No Priors Ep. 109 | With Sarah and Elad

Hey listeners, welcome back to No Priors. Today you've just got me and Elad again. It's a favorite type of episode. Elad Gil, how are you doing?

I'm great.

I'm so excited. Everything is adorable—cartoons that are also slightly nostalgic and sensitive. Tell me about how you react to Studio Ghibli and also just better image generation.

I'm a long-standing anime fan, so I think converting the world into everything anime or manga is a very positive step for humanity. I view this as something I've been waiting for for a while.

I feel like every year or 2, there's this moment in the image-generation world where people have a “Wow, that's amazing” moment again. The first version of that was—I think maybe even the GAN wave was the first wave. There was a GAN artwork in 2018 or 2019 that went to Sotheby's for auction, which was one of the first AI-generated artworks, back when people were doing these adversarial-network-based approaches to generating artwork.

It was a cludgy toolchain, but even then people were like, “Whoa, look at what AI can do right now.” It was super bad in comparison to what you can do today. Then there was the Midjourney and early Stable Diffusion wave, where those models came out and people were like, “Oh my gosh, this thing is amazing. Everybody has 7 fingers in the images, but oh my God, it's amazing. Look at all the things we can do with it. It's going to transform society,” and so on.

I feel like we've periodically had these moments, and I feel like this is the latest version of that. Part of it is that we're just on this amazing curve of quality and fidelity in artwork, and the ability to do so much more. Even back in the GAN world, there were style transfers—“Do this in the style of Van Gogh”—and so on.

The degree to which it does that so well and so cohesively, in so many styles and with so much aesthetic beauty and oversight, is really striking. I think we're just hitting another one of those moments where people are like, “Wow, this can really do it for forms of animation and other things.” All this is obviously in the context of ChatGPT and OpenAI, and the GPT-4o models have been incorporating a lot of this stuff directly in.

I think it's fantastic. We're going to see another thing like this in another year, I think, and then there will be the very commercial versions of this, which are already sort of happening. Look, we can use it for graphic design completely seamlessly, versus it kind of works; we can use it for all these different use cases. I feel like we're doing the horizontal version of it, and soon we'll have the vertical versions all come out. Obviously, companies like Recraft and others are working on the vertical versions directly, but I just view this as a super interesting evolution of the technology. I think it's super exciting. What do you think?

I think it is funny how much, at least in our little niche of the technology ecosystem—but anime and manga are pretty popular—the world reacts to it. They want more cute; they want more beauty. I think it's really exciting.

One of the interesting things this exposes is that users overall are very good at projecting where we are in terms of quality and controllability, and how much more room we have. Going from 8 bits of grayscale to images that might be perceived as photos of real people was a huge jump. To your point, people were shocked at some point, 2 generations ago, by image generation.

One of the things that Midjourney did was really have an aesthetic point of view and take a bunch of user feedback into account in terms of what was preferred. I actually feel like a lot of people thought of image generation—as end users, not researchers—as a little bit more of a solved problem. I think this is another data point for how much more we're going to get, never mind video and everything.

There’s also text and logos, and there’s a lot that's coming that people haven't done, including these truly integrated things where you can start clicking into images and modifying pieces. There are apps that are doing that, and there are things like Krea that do these real-time modifications as you're working on things. I do think there's so much room still. We're very early, but it's still so striking, so it's a very exciting area.

I think ease of controllability is also going to give people a lot more creative power. One of the things that HeyGen has demonstrated and is going to come out with in the product very soon is the ability to use natural language to describe emotion and voice. You can say, “Whisper, ASMR,” and just say, “I want the whole video with this person in this way,” with 3 words of text description. I think that kind of controllability is going to be really powerful.

You can incorporate it into augmented devices, and then I would just be working through an MR world. That's all I would live in. Is that the ideal? No. Maybe the [inaudible] part, but the rest not so much.

Are you freaked out about the macro?

You mean the Nasdaq or what?

The markets? Yeah, the markets. Tariffs, inflation—which part of it? Consumer confidence is at a multiyear low. The Nasdaq is down 8%. There are tariffs on Chinese imports and on autos. I think investors and companies in the market are talking about how stressed they are about that.

I'm not very stressed about it. I feel like there's a degree of uncertainty in the world right now, for sure, but from the perspective of people building technology companies, barring something truly existential happening, it's business as usual.

