it's made with software instruments. I can recreate almost any song I want without real instruments, right? I can synthesize that on my computer. And that changed the music industry in many, many, many, many different ways, right? And I think we're going to start to see the same with the video and audio industry, where you are going to be able to bring your ideas to life without needing much more than just your imagination.

39:13And this is going to have a whole bunch of effects. Most obvious one is that the price of creating content is going to go to zero, just like it costs you nothing today to write a book. Everything is free. In the not -to -distant future, the price of creating a Hollywood film from a purely technical perspective, I think it's gonna be zero as well. That's gonna be, we're gonna have the LOOSH of content, an absolute deluge of content. It means that people like yourself, YouTube creators that can compete with Hollywood in terms of what they can bring to life. Today there's still the separation of Hollywood content, so all the Netflix series that we watch, the really high production value things, and then there's the YouTubers, You can do like prank videos and podcast and kind of like fun things But like even for you right be very difficult for you to make like a Hollywood stop Because it's be like it'd be very very very expensive right that's gonna like flatline Which means that the best ideas and the best content is gonna win and I think that's gonna be pretty I think we are so far away from this.

40:06This is someone who creates content for a daily living When I look at the clipping tools they are so far off what my team is able to do upstairs It's incomparable. I don't see that being two years out. There's a lot of knowledge involved. It's highly ambiguous. What bits important of this episode, depending on what we wanted to achieve, we could totally cut six different bits as being the best for a highlight reel. And so I find these like clipping tools as hey, everyone's democratized. I think content's less democratized than ever. Yeah, and I totally agree with you. I think a very important delineation is when I say that you're just going to join imagination that doesn't mean that it doesn't require skill.

40:45Right. It means that the kind of sort of technical barriers, you don't need to have a camera anymore. You don't need to be necessarily like amazing at visual effects. A lot of the stuff will be able to be done automatically, but it'll be more, put more emphasis than ever on being a great star hoteler on understanding what's important. On asking the right questions on if you're creating fictional content, combining things that work in the cultural side guys, but still stands out a little bit enough that it's like interesting for people to watch. Right. So I think all those things will be more important than ever.

41:11Well, it would be less important, well, knowing the right people to distribute your content, having spent like eight years and becoming the world's best visual effects artist because you can get a lot of help with that from AI systems. But the storytelling piece is going to remain exactly the same. And I also think what we are going to see is that the value of like real content is going to be higher than ever because we have a lot of AI generic content. And I think that'll be a genre of itself. But just like we still like to watch people play piano or know that someone that the artist we're watching is actually like a real person.

41:40I think that will carry over to this world as well. Well, we have more human -made or AI -made content in five years. Definitely AI -made content for sure. But I think what's actually more important is what content surface is, right? Because if you go to YouTube today, I mean, it's like, I don't know what this data is, but it's probably like 95 % of all videos have like less than 10 views or something. So the content is there. It's a matter of like what actually gets surfaced. Well, this is my point, which is when you reduce the cost as much as we are here with AI, and we increase supply side so much.

42:10What is the future of discovery? I think a lot about this. And I think TikTok is actually a really great product, potentially like a bit of an unpopular opinion. When I look at my TikTok feed today, I would say it's 90 % highly informative, educational, really great content. It's about music production, it's about the music that I like, it's about politics, about tech, I see your face once in a while. I think it's an amazing feed of interesting people. What TikTok has done really well is that they built the graph based on your interest not on your kind of social connections It's a bit of that as well.

42:43And I think that model is actually extremely powerful What I do want to see is a bit more control over your algorithm Right, so today is basically like I think everyone has this like intuitive thing Which is like if you see content you don't want to see more if you swipe really quickly because you know that the algorithm But kind of notice that you swipe quickly path that so you're kind of almost trading the algorithm yourself I think that's like an awesome way of doing it But a bit more control maybe we can say like these particular topics just don't show to me I'm not interested in it and then I also think what TikTok has done really well is because they have this like really great interest graph There are a lot of people who are very interested in specific areas when you post a piece of content yourself They basically show that content to like a couple of hundred of people and they quickly sense to those hundred people like the content I'm not like the content right and if you they don't like the content you go in the trash If someone kind of likes a little bit, they'll show to a bit more people and they'll try to figure out what's actually great content I mean, if you look at TikTok's usage, right, I think that's very clearly working really well.

