Latest / The Learning Corner by Precursor / Episode #86: Paying For AI Twice, Sierra's Bet On One AI Agent, Data's Next Trillion Dollar Category, NY Halts Data Centers
Transcript
- 0:00We talked about this before.
- 0:01This is the first tech wave in my career where I've seen active organized opposition.
- 0:05Other things people have been like, I don't know.
- 0:07I'm neutral on mobile or mobile's good.
- 0:08This is people are trying to stop something from happening as opposed to undoing something
- 0:13that's already happened.
- 0:14I think tech needs to take these things very seriously and ask ourselves a question, what is
- 0:18in it for the average person?
- 0:20It's the week of July 13.
- 0:22Welcome to the Learning Corner, a Precursor Ventures podcast.
- 0:28Welcome to the Learning Corner by Precursor.
- 0:30I'm Mia Farnham, and I'm joined by our GP and managing partner, Charles Hudson, where we will
- 0:34be talking through the articles and Goodreads that caught our team's attention over the past
- 0:38week.
- 0:38Our first Goodread this week is a post on x from Satya Nadella called the reverse
- 0:43information paradox.
- 0:45Satya builds off of economist Kenneth Arrow's classic paradox where a seller of information
- 0:50risks giving it away for free just by trying to sell it.
- 0:53He argues AI flips that script.
- 0:55So now it's the buyer who risks giving away their most valuable knowledge, the contacts,
- 1:00the corrections, the internal know how just by using the tool that they paid for.
- 1:05Every time an employee corrects a model or feeds a proprietary information, the knowledge
- 1:09quietly becomes part of what the AI vendor learns.
- 1:11And over time, the vendor ends up knowing more about your business than you know about them.
- 1:16His fix is that every company needs a hard boundary around its own data, feedback loops,
- 1:21and institutional knowledge, similar to how a patent lets an inventor disclose an idea
- 1:25without simply giving it away.
- 1:27He points to Alex Karp's line about customers wanting to own their compute models and data
- 1:31stack as proof that this is already on enterprise buyers' minds.
- 1:35I wanted your thoughts on this more generally, but we're obviously thinking about this
- 1:38Goodread from the standpoint of b to b companies wanting to protect their know how
- 1:43while still capturing efficiencies from AI.
- 1:45But if you flip it to the standpoint of an employee sitting inside one of these
- 1:49organizations, if using these tools is making me faster and better at my job, does it
- 1:54actually matter what the seller is doing with my data on the back end?
- 1:57Is this a trade off worth carrying about, or is it just noise compared to the productivity
- 2:02gain?
- 2:03And when is that start and stop?
- 2:04I think the theme of this week's learning corner is, like, be careful what you train and
- 2:08how you train it, because there's some other things we'll talk about later that are related
- 2:12to data labeling and training.
- 2:13First of all, the fun thing, if you're Microsoft, it's like, well, we win anyway.
- 2:17We're selling a lot of compute capacity to some of the big hyperscalers and hosted closed
- 2:22source models.
- 2:23And if our customers decide they wanna use open source models, we're happy to sell them compute
- 2:27and hosting for those open source models too if they're not gonna run them truly, truly
- 2:31locally.
- 2:31So then if you're Satya and Adele, you're like, as long as people are using AI and they're
- 2:35using our infrastructure, I don't really care whether it's OpenAI, Anthropic, Quen, Kimi,
- 2:40whatever model they wanna use.
- 2:41This to me feels like it was the inevitable pivot back from let's just trust the closed
- 2:46source hosted models.
- 2:48Yes.
- 2:49We have these existential concerns about security, but what's our alternative?
- 2:52Your alternatives in the beginning were use the hosted models and hope that they weren't using
- 2:57your data to train the system that you checked that little box.
- 2:59And now the open source models are getting better, and people are getting more comfortable
- 3:03saying, hey.
- 3:03Maybe the right thing to do we talked about this with Kirkland and Alice.
- 3:06Maybe the right thing for us to do is to make the investment in training our own models.
- 3:10It's funny.
- 3:10I've been doing this this weekend with a fun side project, a video related side project,
- 3:15training a video model, a version of Quen on a bunch of video assets that I have that I'm
- 3:19trying to analyze.
- 3:19And it's fun, and it's more for cost for me than for security.