I've been through a few of these cycles now, where markets are way up and everybody's freaking out in a different direction, and markets are way down. The main place where it impacts the venture world or the startup world sometimes is if it soaks money out of the venture-capital ecosystem, and therefore valuations come down or there's less funding for the marginal startup, or things like that.

Other than that, these sorts of cycles tend to wash away unless you're a super late-stage company that's about to go public and there's some issue with your valuation in terms of expectations versus where you just want to go out, or something like that. For day-to-day technology startups, particularly ones that are not doing hardware, which would be impacted by the tariffs—for people who are just writing software—it should really be of minimal actual day-to-day impact.

Especially if your startup is working, you'll be able to get customers to pay you or find funding, or whatever it may be. I've been through a few of these, and every time it's been a bit of a shrug.

I actually remember going to the “RIP Good Times” presentation that Sequoia did in 2008. Back in 2008, there was a great financial crisis, and I was running a startup at the time. I was the CEO of this small company.

Sequoia did this big all-hands where they pulled together all their founders, and they had people come in and tell war stories from when the dot-com bubble collapsed: how it's time to batten down the hatches and do layoffs, the world will never be the same again, and everything's over. They were doing this as a service to the startup community. They were trying to help their founders figure this stuff out.

I remember talking to one of the Sequoia partners during it. I said, “We're like a 6-person startup. Who cares?” And he said, “Yeah, you're right. You shouldn't worry about this at all.” That was as all these financial institutions were collapsing around us.

This strikes me as very small in comparison to that. I think back then, that didn't have that much of a real impact on tech. Maybe Google did its first layoff ever, but other than that, tech just kept humming along.

If anything, the biggest tech companies in the world are now 10 or 20 times bigger than they were back then. I think this is an even more minor blip from a long-term tech perspective. Who cares? Again, barring some unexpected path that's going to come off of this. I don't know. What do you think?

It has almost no impact on me. I think especially at the early end of the market, the really high-quality opportunities have plenty of capital for them.

I keep discovering that the capital markets are much deeper than I thought for very expensive, for example, foundation-model plays. I still expect capital availability and a lot of inflow there.

I think it's probably a little different for investors who have more public-equities exposure. I bet pre-IPO crossover investors are getting more cautious. You have those sorts of much more long-term issues, with liquidity having been starved for several years now. But I think a return of M&A and several companies ready to go public will help that somewhat.

The place where tariffs kind of matter, which I think is interesting, is for very specific industries where, to some extent, it's useful for America or the West to protect themselves. Automotive would be a good example.

Some of the Chinese car companies seem to be getting so good that, if I were Europe, for example, and given that the industrial base is so automotive-dependent, I would probably be pushing for tariffs on Chinese imports of cars. The internal car industry may not be as competitive.

And so, I do think there are some areas where the tariffs may be useful. There will be some areas where they're probably being used as a negotiation tool, and then some areas where they may be either net beneficial or net harmful in terms of actual costs passed on and things like that. But I think there may be a few areas where we should make sure that we actually have some in place. Then there may be some areas where it's going to be net negative or destructive, and some areas where it's just good for negotiating broader policy or relationships with certain external parties. People are using a catch-all for all of them versus looking item by item.

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think the productive version of tariffs is that there's a need for a broader industrial policy that is more supportive of the industries that we care about. That's going to be a big investment, right? If we want to make key components for defense or automotive in the United States, we are quite behind in many domains in terms of getting competitive from a skill and cost perspective. Some of those things are worth investing in on both the positive and the protection side.

I guess you mentioned that the depth of funding for models is part of all this. What do you think is happening in the foundation model world? You and I were just talking about these ArtificialAnalysis.ai charts showing convergence—kind of a monotonically more competitive market for capabilities—and amazing improvement over the last 18 to 24 months. But you just had the most recent Gemini release from Google. They're clearly still in the game. I don't know who was doubting that, given they have infrastructure and researchers—not just researchers, but very smart people at the helm. They're competing here as well.

I think one of the more interesting things is that you have convergence not just on capability, but also in the product surface areas. Most people have search, they have a research product, and they have reasoning in the models. I think a lot of it is going to end up with consumer surplus and distribution being the question.