43:36Should TikTok be banned? I tend to believe that as a moral panic, more than anything, clearly TikTok is built in amazing products. I don't think it's a brainwashing machine. I don't think it's a propaganda machine. My thing is like the integration of social media, which is like to your point, you said it's educational, it's about music. Mine is like motivational speeches, air -fry recipes, and like workout routines. Mine is highly additive to my life in positive ways. just like a diet can be chocolate and sweets or, you know, vegetables and fruit. You choose your own content diet and that is a human responsibility.

44:11I think it's unfair to demonize social. I totally agree. And I think that's the paradox because probably for you, maybe for me, like we built our go to to be productive to our lives. We're kind of starting to find our way into like how do we build a really awesome media ecosystem that is driven by citizens and experts rather than journalists and politicians. and where we still have some of the control that you can argue has been good around that the previous generation of media where a few corporations owned the newspapers and this is like chain of command of like before content goes out the doors been reviewed by like six different people and I think what just always happens in the world is that we invent new things as humans and we learn as we go right and there's definitely some negative consequences.

44:51I don't think anyone would disagree with that but I think we are finding our way. I'm actually very optimistic about the future moving into. I also think the quality of the content that you consume is inherently better. I mean, this in the nicest way, but I think the content that we produce on Vantricapital is inherently 10 times better than the content that adjournless to a large publication produces, because it's my job day in day out. I live and breathe this. Yep, exactly. Exactly. It'll take talk, like a few months back, but I actually talk about this. But I actually talk about this because I think this...

45:21You did it, Ted, at all. I did a tech talk. Dude, he made it. Big things. I say it round. No, what I actually talk about there is that my kind of like provocative opening statements that we made with the last generation to read and write, right? And I think there's a lot of like moral panic about TikTok, for example, like our people's attention spans like decreasing massively and maybe those are real problems, but what if we're just tired of overly dense, long, boring content? And that actually a two minute long TikTok video is a better way of understanding a topic than a 20 -minute long YouTube video, which is a better way of understanding a topic than a 300 -page book.

45:57What do you say to the fact that we just then dopamine junkies getting jacked on two -minute clips because we can't be asked to read a five -minute piece? I think with dopamine junkies for everything. Like, that's how we govern our lives most of the time, right? I mean, I totally get the analogy, but is it all the dopamine diction if you do sports every day? Whatever thing you do that makes you feel good, I think most of the things we do is to try and make ourselves feel good in some way. One of the problems is I don't see miss you so fraught. How do you think about the future of identity verification?

46:26Both for you and cross -platform. I do think we need some degree of identity verification for some of the big spaces that we use. I think we need to know somewhat where content comes from. Who created it? When was it created? How was it created? So I think we need identity verification to some extent. But I also think we need to take that all the way down to kind of like the content level. So if you imagine that you think of printed, you know, Shasam, the app on your phone. Of course. Yeah. If you imagine you had like a Shasam, but for every single piece of content and then they could tell, hey, this picture was originally uploaded, you know, like five years ago, it was uploaded the first time by like Harry, maybe in the future, it all said like this was like partly made with syntheses here.

46:59You watch it at the top version. So this is kind of like AI for translation, whatever like kind of signals we can give around content. If you had that and identity verification and community notes, every time you scrolled past a piece of content, you would see if it's verified or not verified. And today, everything, well, this changed a bit now, right? But used to be that only celebrities had like verified Why was that? Well, that's because a lot of people try to make an account pretending to be some celebrity. And so as a consumer, when you see that trusted verified sign, that tells you that that's actually the celebrity posting that content, right?