- 3:23And I think we're gonna end up in a world where people are gonna use it's the old you don't
- 3:27drive a Ferrari to the grocery store analogy.
- 3:29Like, people are gonna end up using the frontier models to do the frontier tier work,
- 3:32work, the really, really hard stuff where you want the most sophisticated models.
- 3:36There'll be some things for privacy, propriety, whatever people will want to keep inside their
- 3:41own firewall, whether it's actually worth protecting or not.
- 3:44It's probably more about a feeling of safety and a feeling that we're not this information
- 3:49than it is that, like, having it out there in the model would really make.
- 3:51A difference is whether you're gonna see a pivot back towards maybe we should control and
- 3:55manage AI.
- 3:56It's funny.
- 3:56I told him our portfolio company founders this.
- 3:58AI is just becoming part of corporate infrastructure again.
- 4:01And for a while, it was this, like, Wild Wild West rogue thing where people are like, well,
- 4:05we don't need controls or compliance or training or guardrails just like spend, spend,
- 4:09spend, and test, test, test.
- 4:11And now I think people are like, well, what if we just treated this like other parts of
- 4:14infrastructure where we care about ROI, where we care about compliance, where we care about
- 4:18data security, and where we weigh the benefits of, like, openness versus this.
- 4:22And I think the the pendulum is gonna swing back towards treating AI more like corporate
- 4:26IT.
- 4:27It will not be fun for the people who are, like, out here doing all these crazy cowboy
- 4:30things.
- 4:31Yeah.
- 4:31Well, that was my next question.
- 4:33Whose job will that be to determine what's absolutely has to be secure and compliant, and
- 4:38then what can you explore with frontier models and just kind of run amok on your own?
- 4:42I'm just sure in two years, you're gonna hear about an engineer who wasn't using all their
- 4:47tokens who, like, swapped their tokens with some other b l's of their team who needed them
- 4:51in exchange for a vacate.
- 4:53It's gonna get worse.
- 4:53Ordering.
- 4:54Yep.
- 4:54But I think the CFO is gonna have a big role in this.
- 4:57And you're already seeing what I would describe as brute force attempts at this.
- 5:00That company is just saying engineers can only spend x amount in tokens per month.
- 5:04I'm like, but what if one person's really, really efficient at getting value out of
- 5:08tokens?
- 5:08Maybe that person should be allowed to spend more.
- 5:10And the person who's just wasting them translating PDFs into PowerPoint shouldn't get
- 5:14any tokens.
- 5:15Yeah.
- 5:15But we're not we're not at that level of sophistication and nuance yet.
- 5:18No.
- 5:18We're still token maxing.
- 5:19Yeah.
- 5:20One last piece I wanted to touch on this.
- 5:21Another comment that was in the threads a little bit further down the chain was how are
- 5:26workers' IP protected from the enterprises.
- 5:28So Yeah.
- 5:29One click below that.
- 5:30We talked about this a little bit ago when we were reading the takes on if you got to take
- 5:34agents from one job to the next with you, if you built them at a job.
- 5:37But the knowledge that you bring to a workspace and the know how, that's training your
- 5:41enterprises model on.
- 5:43How do you as the employee get to ring fence?
- 5:45What's trained on that versus what you get to keep?
- 5:47Everybody involved in training is telling the people doing the training, don't worry.
- 5:51You'll be fine.
- 5:51You know, all the data labeling people are like, don't worry.
- 5:54You labeling all this data by your profession, you'll be fine.
- 5:57The companies are telling their employees, you teaching the AI how you work, don't worry.
- 6:00You'll be fine.
- 6:01I don't know if everybody's telling the truth.
- 6:03More to come.
- 6:04Well, our next good read is a blog post from Neil Rahili at Sierra called AI Pilling Our
- 6:08Company, Lessons Learned.
- 6:10After their engineering team started seeing five x productivity gains from running coding
- 6:13agents in parallel, Sierra set up a six person AI acceleration team to figure out what it
- 6:18would actually take to get that same boost across the entire company, not just engineers.
- 6:23They started by building a separate agent for each department, one for support, one for
- 6:27sales, one for data, but found that setup actually got in the way since the most valuable
- 6:32work happens across teams, not within one function.
- 6:35So they collapsed everything into a single agent, called it pine cone, one that persists
- 6:39across an entire project instead of resetting after each request since most real work doesn't
- 6:44actually get done in one sitting.