There's actually a really great website called ArtificialAnalysis.ai that shows different benchmarks they've run against these various models for reasoning or for different aspects of how you test a model for a knowledge base or for other forms of performance, speed of tokens per time unit, et cetera. I think that's really worth taking a look at. You see that for certain areas there is really strong convergence, and then there's almost a cluster of models that seem reasonably within the ballpark. Again, certain things spiked dramatically in one form or another around coding, reasoning, or other things. Then you have sort of a longer tail of other models.

At least for the core language model world, which those benchmarks are for, there definitely seems to be some form of convergence happening. Then there are outliers, right? Grok, or xAI, coming out of nowhere with a roughly SOTA model in 9 months was super impressive. There are also some of the things DeepMind and others have been doing.

What they don't really have benchmarks for are image models, and all of those obviously exist on a variety of sites and other places. But then there's a whole other suite of models that I think are discussed a lot less. Part of that is just the economic value, and part of it is what's in the market today. That's things like physics, materials, robotics, and certain types of science, as well as things that are more specialized in terms of post-training, like health-related data on top of some of these core models.

I do think that there are a lot of other types of models that people spend a lot less time on, some of which are becoming quite interesting. Probably the place that gets the most attention outside of the foundation model world—or the core LLM world, I should say, the language models—is probably biology. I feel like there's a new biology model every week.

But there are all these other fields and disciplines where I actually think there are some very big opportunities. Opportunities are obviously both societal in terms of impact, but also, in some cases, there are actually very big markets behind them. I think often the interest level of people working in the industry to build models is divorced from the economic value of these models, and sometimes that's rightfully so. There may be really interesting scientific applications that aren't very commercially applicable.

Sometimes it's really misaligned, where you're like, "Why are all these things getting funded when there are these wide-open spaces for certain types of models that just nobody's working on?" At least I've been looking a lot at what these alternative models are that are interesting from a market perspective and maybe are getting a little bit ignored right now.

Then I guess there's the other question: How many things get subsumed into these core LLMs versus being their own standalone thing? Do you think it's all one ring to rule them all, or do you think it's going to be a fragmented landscape? Where do you think that fragmentation happens? Is it somewhat too binary a distinction to say it's a model company versus not a model company?

Actually, even many of the companies that you and I, in the industry, consider to be model research companies are starting with some base of pretraining of existing knowledge and reasoning that is more and more readily available. In the case of robotics, you start with video pretraining. In the case of other domains, if you're going to start separately focusing on code—and we can talk about whether or not that's a good idea—you want both language and code in terms of being able to interact with the model.

I 100% believe that there are big opportunities in some of these domains, but one of the biggest distinctions to me is: What does the data collection engine for this look like? If you are thinking about physics, chemistry, biology, robotics, and maybe even some more near-term commercial applications, the data you would want—the understanding for the model to learn from—often doesn't exist yet. I think a theory of many of these companies that is interesting is: Our job is to go collect or generate it efficiently and use that to train the model.

In that case, I think the question of whether it needs to be in this single model to rule them all comes down to whether it's reasonable to expect one of the existing large labs to go do that data generation. If you have to set up a physical lab with robotics to do experimentation on new chemicals, that feels more far afield than code generation in RL environments, for example.

Anytime you go into the physical world, it's always harder to generate data. That's one of the reasons that language models, where you just effectively collect the wisdom of the internet digitally, are the first places where we've really seen this scale of breakthrough happen in recent times. Coding is a great example, where you not only have a lot of the data resident either online or digitally, but also you have very clear utility functions, or things that you can test against, in terms of code and its performance. Is it doing what you think it's going to do? Those are always going to be the easiest areas.

This is an odd pet peeve of mine, but it always annoys me when people who do really well as founders in traditional software and tech start telling everybody else to go and do the hard stuff in biology, materials, and physics. You're like, "Well, you made all your money in [__] software. What are you talking about?"

I feel like there's been a long history of that. I remember interviews with Bill Gates from 20 years ago. He was like, "If I were to start today, I'd go into biology." I feel like sometimes there are the model versions of this.

You're so funny. I feel like you're the opposite. You're like, "I actually have a PhD in biology."

Yeah, that's why I know. That's why I know reality. I think the other distinction I would draw is: Is it some orthogonal, totally different technical thesis? Do I think there's a research advance that is just very different, architecturally quite different? I'll describe categories of companies that could be relevant here.