47:29I think we should try and flip that around so that everyone and all content is kind of verified. If we have the provenance trail of it, we know kind of where it came from. Maybe I was created and small kind of things around and that'll give you like a green check mark on that content. And it should stick out like a sore thumb is something is not verified. So if there isn't a fingerprint for the content if we don't know where it's from that should be the thing it sticks out Not the kind of verified sign on a celebrity's page does that make sense? Yeah, does that be does that inherently lower the value of your content?

47:54I would lower the eye of the content because your content is AI generators that wouldn't have the green take no because I think that I think we're right now Like is it real or is it fake? We're all in a world where like most content that we consume today is in some to some extent fake Right like most pictures on Instagram have been like touched up in some way shape of form when it leaves the sensor They already like color corrections and whole body of other things and so I think this line will just increasingly blur and I think it'll be less about how you made something and More about the content itself you could make you know a video if you're you talking about something and a couple of years No, I will be able to tell if it's actually real or not But it won't really matter that much what matters is that you made it right and that whatever you say in that video is something that you Actually wanted to say more than how you made it It's a bit like we don't care if content uses green screen today I don't care that much if when you go to see a Hollywood film right I know that's fiction but you don't care how it's made, you care if it's a good film or it's a bad film.

48:44You should evaluate content based on the content itself. And in here, how it was produced certainly is a signal, but it's all the signals. Winner was produced, who produced it? Are you watching the original version? Are you watching an edited version of it? It's really hard, right? It's not because it's right around the corner, but you can imagine a world where you can begin to build a chain of where was content originally created? What happened to it since? Are you watching an edited version? Maybe you're watching a 25 second outtake from Harry's podcast show, and you want to watch the full segment, click here.

49:12You can trace it back to actually watch the full episode. We can't begin to build these kind of things. And the reason I mentioned Chasam is that Chasam exists because this was a commercial problem for essentially YouTube, right? Record companies were telling them, hey, people are uploading videos on YouTube, but they're using copyrighted music. We're gonna sue you out of existence if you don't fix this problem and pay us some money. As in what did they do? Well, okay, what we have to detect if something is actually copyrighted, right? So when you upload a video to YouTube, as I'm sure you know, they'll scan it And if it's copyright amusing in it, it'll take it down.

49:41Or most of the time, we'll just put an ad in the middle of it and it'll pay something back to the license holders. Now, what's actually happening here, right, is that you're uploading a piece of content. And in, I mean, milliseconds, that piece of content is held up against a database of billions of songs from that little short clip, like a four -second clip of a song. It actually identifies milliseconds what song it is. And if it's a copyrighted song, they'll put something in there. So if you imagine that happened as well, you upload a video, and I upload a video on my channel with maybe with this interview, right?

50:11But I've caught out 10 minutes of it. You'll just say this is actually a piece of, of this is a clip from Harry's original podcast, which was released two weeks prior to Victor put in his YouTube channel. If you want to watch a full thing, you click to it here. So we begin to build this like chain of content, we can identify where things came from. That does require we have a centralized database decentralized ideal, right? Where you just write every time you make content, no matter if you make any video on some easy, I'll take a picture with your camera. You registered in this I kind of hate to say but it could actually be a blockchain where you registered the first time a piece of Content what's created and we then upload content to different social platforms distribution systems You check it against that just to see if this information one big problems about the what people mostly do right is that they take a picture from a war Five years ago and they say this happened yesterday in whatever country and if you had a system like this if I tried to do that Actually, what it would do is it would say well this picture was uploaded five years ago So when you're looking at this picture, it'll have a little block of notice under the community notes, but the automated version of community notes saying this picture was actually taken by a PBC journalist like seven years ago.

51:13A lot of the stuff is hard, but we actually have a lot of the piece of the technology to get there. And I think when we think of like, quantity identification, we think of moderation, concentration, I think we are beginning to see the birth of an entire new content ecosystem. That will look very different than what we have today. How will that new content creation ecosystem change the labor markets of content? And what I mean by that is which roles are legitimately threatened and which will be created? I think the very technical roles like camera operation, those types of things, they'll probably fade away.