- 6:45It unfolds over days or weeks.
- 6:47One of Neil's bigger points is that the agent should really be thought of as just the
- 6:51interface.
- 6:52The actual system of record, your CRM, your ticketing tool, your code base still lives
- 6:56underneath it, and an agent is only as good as the quality of the system that it's pulling
- 7:01from.
- 7:01Since launching, Pinecone has run over 75,000 sessions and now opens 70% of their engineering
- 7:08pull requests.
- 7:09But Neil is careful to point out that usage numbers alone don't prove the tool is actually
- 7:13making outcomes better, just that people are using it.
- 7:16So Sierra admits they can't quite measure whether Pinecone is actually improving outcomes
- 7:19versus just generating more activity.
- 7:21That's coming, like, from an agentic company themselves
- 7:24Yeah.
- 7:24That they build for a business.
- 7:25Would you have expected more from that experiment from them, or do you think the
- 7:29insights were kind spot on?
- 7:30I appreciate the honesty and the willingness to not AI wash what actually happened.
- 7:36I really enjoyed reading the article, and I think what they're doing is this everyone says,
- 7:40oh, there's no ROI.
- 7:41I'm like, yeah.
- 7:42Because the gains aren't broadly distributed enough across the company to show up.
- 7:46And I think in the same way we've talked about companies that are beginning to take these open
- 7:51source models and use them instead of the closed source models, I think you're gonna see
- 7:54more companies that say, you know, we have two choices.
- 7:56We could hire a very expensive consulting firm to come in and do an AI transformation, or we
- 8:00could do it ourselves.
- 8:01Or we could put together an internal team that will help us do an AI transformation.
- 8:05And I think you're gonna see more companies say, the answer is in the room already.
- 8:09What we really need is a team of people who understand our context, our workflow, and who
- 8:13can make the gains of this AI productivity extend beyond just if if it only lives in
- 8:18engineering, unless you're a software development firm, there won't be enough ROI for
- 8:23this stuff to pencil.
- 8:24It has to get into finance, ops, customer support.
- 8:27It has to get into all these other areas for at the organizational level for the ROI to make
- 8:31sense.
- 8:31Yeah.
- 8:32And for Sierra, it's pretty obvious because they have that technical talent that lives
- 8:35within the organization.
- 8:36But would you say that's the first phase?
- 8:37It's taking a good look at your organization and having an honest conversation.
- 8:41Do I have the talent that lives within this to run that experiment, or should I outsource
- 8:44that?
- 8:45I think though we're also at interesting stage where because the tools are relatively
- 8:50accessible, I'd argue what you really need are people who are curious and engaged with the
- 8:55tech.
- 8:56If there are people who are curious and engaged with the tech, they can come up with lots of
- 8:59interesting ideas.
- 9:00It doesn't have to be just the most senior people in your org.
- 9:02It doesn't actually have to be your most senior people leading this transformation.
- 9:06What you really need are the people who understand what the tools can do.
- 9:09I think the SaaSpocalypse people are gonna look back and say, directionally, were right.
- 9:14But in the end, I think people are gonna use headless versions of systems of record because
- 9:18those systems are very good at keeping track of things.
- 9:21But you won't interact with the UI and you won't use them in the same way, but they're
- 9:25still gonna be a part of the tech stack.
- 9:26They're still gonna be very valuable important systems.
- 9:28That was one of the most notable takeaways that I felt like was buried in the piece.
- 9:32Neil said, quote, we found it's best to work with your systems of record, not replace them.
- 9:37GitHub keeps the PR.
- 9:38Salesforce keeps the account, and Linear keeps the issue.
- 9:40The agent is a layer across them.
- 9:42So it's just Yeah.
- 9:42Essentially a big pushback on SaaS's dead argument.
- 9:45Well, our next good read is another post on X from Everett Randall at Benchmark called the
- 9:50task economy.
- 9:52Everett opens by contrasting two metrics, tokens, which measure how much a model gets
- 9:57run, and tasks, which measure whether a model is actually getting better at real work.
- 10:02Tokens have obviously become the default way everyone tracks AI's growth, but he argues that
- 10:06just telling your usage is up, not that the model is improving.
- 10:09His core argument is that the Internet is basically tapped out as the training source.
