Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…First, there's so much data on the internet. The two primitives that you need to build models are – You need lots of data. We have that in the form of the internet, we digitized the whole world into the internet. And then you need these GPUs, which we have because of video games. So you take like the internet and video game hardware and smash together and you get machine learning models and they're both commodities. I don't think anyone in the open source world is really going to be data-limited for a long time. There's so much that's out there. Probably people who have proprietary data sets that are readily scrapable have been shutting those down, so get your scraping in now if you need to do it. But that's just on the margin. I still think there's quite a lot that's out there to work with. Look, this is the year of proliferation. This is a week of proliferation. We're going to see four or five major AI announcements this week, new models, new APIs, new platforms, new tools from all the different vendors. In a way they're all looking forwards. My Herculaneum project is looking backwards. I think it's extremely exciting and cool, but it is sort of a funny contrast. Before I delve deeper into AI, I do want to talk about GitHub. I think we should start with – You are at Microsoft. And at some point you realize that GitHub is very valuable and worth acquiring. How did you realize that and how did you convince Microsoft to purchase GitHub? I had started a company called Xamarin together with Miguel de Acaza and Joseph Hill and we built mobile tools and platforms. Microsoft acquired the company in 2016 and I was excited about that. I thought it was great. But to be honest, I didn't actually expect or plan to spend more than a year or so there. But when I got in there, I got exposed to what Satya was doing and just the quality of his leadership team. I was really impressed. And actually, I think I saw him in the first week I was there and he asked me – What do you think we should do at Microsoft? And I said, I think we should buy GitHub.…

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