Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
33 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“If you’ve written exams in undergrad or grad school where people allowed you to come with your notes to the exam, versus no notes allowed, I think not the same set of people end up scoring number one on both.”
02 / uncertainty
“Every day I wake up in sweat thinking about how things are going to go wrong.” Because one thing you got to understand, hardware is, you got to actually, I don’t know about the 10, 20 year thing, but you actually do need to plan two years in advance because it does take time to fabricate and get the chip back and you need to have the architecture ready.”
03 / belief
“I think there’s something powerful about showing something that was not possible before.”
04 / uncertainty
“Can you have a conversation with an AI where it feels like you talked to Einstein or Feynman? Where you ask them a hard question, they’re like, I don’t know.”
05 / belief
“I’m not saying it doesn’t have its flaws and there are things that are widely debated, but here I think you can just appear not to have any true emotional connection.”
06 / belief
“I think he went through many years where people just ridiculed or didn’t respect his work as much as they should have, and he still stuck with it.”
07 / belief
“My wife is insanely supportive of this journey. It’s almost like she cares equally about Perplexity as I do, uses the product as much or even more, gives me a lot of feedback and any setbacks that she’s already warning me of potential blind spots, and I think that really helps.”
08 / belief
“Now I think he has this mentality that it all has to be in-house, but it frees you from working on problems that you don’t need to be working on when you’re scaling up your startup.”
09 / belief
“I think another dimension is, we are just deeply curious as a species, and I think we have… Some work in AI’s, have explored this curiosity driven exploration.”
10 / observation
“Your mission is about making people smarter and delivering knowledge. And the way to do that can start from anywhere.”
11 / observation
“If an AI had given him that insight when he started the company itself said, “Look, Elon, I know you’re going to work hard on Falcon, but you need to redesign it for higher payloads and this is the way to go.”
12 / belief
“I think LLMs really help there. So what LLMs add is even if your initial retrieval doesn’t have a amazing set of documents, like it has really good recall but not as high a precision, LLMs can still find a needle in the haystack and traditional search cannot, because they’re all about precision and recall simultaneously.”
13 / belief
“If we can achieve that, that amount of inference compute, where it leads to a dramatically better answer as you apply more inference compute, I think that will be the beginning of real reasoning breakthroughs.”
14 / observation
“The reason is that you can get short-term dopamine hits from someone seemingly appearing to care for you.”
15 / belief
“Human-computer interaction. That’s what helped them arrive with new insights to search than people who are just working on NLP, so I think that’s another thing that realized that new insights and people who are able to make new connections are likely to be a good founder too.”
16 / belief
“I think he’s controversial for whatever’s happened in social media in general, but I think his positioning of Meta and himself leading from the front in AI, open sourcing, create models, not just random models, really, Llama-3-70B is a pretty good model.”
17 / belief
“I think even in 2010s, one third of Google traffic, when it used to be like 3 billion queries a day, was just instant answers from- … just answers, instant answers from the Google Knowledge Graph, which is basically from the Freebase and Wikidata stuff.”
18 / belief
“I think we don’t have an AI coach where you can actually just go and talk to them.”
19 / belief
“Again, I’m kind of beating the drum here, but for me it’s all about curiosity and knowledge. And I think there are different ways to keep the light of consciousness, preserving it, and we all can go about in different paths.”
20 / belief
“If you work from that perspective, I think you’ll give up beyond the point because it’s very hard to work towards something that was not truly important to you.”
21 / belief
“If we can get to that, then I think we can make a more accurate estimation of the timeline.”
22 / evaluation
“A lot of startups have this problem and initially they just do things that don’t scale in the Paul Graham way, but then things start breaking more and more as you scale.”
23 / evaluation
“You can do that too when you’re small just to delight users, but it doesn’t scale.”
24 / evaluation
“If you’re just trying to take on Google by building another [inaudible 00:15:38] search engine and with some other differentiation, which could be privacy, or no ads, or something like that, it’s not enough. It’s very hard to make a real difference in just making a better [inaudible 00:15:55] search engine than Google, because they have basically nailed this game for like 20 years.”
25 / evaluation
“What is the weakness of Google is that any ad unit that’s less profitable than a link, or any ad unit that kind of disincentivizes the link click is not in their interest to go aggressive on, because it takes money away from something that’s higher margins.”
26 / evaluation
“LLM means large language model. That LLM takes the relevant paragraphs, looks at the query, and comes up with a well-formatted answer with appropriate footnotes to every sentence it says, because it’s been instructed to do so, it’s been instructed with that one particular instruction, given a bunch of links and paragraphs, write a concise answer for the user, with the appropriate citation.”
27 / prediction
“You couldn’t search over them before, but now you can because you can have a model that looks at your question, translates it to some SQL query, runs it against the database.”
28 / preference
“Or like in the mobile app when you’re clicking, when you’re touching the search bar, the speed at which the keypad appears, we focus on all these details, we track all these latencies and that’s a discipline that came to us because we really admired Google.”
29 / evaluation
“He learned the mistakes that, if you rely on others a lot for your distribution, his first company, Zip2 where he tried to build something like a Google Maps, he ended up, as in, the company ended up making deals with putting their technology on other people’s sites and losing direct relationship with the users because that’s good for your business.”
30 / recommendation
“Absolutely. And these are the kind of architectures we should explore more, where small models… And this is also why I believe open source is important, because at least it gives you a good base model to start with and try different experiments in the post-training phase to see if you can just specifically shape these models for being good reasoners.”
31 / preference
“The Google presents this information in cool widgets, and I think that is where this is a very different problem from just building another chat bot.”
32 / evaluation
“One common trait across every successful founder is they were relentless. So that’s why I really like this, an obsession about the user.”
33 / commitment
“I will just point out before you stepped in we have Simon here who some people can say Simon knows how to code, and Simon also highlighted some things that he did that he wouldn't otherwise be able to do.”