- 10:14So the next real unlock for AI has to come from somewhere else, the knowledge sitting in
- 10:18professionals' heads that never got written down anywhere online.
- 10:21He estimates 99 of the expertise we actually want AI to learn, how a lawyer reasons through
- 10:26a contract, how a doctor works a diagnosis, lives only in people's heads.
- 10:30It's not on the Internet.
- 10:32And his answer is what he calls the task economy, paying real experts to attempt actual
- 10:36work tasks and then grading or correcting their output so that judgment gets fed back into the
- 10:41model as training data.
- 10:42He points to an impressive growth numbers as proof that this is already happening at scale,
- 10:46labs increasing their data spend 10 x year over year, and Benchmark's own portfolio company,
- 10:51Merkor, going from 1,000,000,000 to 2,000,000,000 in ARR in just four months.
- 10:55Charles, do you like the task metric better than token usage?
- 10:58I assume yes, but wanted to hear what you think limitations could be on this one or how it
- 11:01could be gamified.
- 11:02I think when people told me about, oh, all of this AI stuff is gonna be outcome based
- 11:07pricing.
- 11:07I'm like, well, what's an outcome?
- 11:08And they're like, what do you mean?
- 11:09I go, well, some things are easier to quantify like a support ticket.
- 11:13When it's marked closed and resolved, that's that's an outcome.
- 11:17But if you're closing the books for the quarter, there's a million little micro
- 11:21outcomes that roll up to the, like, closing the so I was I was like, look.
- 11:24For outcome pricing to work, you have to have a clear, easy to measure outcome.
- 11:28I don't hear people talking about outcome based pricing as much as they did maybe a year ago,
- 11:32much more usage based pricing.
- 11:33You know, you look at, like, Handshake and some of these businesses that were not in the data
- 11:37labeling business that now are, they're ripping, which tells me that the models have an
- 11:41almost insatiable demand for trained labeled data.
- 11:45And it reminds me a lot of some of the things that Sarah Guo brought up in her post about
- 11:48untrainable, which I think we have a lot of things that are in people's heads that are not
- 11:52yet in these models.
- 11:53And to our earlier conversation in this episode, the question is, like, how willing
- 11:56will people be to part with that knowledge?
- 11:58Because you can kind of only get paid for it once.
- 12:01At some point, you've contributed to the model, the model knows, and you you can't resell that
- 12:05knowledge or insight again.
- 12:07And so I think if I were a model provider, I'd be doing the same thing.
- 12:10This is probably an ongoing expense for you to capture real time, real world training data on
- 12:15these tasks.
- 12:16But my guess is that, like, in a year, it won't be 99%.
- 12:20It might be 80%.
- 12:21It might be 60%.
- 12:22This is, like, a one way transfer of knowledge from humans to machines.
- 12:25And I think there's money you may when I first heard about this market, I was skeptical that
- 12:29it had longevity.
- 12:30I'm like, isn't this just arbitrage?
- 12:31Don't you eventually, in a fairly short period of time, transfer all of that human knowledge
- 12:35to the machines, and then this is like isn't a thing anymore?
- 12:38And I don't know that I believe that anymore.
- 12:39Yeah.
- 12:40But that was my initial thought was like, this is a one time, one way transfer.
- 12:43How is this like really a thing?
- 12:45And it's not one time transferring your brain just because you continuously need to update,
- 12:50improve the models themselves so that it's actually ingesting the things that your brain
- 12:54would actually wanna put on paper.
- 12:55Right?
- 12:55I think at some point, law will be solved, for example.
- 12:58But then we'll have to say, well, what does a physicist do?
- 13:00Or what does a biologist do?
- 13:02Or what does a air traffic controller do?
- 13:04Or what does a an architect?
- 13:05We will move across domains, and there will be new datasets to label and new information to
- 13:12contribute.
- 13:12But I think it will be like locust to some extent.
- 13:15We will come and destroy all of the, like, offline knowledge in a given field.
- 13:19We'll get enough of it into the models that they're good enough, and then people will go
- 13:22say, well, what's the next area of expertise that we should go mine and acquire?
- 13:26Someone down in the threads also made the point that the task economy can come in the form of
- 13:30AI creating tasks for humans to do.
- 13:33Yeah.
- 13:33So like Uber fares or DoorDash tasks, which calculate the value based on how complex each
- 13:40task is.