51:46And I think a lot of emphasis will be put on creativity, storytelling, being relatable, all those things that makes great content. I think it would be more important than ever. And it's a bit of a thumbnail design today, or a visual effects person's day. Like who is the right -hand and whose job's gonna be created? I actually think that most of those roles will have a natural transition to something different as you mean that you're open -minded enough to do it. So visual effects, for example, right? As we talked about before, we're making clips. AI can do a first pass asset, which may be better than random, but it's way worse than what you can sit down to yourself, right?

52:24But you plus AI can probably be really really good right because if it's a two hour episode You just figures out like all the right place that could be interesting and show you that you get kind of juicy So if you're a visual effects artist probably what it means that you'll just like a software engineer right means that you'll probably be a hundred Time is efficient and instead of relying on 20 other people to create a digital clone of me But like modeling my face you just prompted a control the river I think if you could at that you'll be even more powerful in this new world I think we'll have much more content creators than we have today Just like if you look at pre -internet pre -computers, how many people wrote things very few people, right?

52:59Like in the 1930s or 40s most people didn't like create text. That was like Pacific people like secretaries and then typewriters later on now ever all of us produce content all the time and I think That'll be a big trend I think most of the rate limiting on how quickly AI becomes a part about their life is actually not the technology I as I said earlier I think we have very very powerful LLM today into a lot of like great things but the rate limiter is people. Because people have to use these things, they have trust these things, they have to pay them, buy them, integrate them. I mean, with technology, it's always the case, right?

53:28It takes a long time. Dude, the final one I have to talk about is location. You decided to do this in London, which I love as a Londoner, but it's a different choice. Why did you choose to do this in London? The honest question is because I couldn't get to the US.

53:45I mean, I didn't have like an amazing CV before I started in DGN, I couldn't get the US, basically you need to get a sponsorship if you wanna go to the US, right? I couldn't really get that. Once that company knew a few people here, so I just kinda like moved on open, actually, and spent a year. How would synth easier have been different, do you think if you've been in the US? I still do think that the chance success is higher if you're in the US on the West Coast. I think there's a lot of pros, especially like the last six, seven years, got a lot better to build here, but do still think that there is a lot of advantages to being in the US.

54:15But I think Europe is catching up pretty quickly. What are the pros of being here? One big one which is talent. It kind of goes both ways in some sense. But if you look at the ecosystem in the valley, one thing is kind of like the price of talent which is just abnormally high. But there's also things like loyalty for example that I think are less spoken about. I think in the US you have a lot of people who are very driven and they basically view their careers like building a portfolio of like stock options in different companies and hopefully one of them will kind of explode and they'll be very rich.

54:45which is a rational way of thinking about it and makes a lot of sense. But it also means that it's a more transactional relationship. I think people have with their employer, people are much easier to jump ship. They have one or two bad quarters. It may lose a lot of good people because, hey, there's this other cool thing on the block over here that I'll go to and work at instead. In Europe, I think people, for better and for worse, I think people are, they think less like that, as you of course know, like stock options in Europe. People still view it as like a random lottery ticket, not really as part of their compensation.

55:12because no one in Europe knows anyone who got rich off working in startup because we're not that many successes here. Are you saying that that's cheap change? I haven't seen that that's too change a little bit. It's going to take a long time to change because the way no matter what I tell people who work at Sinti's here no matter how much they can kind of read the news and do all this stuff what people care about is like do they know someone do they have a cousin who made $2 million being early in the startup. In the US especially in the valley everybody knows someone who made $2 million of working in the startup and they know several of them that makes you feel like you can do it as well.

