Bret Taylor: belief

Transcript context

…Exactly, yeah. Now we get to it, which is you described building stuff that you know you're going to throw away because the model capabilities will get there and you're occasionally... They are developing capabilities that you developed yourself. Isn't Sierra itself "short AGI?" Sorry, I said I couldn't resist. No, it's the right question. The short answer is I don't know. I mean, the fog of war in the software industry is pretty thick right now. I really believe in the applied AI market, though. I think most companies don't want to buy models or buy software. They want to buy solutions to their problem. If you just go back to the cloud industry, why doesn't Amazon and Microsoft do everything for everyone? There's not really a... By somewhat similar logic, why should any software-as-a-service company exist when you have bigger scale, all this technology? In theory, they could just develop all the software. Actually, many of them have tried. There's actually competitors to Salesforce and almost all the above. I think there's so much nuance in how these companies align themselves with different departments at these companies, solve their very unique problems in very specific ways. That is a mix of product, not technology, but product, go-to-market. It's an ecosystem around it. I think a lot of that still exists because I'm not sure coding the software was necessarily the hard part. Then similarly, I actually think, especially in enterprise software, how you engage with your clients really matters. I think it turns out that GPT-5 and Claude, whatever version it's on right now, or Opus, excuse me, is sold to a different buyer than the CFO or the Chief Customer Officer, the Chief Digital Officer. It seems small, but it's actually big. I think you tend to see software companies orient around individual buyers within companies. You tend to see consolidation around departments and around buyers. It's possible that you can go beyond those lines, but it hasn't happened traditionally. I think the reason for it is most business users want actual solutions to their problems, and they want a company that serves their unique problems in a very specific and bespoke way. I actually am extremely bullish on applied AI. I actually think we could accelerate. I'll make one statement, which is I think if we paused model development, we'd still have trillions of dollars of economic value. I totally agree.…

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