We had Karan and Albert from Cartesia on the podcast. I think state-space models are an interesting direction that is highly efficient for certain types of data that are compressible. If you look, there are several plays on formalization and translating problems into Lean and taking that as a path to increasing reasoning capability for math and code.

There are a number of companies that are trying to train models that are better at taking actions in software and on the web. This is clearly also in line with the large foundation model labs, but I think they're at least trying to work on a question that doesn't feel fully answered in terms of consistent, generalizable RL environments for agents. There are spaces where I think there is a theory of why the company should exist if true, versus just being straight in line with the OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI steamroller, of course, and the Google steamroller.

What did I miss? What else do you draw as a distinction, or where do you think there is opportunity?

To your point on state-space models, there may be advantages in terms of the speed and size of some of those models on a relative basis for very specialized tasks. Usually, I think of it as a 2-by-2 matrix where you have one axis that is speed, performance, and cost, because those are roughly the same thing for many of these models—it’s inference time, effectively. Then there’s reasoning fidelity, or whatever you want to call it.

Depending on where you are in these different quadrants, you have one quadrant where it’s slow, expensive, and not very smart. Obviously, nobody wants to use those models. There’s the one where it’s very slow and expensive, but it’s very smart and very capable. That’s where you’re like, “I’m going to upload a 100-page Supreme Court brief, and it’ll give me this amazing analysis I can use to argue a case,” or whatever. It’s high value, and it’ll take a while to process.

Then there’s the super-fast, highly performant category, which tends to be these very specialized niche models for specific applications. I think some of the state-space models, or SSMs, tend to work very well for very specific application areas. Then there’s the last quadrant.

Based on which of those quadrants you’re in, I think it really determines the type of things that you can build. The really fast, high-performance models tend to be more vertically focused or more focused on very specific types of tasks. The really slow, expensive ones that are actually very performant—you could imagine OpenAI’s versions—but it seems like the backbone for a lot of those is actually these very generalizable models, where a big chunk of what you’re getting is the reasoning and broader linguistic capabilities that you then apply to a domain.

Then, of course, there’s stuff that people build on top of them in terms of orchestration layers and specialized, bespoke things that route things to different models differentially relative to your use case. It seems like everything that’s quote-unquote agentic right now is basically doing that across customer success, code, and every domain that has a specialized approach. They always have this sort of orchestration layer built on top.

I think it’s super exciting to watch all this stuff, and I do think some of the applications in some of the less purely linguistic domains may be interesting in the short run. Going back to the question of whether the macro is stressing you out, there’s such a virtuous cycle in technology happening right now. This is actually quite dominated by the fact that M&A is alive again, so we’re going to have outcomes.

To your point, there’s exploding surface area of stuff that these models can attack. You have research progress and people making different technical bets. You mentioned DeepSeek. I think model development and the continued increase in the aggressive use of reasoning and test-time compute are quite expensive, and training continues to get more expensive. So I think the fact that there are now people trying to solve data, scale, and latency problems will help everybody, too.

Do you know if it’s true that the DeepSeek researchers are not allowed to leave China?

I do not know if that’s true. I think any country should want to hang on to its best talent, but perhaps not restrict people’s movement.

I think we should be trying to attract great talent here. We should keep all the AI researchers in the Mission District and just not let them leave.

Somewhere between the Mission and Dogpatch.

Yeah. We could actually just draw a line between our offices. They all have to go to Atlas Cafe every day.

Let’s talk through the talent categories. For anybody who isn’t thinking about their kids 10 years from now but is just thinking about the next 2 or 3 years, what type of expertise is valued, and where should you stay between my office and Elad’s office in the Mission and the Dogpatch?

You have researchers, and you have infrastructure scaling and efficiency. We welcome all of you. Hardware-software co-design, right? Designing the next-generation TPU or whatever—there’s a special visa for you to move into that region.

Yes, we’re here to sponsor you. Visa program.

Yes. If you’re ready to design chips to better handle sparsity or massive MoE models or something, I’ve got a visa campaign for you.

Kind of what you said, right? Anybody who has deep domain-user understanding combined with the basic product engineering—it’s not basic, but the product engineering sense—for this orchestration and applied-ML area, evals for agents, setting up RL environments, all of that is still a very nascent area.