55:41Here is very abstracts. People, these companies made. But before we really see that, and that just requires a bigger ecosystem with more exits, more big companies, and so on, I think it'll take a long time. But what I think you get in Europe is you get more loyalty in the sense that people care a lot about working a place that they like working, working with interesting problems, having great colleagues. I think that's a pro that's less spoken about. Do you think people work as hard? Honestly, I don't really have a strong sense that people work way hard on the valley. I know a couple of great friends who've moved over there and opened offices.

56:14I have not heard from any of them that like, wow, people just worked so insanely out there. There's probably like a percentage of people there that work like really, really hard, but I think we have those people here as well. That's more like a personality trait. That's dispersed all across the world. By our own think, if you take like an average software engineer in the valley, they work harder than we do in Europe. Why do you think it's gotten better building here? I feel it's gotten much worse building here in the last six months. Do you share my opinion? Yeah, I mean, I think it's kind of embarrassing to see what the new government is going to do, right?

56:44I think they have a lot of great cards on their hand, like you have a lot of great companies that are actually building here And I think what's important or what we see in the London ecosystem is that we're actually building global leaders Not just like regional winners of like expense management or something like that, like you have 11 laps, We're leading in voice, you have us, which is leading in enterprise AI video, we have way for to definitely like doing self -reli - I think it's really important that the incoming government doesn't screw this up because it's a matter. How could they screw it up?

57:13I think they could screw it up by like over taxation. All the kind of usual things that I think everyone is talking about, right? I think what they can do to make it better. I think you guys have a brand problem. What do you mean? I think what they disagree on this. But I actually think the UK is a pretty good place to build in general. I come from Denmark, right? That would have been a terrible place to build a company that would have been impossible, basically. I think with SIS, UIS, entrepreneurs believe. I think there's a lot of good things that have happened in Euclidism. You have all the talent.

57:39I think the venture ecosystem has gotten better. Even though it's still very like PE -centric, I still think it has gotten better. There's also still a lot of ways to screw it up, right? And I see a lot of people who are leaving, especially after the recent administration. My phone is just literally, hey, where are you moving? What do you advise me? Where do I move to? From Billion Dollar Fathers. Every single day. So my question to you is, you're sitting down with Keir Starmer. You can advise him on what he can do to make the best developers want to build here, the best founders want to stay here.

58:08What would you advise him? The obvious things, like corporate tax, entrepreneurs will leave, like all those things, make it like really attractive to build here, because we are in stark contrast to Europe, which is in many places, terrible. I think it's different because you're from here, you're British, right? I'm from Denmark, and I think we always like with wherever we are from, we're like much more negative. I moved here and I've seen a lot of the positives around it, but I think don't screw up the fundamentals, right? Don't raise the taxes too much, make sure we still have great relief scheme to people who create jobs, great economic productivity and those sort of things.

58:39On the brand problem, that of course starts with the fundamentals, like crimes on the rise, living costs, all those things that I think you've also been very vocal about. Those are big problems. Sorry. But what I actually would say, though, is that... But also the consistent negativity from this labor government. It's like, stand up and say London is open for business. Yeah. Not negative, negative, negative. Sell the store. Yeah. I don't know, I agree, I totally agree on that. And I think that comes a bit back to the brand problem, because I actually do think that as much as we have a lot of people here want to leave to the US, one of my learning has been that actually a lot of people want to come to London as well, especially from the US.

59:13Like I've in our journey I've seen that it's actually easier to move people from the valley to London and from the valley to New York, which feels kind of counterintuitive. But a lot of people want to come and experience the European lifestyle, right? They like the cultural heritage, they like the fact that London is a cultural melting pot. All the things I also love about London and we're kind of on a personal level, right? If you work a bit more on the brand, I can think you could attract a lot of great people to also come here and build But of course, it starts with the fundamentals right now if you look at California versus London in terms of like taxation things like that I'm not sure you can say that there's like a massive difference right?

