AI startups need a shim to switch models easily

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 42:15

   And you wake up today and there's this open source model that's 670 billion parameters. You can run it on your desktop computer. It's completely available. Everything's completely transparent. And I ask you the question, forget about all the big companies that are involved in everyone's strategy historically. What's the model today to build value here? Where do you build equity value as a business?

2. 42:38

   if you're going to start a company, if you're going to invest as an investor, where do you go? The first is you have to build a shim. And I think the reason why a shim is really critical is that there's so much entropy at the model level. What this should show you is you can't pick any model. And the problem is that the people that manipulate these models, the machine learning engineers and whatnot, they become too oriented to understanding how to get output of high quality using one thing, meaning it shouldn't have been the case that we have engineers that can only use Sonnet, right? That's the anthropic model, right? It shouldn't be the case that people can only use OpenAI or people can only use Lama. Right now, that is kind of what we have. You don't have the flexibility to hot swap as models change. So if you were starting a company today,

3. 43:23

   the first technical problem I would want to solve for is that because tomorrow, if it's R2 or Alibaba's model or Lama, I would want to be able to rip it out and put it back in and have everything work and right now we can't do that the answer to your question is the answer to your question is the application layer because this is all going to become storage it's like youtube being built on top of storage or uber being built on top of gps all these innovations are being commoditized and this one is happening faster than all the rest do you want to be in the storage business or you want to be in the youtube business do you want to be in the uber business or do you want to be in the GPS chip.

4. 44:00

   business. I mean, they're both decent businesses, but Gavin Baker came on this podcast and said, it's the fastest deprecating asset in the world was a large language model. He's been proven right. They're not worth anything. They're all going to be open source. They're all going to be commoditized. And that's for the best of humanity. And now we're going to be on the application level, the hardware level with robots. And I think that's where the opportunity is.

5. 44:18

   Travis, what do you do? What company do you start today? If you start a company today, given where the world is at, given the open source models, like what do you do? Oh, I'm getting so excited. Look, I think the first degree out is, is there a wrapper company? Okay. So of course, maybe those companies already exist. And then is there a tools company? Right? So in a funny way, even though Facebook could be the wrapper, they have a tools business that DeepSeek is basically challenging going full open source and putting something out there that's really good.

6. 44:59

   And what has to happen is Meta has to decide, we are going to embrace and extend this. We're going to make sure that all the developers come to us, that all the cool applications get built here. So I think it's like there's a tools business and then there's the wrapper business. Um, and then, you know, look when AI, here's the one thing on the NVIDIA thing that I would counter