Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
01:32:39 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[01:32:39] S1: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Any other commentary when you don't spend time on, you know, the labs? What are you what are spending time on? [01:32:45] S0: Oh, man. It's... Again, in a world that's highly unknown and unknowable and uncertain, I kind of fall back to what are my core beliefs that I do have conviction in, and that is the world's gonna consume more models, world's gonna consume more power, world's gonna consume more compute, networking, and storage, we're and gonna need to build a lot more data centers to serve the intelligence we're building. Those are kinda like my six core truths. And so, like, a lot of what I'm looking for are what are businesses that are a direct derivative of one of those one of those core beliefs that I have. [01:33:13] S1: Yeah. And any any other expressions of those core beliefs that you've done recently? [01:33:17] S0: Done recently. Yeah. Certainly. There's a chip company still in stealth that's super exciting. Maybe we can talk about later. K. There's, you know, power company, American terawatt. They wanna build a new grid, an industrial grid to serve industrial offtake. Big, huge, bold vision. Yeah. We talked about Elorean and glimpse and kind of the visual thinking. [01:33:39] S1: Anything on the compute market side? So effectively, like, slicing out compute in order to increase the efficiency. Trading futures trading futures on compute almost. [01:33:49] S0: I haven't... I I haven't spent as much time there. Yeah. I haven't spent as much time there. [01:33:53] S1: You know, we spent some time with Anj who's
01:33:53 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[01:33:53] S1: You know, we spent some time with Anj who's [01:33:56] S0: Okay. [01:33:56] S1: Doing National Compute and and AmpGrid and Yeah. And SF Compute and all those those guys. In in New York, we launched a compute trading track where we're we're... Like, mostly it's just the increased utilization. It's the broader goal. Yeah. But that's how you can magically create a whole bunch more compute, which is better use the ones we already have. [01:34:13] S0: Totally. [01:34:13] S1: And so, know, if the MFU or whatever choice of utilization is at 30 to 40% right now, taking up to 60%, you've doubled the number of GPUs you have. [01:34:23] S0: Yeah. Totally. [01:34:24] S1: And so I [01:34:25] S0: I mean, I think there's gonna be so much cool innovation. It's why, like, this is the most exciting time to be in tech, to be investing, to be around all these startups. Because, like, you're just... You're seeing innovation at the silicon layer. You're seeing innovation at the capital markets layer. You're seeing innovation at the product. I mean, like, it's like every... Creative [01:34:42] S1: destruction everywhere. I noticed you're not doing much on the application layer. [01:34:46] S0: You know, look, I I would [01:34:47] S1: say agent layer.
01:34:47 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[01:34:47] S1: say agent layer. [01:34:48] S0: No. Sir sir... Certainly are. Again, like, I I I... I mean, I'm I'm I'm speaking more personally than necessarily on the the Altimeter behalf. Wanna believe there's a strong product research or combo. There's certainly a lot of great teams, and we think, you know, early on in market cycles, you know, we kind of use these like triangle analogies where you have compute or infra, like like hardware infra, software infra, software apps. And in a mature market, the biggest TAM is the apps. And the smallest TAM is hardware. Early on in cycles, it's inverted. And the biggest markets are at the both top or bottom of the triangle, more of the physical hardware, and then the infrastructure, and then the apps. And eventually the triangles invert, and so, hey, at some point in the future, I think the apps and the agents will be the biggest part of the TAM. We're just early on, and there's lots of opportunity in the other parts of
01:35:50 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[01:35:50] S1: Objectively, that is correct. Yeah. I I I do feel like... And and and by the way, you can see various versions of this in all of computer history. Yeah. Right down to, like, the Western Micro... West... Like, the... Like, when hard disks were were were getting built out or whatever. Anyway, so I I I don't think those are the best examples. Western Digital? Western Digital. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so they'll... There... Yeah. I I I think that is true, but, like, to me, domain specificity is very interesting. And to me, the app layer, the agent layer is supposed to capture that. Yeah. They... They're just like... The biggest outcome here is cursor Yeah. Right now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's 60,000,000,000. We're Yeah. Here talking about $2,000,000,000,000. [01:36:27] S0: Yeah. Exactly. [01:36:28] S1: So you're very different. [01:36:29] S0: Yeah. Totally. Totally. I think I also just, like, skew a little bit more infra than... You know, just personal bias. [01:36:33] S1: Yeah. Yeah. We... We're we're infra guys at heart. [01:36:35] S0: Yeah. Exactly. [01:36:36] S1: Okay. Great. My closing question was gonna be, Friedrich, Brad's story. I mean, Brad's a character. Yeah. And you've you've worked with him for like, I don't know, three, four years now. Six years. Six years. Yeah. Okay. So so Call of Judgment ends. Okay. Alright. [01:36:50] S0: Is Right around. Yeah. Yeah. [01:36:51] S1: I I feel like I'm getting my time... Either my timeline is wrong or I met you way earlier than I thought I met you.
01:36:51 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[01:36:51] S1: I I feel like I'm getting my time... Either my timeline is wrong or I met you way earlier than I thought I met you. [01:36:56] S0: No. I think we met earlier. So I I was... I think I was still at Redpoint. [01:36:59] S1: Oh my god. Okay. Alright. [01:37:00] S0: Yeah. You... Where were you? Netlify? No. [01:37:02] S1: Airbyte. No. No. Before that. Before that was Temporal. Before that? Netlify. [01:37:07] S0: That's when we met. Really? [01:37:08] S1: Yeah. Jesus. That's that's ancient history. [01:37:11] S0: Yeah. [01:37:12] S1: Anyway, Brad's a character. I I just think he's he's interesting and Yeah. Like, what's what's what's a good story you have? Oh
01:37:12 · Shawn Wang, Jamin Ball
[01:37:12] S1: Anyway, Brad's a character. I I just think he's he's interesting and Yeah. Like, what's what's what's a good story you have? Oh [01:37:18] S0: oh, man. You put me on the spot. Yeah. Honestly, I would say favorite Brad story, just how much he's worked at Invest America. Like, and I don't know if people know this initiative. It is the idea of, like, how can we get people invested in capitalism early on in their life. I think, like, right now in the world, right, you mean you survey, you know, America, you know, most people have a negative view of capitalism because they haven't participated in it. And like a lot of people view capitalism as a great thing, and it's the people who have participated in the equity upside of America and have kind of compounded into capitalism. But most people don't have that luxury. And so how can we educate people with firsthand experience about the benefits of capitalism by helping them participate early on? So the whole idea is an investment account funded by the US government at birth that can be funded by anyone along the way. That could be philanthropists like like Michael Dell, who made a $6,000,000,000 donation. I think Elon Musk has pledged one share to every kid in America, which is, I think, $10,000,000,000. [01:38:23] S1: Anthropic has some version of, like, the public benefit fund or something. Exactly.