59:44California is also like it's super high tax. It's very high taxes and pretty rough So I wouldn't over index on that But I think definitely a case of like double down right there's a lot of good things happening in the UK And I think if we don't screw it up We just need one or two companies to become plus 10 billion dollar companies headquartered in the UK Then I think we'll really start to see the ecosystem grow Couple of 10 billion dollar companies and they crystallize those ice is way forward wait for it and they IPO Yeah, where do they IPO though? That's the point. So I don't know. It's easy now's that no It's a joke.

1:00:17I mean the London stock exchange like They need to fix that like they need to put some liquidity in the system I don't know, I'm not a finance here, I don't know what they need to fix it, but I mean, that is a disaster, right? And I think we've seen, unfortunately, great companies really suffer under that. 100 % you have done. Yeah, it's not very attractive. Do you think that's actually a problem, though or not? Like, because the answer is like, he gives a shit. Like liquidity is the liquidity or whatever market you get it in. I agree. I don't think that's the best way. I don't think it still makes 1 ,000 people in London in the office, millionaires who have early stock.

1:00:51I agree. I don't think that's my top three or things needs to be fixed. What is your top one that needs to be fixed? Keep the reliefs for entrepreneurs for people who create things, maybe even make them better, because that's very attractive. I think there's also a whole bunch of things that you could do in terms of subsidizing GPU costs, for example, that would incentivize for UK data centers. That would be interesting. That's an actual competitive advantage. Obviously, don't over -regulate. We haven't seen much regulation yet. The descendants that is a little bit of a white shift from the last Administrations of this one terms of like regulation don't look at Europe as an example right?

1:01:26Like Europe has all the AI regulation and none of the AI companies Staying the course to some extent and not screwing it up. I think is I think it's really important I want to do a quick fire with you my friends So I say a short statement you give me your immediate thoughts. That's not okay So what do you believe that most around you disbelief? I think that playing computer games is probably one of the best things a kid can do for like future success in their life Why did computer games make for better entrepreneurs? Because Tobiet Shopify said that if you can run a clan, it's better than the university.

1:01:56That's exactly what I did. World of Warcraft. Now, actually, what I think it is is that we have probably the first generation that really had access to like, especially a bit more complex strategy games. Basically, what you learn throughout life is like decision making, to some extent, right? And computer games is a microcosm of the universe, right? And you can run so many simulations, and it made it look like it for parents If you're playing like walkraft free or read a lot or whatever game that you're playing, all of the workraft that you're playing back then. But actually what you're doing is you're training yourself to make a lot of decisions really rapidly and to understand what the implications of each decision that you make are in some kind of like game that you're playing.

1:02:32But life is a game, career is a game. Building companies is a game to some extent, right? And I think we're just the first generation we actually can sit by yourself and get so many iterations in that would have otherwise been impossible. You can't sit down before the computer era and simulate lots of small decisions in how to run a business. You just couldn't do it. You have to actually build a business and run a business. Here you can play rollercoaster tycoon. Of course, rollercoaster tycoon is not like running a real theme park, even if it's just like 20 % of being the CEO of a real theme park.

1:03:04I think that teaches you a lot. I think the decision making and center strategy You're both on that is, I think it's highly valuable and because it's two -way feedback mechanism, right? You can sit down and read books about things, but I think what's powerful about computer games is that there's this constant feedback loop. What trait are you slightly ashamed of but that has contributed to your success? I am a generous and the purest sense of the word. And when I was younger, I wanted to be an artist, wanted to be a great computer programmer, developer. And I just like never really excelled at any of them.

1:03:39I still have a dream of like making the music improve one day, but I think what I'm really good at, I know a lot of things about lots of like very random things. I'm just extremely curious. I'm not like an expert in anything specific, but I have a very, very wide range of interests. And I think like my neural networks, my trainer like so many random things, like how elevators work through a black metal in Norway, to like how people make techno. We like all these kind of different things. And I kind of used to be a bit annoyed at myself. like why can't you just sit down and become like, you know, the world's best music producer, like the world's best programmer, AI research or something like that.