Gather context, plan, make model calls, parallelize, verify, retry—this orchestration that I already described. We’ve got a visa program for you. We’re thinking about naming it. We’ll hire somebody to run it. It’ll be great. I’ll call it Gillingrow. We’re going to work on the marketing.

I feel like we’re in the business-as-usual phase of AI. I think the stack is reasonably well defined, and obviously it’ll change and there’ll be new things in it, but the last couple of months have been very clarifying in terms of the consolidation of the things that are short-term crucial.

There’s the model layer and all the various accoutrements around agentic stuff and reasoning, et cetera. Obviously, that will only accelerate and get dramatically better, and it’s on its own scaling curve. Then, on the infrastructure layer, I think that’s solidified a bit, right?

I remember when RAG was a big deal, a new thing. All these things are, I feel like, kind of falling into place—evals and how you do them. I think things are solidifying there with companies like Braintrust and others.

Then, on the application-layer side, I think I’ve bought into the notion we’ve been discussing for a year or two now around AI really starting to impact different service-related industries, vertical applications, and different use cases. I’m starting to finally see some inkling of consumer stuff again. It’s nascent and early, but at least people are trying.

I feel like there were 2 or 3 years where nobody was really trying to do anything similar, although one could argue that Perplexity, ChatGPT, Midjourney, and all these consumer-y things were early consumer forays. Maybe ChatGPT is the world’s biggest new AI consumer product. Google was really the original one in some sense.

It feels like a period of brief consolidation. In a handful of verticals, I think we’re starting to see some of the winners emerge. It’s an interesting, clarifying time. Of course, the thing I say about AI is that the more I learn, the less I know. It’s the only industry where I feel like the more I learn about the market, the more confused I am.

There’s this brief moment of clarity, and then I’m guessing in a year all bets are off and all sorts of things will scramble again. But at least for now, it feels to me like a few things have fallen into place, at least temporarily.

This actually feels like a very comfortable time to invest for me because, to your point, it feels more like—I don’t know, maybe it’s inning 3 instead of inning 1—where there’s a little bit of stability in the ecosystem. There’s a real goodness around standardization, some standardization of integration with different things. MCP, I think, is going to accelerate a bunch of development for people.

I’m meeting companies where they’ve set up a data source that is useful to the enterprise in some way, that these models can interact with well, and they’re like, “Oh, MCP server.” Do you want to quickly explain to people Model Context Protocol, or MCP, what it is, and how it works?

I’m going to fudge this, but I’ll try to describe it. This is an attempt by Anthropic. It came from Ben Mann’s group at Anthropic. It’s called Model Context Protocol, which is an attempt to spec out a standard interface for connecting model capabilities to systems where you already have useful data.

That could be documents, logging, business tools, the IDE, whatever. Sam Altman from OpenAI said they’re going to support it as well. I think this is not a complete solution. It has gotten a lot of popularity with developers over a very brief period of time, but it’s just how you expose your data to the model.

It’s an open standard, so it’s not proprietary. Anybody can use it. It’s a two-way connection between data sources and AI-powered tools.

And big companies have done it.

Yeah, I think there’s still a bunch of work for developers to do in terms of describing their tools and how to use them very specifically and cleanly, but it does make it much easier, and I think it will accelerate agent development a lot.

Going back to this idea of what it means for the ecosystem, the fact that you’re accelerating the ways for models to interact with existing ecosystems means we expect agents to get better. You have a bunch of choices around model availability. As you said, there’s this clear pathway about how to automate certain types of work through the orchestration of these capabilities. I think that’s going to be super fertile.

I do think it’s very unclear what types of winning consumer experiences are possible here.

There aren't consumer agents that don't look just like search or research in the large-model products that are really working yet, at least that I've seen. But I expect to see them this year. I'm excited about it.

Yeah, I think cool stuff is coming.

When everything destabilizes, Elad and I will be back on No Priors. We'll talk to you all then.

It's going to get destabilized again, but I think it's a moment of calm, and calm is all relative, right? There's enormous innovation, huge changes coming, big technology waves, new things every week. But at least there's a little bit more of a view of who are going to be some of the main players in some of these areas and how all these things fit together. So I think we should enjoy the calm while it lasts—for the next week or whatever it is, the next few hours before the next thing drops.

All right, signing off, y'all. Good to see you. Find us on Twitter at No Priors Pod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you want to see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That way you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no-priors.com.