Ben Horowitz: belief

Transcript context

…Database. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it meant companies like Salesforce were basically just a thin wrapper. And I think that that's kind of the mistake people made. So we're at this company Cursor, and if you look under the covers in Cursor, they've built 14 different models to really understand how a developer works, a high-end, a real developer. Those models have tons and tons of interactions with how people talk to their friend Cursor about how they should design their programming so forth. And that's real, that's not just a thin layer on a foundation model. And I think there are many, many applications like that. And so I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity at the application layer. There's going to be some opportunity at the foundation model, and of course you can invest in Sam, you can invest in Anthropic and so forth as well. But there will probably be a very small number of companies at that set, and then a almost unlimited number of companies at the application layer. And then as the technology advances, we'll of course see more things we can body to AI. I mean already autonomous cars are working really well now after a long, long, long, long time. Since I think Sebastian won the challenge in 2006 when he drove the self-driving car across the country. And here we are 20 years later and now they're deployed. So that was a long time. Robots I think is a harder problem than self-driving cars. So we'll see how that goes. But, yeah, there's certainly a lot in that world as well. Wow, okay. There's a lot to this answer. No, that was exactly what I was looking for. The Cursor example, it's something that comes up a lot on this podcast, in the application layer specifically. The thought that the way to win in this space and to build a moat is, as you said, "Build your own model slash have proprietary data that you build through people using your product." Thoughts on that?…

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