Sam Lessin on Artificial Intelligence

Essays

From the Podcast

Brit did not invite me to her big birthday bash. Or wait, or did you invite me but I didn't come?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

This is the thing that I think is interesting is in the spectrum of negativity, this is my, my, like, scoffing at the 10% kill all people thing. M- maybe there is some percentage truth. There's also- Aliens might show up, an asteroid might hit us. But this is at least far more practical and a real problem to talk about and deal with in the spectrum of how AI plays out. So if you wanna talk about negativity, while I agree it's very negative, it's a valid conversation. I think less negative than people who say like, "Oh, well, we can't care about anything in the middle or anything 'cause all that matters is, like, the edge case that we can't predict," right?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

The-- For that to happen, everything needs to crash. Right? Everyone, everyone's, like, pretending they're getting paid on the open. If it all crashes out and people get super hoardy... I mean, this is what's happening with networks. Like, I actually think one of the ironies of AI is it's very hard to take cold pitches as a VC now 'cause, uh, you're inundated with them. It's too easy to generate reasonably credible things. So what do you do? You lock down and only talk to your friend.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

This is-- But for what it's worth, though, this is, like, the other really negative dark future of AI, which is kind of like the Middle Ages version, where everyone effectively builds a castle and a moat and hoards. We end up in the Middle Ages 2.0 with these, like, sovereigns you-- that are, like, completely... You can't open it. You can't edit it. You have a car that's a black box that self-destructs if you touch anything. Like, it becomes really testy 'cause there's no other way to create moats, right?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

You are perfect. Oh, wait, only Sam's allowed to hit on you, my bad.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

But if so, then we're sitting in this, like, local blip. Because it's like you gotta project out. If you project out N years, like, almost certainly we all have neural links or equivalents, like, plugged into our brain. Like, we're only getting more and more connected and online. We're not certainly, like, moving away from that world anytime soon.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

Okay, so the never will be, so last part, here's the crazy part, and this is my third point. To your point, I think you're 100% right about this. The only way there ends up being lock-in somehow, right, is through BD, which is hilarious because it basically means that what it's gonna end up being is the world first all of a sudden all the engineers got overpaid. Right now we're in the place where all of effectively the political operatives are getting overpaid to try to deal with Washington, and ultimately it's gonna be, like, all the business teams getting overpaid to seal these deals. But, like, it's basically this, like, race-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

Right? So, like, now our printer is just, like, humming with, like, "Here come the daily reports." It's actually fabulous. Great idea, Jessica.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

And then built another one and sold it to OpenAI. Did you write him a check for the one he sold to OpenAI?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

Okay, guys, I got to tell you one floor as we were gonna do. So we're at-- Adrian, you know, we fly down to this secret conference, and we run into this, like, large institutional LP, and they're talking about h- very excitedly, they're actually an LP of ours, I quite like them, about how they're using AI to track their 14,000 private company positions, da, da, da, da.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

... Yeah. It's just, it's not a terrible thing to try, but the thing for me is, like, I keep going back to this fact. I use a lot of Claude. I think Claude's excellent. It's like the core of my infrastructure brain. But if I woke up tomorrow and Claude was gone, I would care for about one second, right? And, like, that is the fundamental baseline problem in the core business model, not necessarily unique data, wetlab, vertical integration, bogey, solve all cancer in a way others can't. Like, there are still option values on having this, but you gotta support a massive core infrastructure and cost structure, and the question is, is there a core business or not?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

The forward deploy thing actually weirdly, you know, you look at the Palantir or whatever, in a story of it's a security problem, it's an integration problem, it's hard to switch, it actually kind of makes sense for locking a bunch of people in. It's just a very different business model if it's like what we're doing forward deploy and what we're gonna get paid on is the tokens. But actually, the reality is, and this is my biggest thing-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

The thing that I think is just interesting is you look at these businesses, and you're like, generally speaking, these public companies, especially at this scale, there's like two things. You're investing in a core business- That has some properties that you believe in, and then you're buying option value on top, right? Which is there's six things that might happen to make them super valuable. I think the, the core anthropic business, which is can you sell premium tokens to people effectively? Like, can you sell it at a higher price than the open models because, like, what you're doing is so valuable? Like, the... And it- people will sink infinite amounts of money into marginally better tokens. That's the core business. It's been totally true for the last bunch of months. It's flat lining. Are there certain people that will pay infinitely forever for slightly marginally better tokens? Maybe. But, like, that's, like, the weakness of the core business is that whole conversation. And I think things like Muse, which again, can argue are not as advanced as Feeble, but are clearly sufficient for, like, what normal people need, right? Kind of put a dent in that story.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

Well, people are saying maybe four of inflation, four real. Like, there, there's some, like, people are arguing with the numbers. But, like, let's... It's a big number. It's a number much bigger than we've ever had in recent history. So DC needs it. The country in that way needs it, right? Silicon Valley's having a fucking party. And then New York weirdly really needs it too because New York is, like, this is, like, a huge financial engine for New York. Unlike historical tech situations where, look, you can't make that much money on Facebook or Google if you're in New York because they don't need that much money. It's, like, not your business. Now you need s- everything. Every insurance product, everyone's freaking having a party. And so the problem is when you say not, well, what happens if they don't work out? I'd flip it around and say, right now, if you did not have an AI story, we would be in, like, terribly dire straits.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

Or they figure out wet labs and vertically integrate and close down their services, and they're in a completely different business, and, like, whatever. But, like, it's weird. It's like SpaceX is, like, an option on 15 different businesses plus unique ro-rocket capabilities. These guys are, like, in a commoditization race for their core, where, like, again, if... And they are options on really great stories, but they're just stories.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

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