1:04:10And think now I realize that my power is actually the fact that I'm like decent at like a lot of things. I think especially in my role, I would do it, you make decisions and you get ideas and you can't force those things. I think I really truly believe that those companies are subconscious and the more food and diverse things you put into your brain, the better you get at like making an allergies and pattern matching of those comics. They do tell me you are the resident DJ, which I was a brilliant description. Tell me, the heaviest things in life are not iron or gold, but unmade decisions. What unmade decision ways on you most?

1:04:43So I did a degree in kind of split computer science and business at university, and I really kick myself not just taking a stand degree, like a pure CS degree. Studying business, controversial opinion is like mostly useless. There have been like like 10 ideas in business. And if you learn those, you'll be pretty well covered. I should just have done like a pure CS degree or pure math engineering stuff like that. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? I think that one of the things I've changed my mind on in this whole AI hype cycle, I think when you're in the middle of these cycles and you see like all these things getting funded, all these like your competitors pop up, you get a lot of like noise and lot of like, oh, should we do these things?

1:05:20Should we like listen too much to what the market says? Like someone is doing this over here And I really, I think I just really learned the lesson again, although I think we've stayed the cause really well, to like never do things out of like guilt of other people doing it, like looking too much at like competitors, or you know what the broader kind of AI landscape is doing, like listen to the customer, they're the ones who pay your bills, and ultimately they're the ones that you need to make happy. I had a period where maybe over and takes a little bit too much on like what other companies are doing as like the AI space in general, like what's happening there as like the most valuable signal as opposed to the customer.

1:05:52So maybe more like a re -learning of our fundamental lesson and building startups. You can only choose one investor from your cap table for your next company. I can't answer that. You can, I won't let you out of this room. You can choose one investor. Who would you take?

1:06:11That's a hard one. I would take my Cuban again, because he truly believed when I had to know and else believed in us. I'll be forever grateful to him for doing that. Boom, that is a clip. You think in clips when you're with me these days, penultimate one, what about the way that your parents brought you up? Would you do deliberately differently with your future kids? My parents' generation, they saw computers as this inherently socially isolated thing of like you're just sitting and like dopamine addicted to like clicking buttons. Exactly what people say about TikTok today. The reality is usually much more nuanced and I think for me when I play computer games as a kid, first of all, the very social thing, both because you play with other people online and I think our parents have a hard time believing you can be friends with people, you haven't met in real life.

1:06:54And saying all that is like a waste of time, right? As I said, by using your playing strategy games, I would sideline that, but like solving math problems or like reading a standpoint. So of course everything in moderation. That's one thing I'll definitely, I'll definitely encourage my kids to play great computer games. Every parent is like questioning their and parenting decisions, listening to you. Final one, I presume you've had some secondaries now, does having some secondaries have the mentally freeing effect that people often say it does. I definitely think so. I definitely think so. Not having to worry about financial stress and having everything you own in one stock, I definitely think frees you up to make better decisions.

1:07:34So I definitely, I mean, everyone I need, I'll definitely encourage, like, take seconder's off the table when you can. I'm 100 % certain that they have to take no seconder at all. We would definitely have thought about selling much earlier, and you might have made more rational decisions, right? This has been one of my favorite shows, like honestly, it's painful. Like, it sucks to be honest. Like, when someone you met years ago is now a guest on the show, it's like, oh, like, we have, it sounds so dickish. We have like a high bar for like, we have to be together on the show. And that just shows what a fuck up it was for me.

1:08:06So thank you so much, dude, and you've been amazing. Thanks, dude. This was great. I am just in so much pain right now. I cannot believe that I have the chance to invest in that company at below a $20 million valuation. Oh, it pains me. Victor wouldn't incredible guess. Wouldn't an exciting future ahead. If you want to see that episode info, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20BC. That's 20BC. But before we leave you today, here are two fun facts about our newest brand sponsor, Kajabi. First, their customers just crossed a collective $8 billion in total revenue. Wow, second, Kajabi's users keep 100 % of their earnings.

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