- 13:41So the argument from their standpoint was if AI is now just selling work, then surely the
- 13:45previous ways of how you bill it has to change.
- 13:48That I think those are really specific examples because those are total gig economy works.
- 13:53We've mostly been talking in the examples of white collar professionals.
- 13:56Yeah.
- 13:56I mean, people keep saying it's gonna upend consulting.
- 13:58I'm like, maybe.
- 13:59Maybe not.
- 14:00I don't know.
- 14:00I think the consultants are gonna have something to say about that too.
- 14:03And, you know, every pricing change has all these weird dynamics.
- 14:07And I don't know.
- 14:07My experience has been, I spend a lot more on software than I used to.
- 14:12And even though software has gotten cheaper, I just use it more and buy more of it.
- 14:16So I have a lot of questions right now about does all of the math on this stuff pencil in
- 14:20the end?
- 14:21Do you think there's a world in which white collar professional people are doing this
- 14:25purposely as a side gig in putting some of their knowledge know how into the models
- 14:29themselves, or are they just doing it passively just by using the models themselves day to day?
- 14:33I think there are certainly people who are doing it as a side hustle, a GLG style expert
- 14:39network type.
- 14:39This is a way to make some money on the side.
- 14:41And other people, I think, maybe don't realize that they're helping to train these models by
- 14:44asking questions and contributing data.
- 14:46As they get better, we're just gonna use them more.
- 14:48Well, we have a fourth Goodread almost as a mini news flash.
- 14:51New York this week became the first state to fully pause new large data center construction
- 14:56imposing a one year moratorium on any facility using 50 megawatts or more of power.
- 15:01Governor Kathy Hochul cited rising utility bills, strained water supplies, and pressure on
- 15:06local communities as the reasoning, and she's also pushing to repeal the sales tax exemption
- 15:10hyperscalers currently get on these facilities.
- 15:13During the pause, the state's environmental regulator won't issue new permits while
- 15:16officials work out consistent standards for how data centers get reviewed and built going
- 15:20forward.
- 15:21New York already has more than 12 gigawatts of large power hungry projects, including data
- 15:25centers waiting to connect to its grid.
- 15:26And nationally, only about a third of Americans say they actually support the pace of data
- 15:31center construction happening around them.
- 15:33Wanted to just get your reactions if you think this type of legislature will actually do
- 15:37anything.
- 15:37I think a lot of the job of a politician is to read public sentiment and to pass legislation
- 15:43that addresses the needs of their constituents.
- 15:46I think tech is totally losing the communications battle.
- 15:50I won't even go into the data around the claims on energy and water because your mileage may
- 15:55vary depending on where you live.
- 15:57I don't wanna go down that road.
- 15:58Tech has totally lost the narrative battle here.
- 16:01And I think people say, like, well, what happens when you live in a bubble?
- 16:04I think if you live in the tech world that we live in, this AI feels mostly good.
- 16:08It's probably not gonna take your job.
- 16:10It's making your job more fun and interesting.
- 16:12But for a of other people, they're like, what's in it for me?
- 16:15I use the free Planet Chat GPT.
- 16:17Hasn't changed my life.
- 16:18I see this big ugly structure being built in my backyard.
- 16:21My electric bills up, whether that's due to inflation or due to the presence of these these
- 16:26things.
- 16:26I'm reading things online about the water consumption, whether and then some of that is
- 16:30motivated reasoning.
- 16:31And I think if you ask the average version, what's in it for me?
- 16:33I don't know what I would tell them.
- 16:34Why you should have a data center in your backyard or why, like
- 16:37And the new jobs thing, I think, isn't landing.
- 16:40Like, I don't think people are like, oh, I and I wanna work in a data center.
- 16:43Yeah.
- 16:43I wanna be a construction guy pulling cable or I think because within tech, AI has felt so
- 16:48inevitable and so magical, I don't think we've asked enough questions about why are so many
- 16:54other people so uninterested or act again, we talked about this before.
- 16:58This is the first tech wave in my career where I've seen active organized opposition.
- 17:03Other things people have been like, I don't know.
- 17:04I'm neutral on mobile or mobile's good.
- 17:06And maybe you could argue social media in its twilight era, people have come to see it
- 17:10through a different light.
- 17:12This is people are trying to stop something from happening as opposed to undoing something
- 17:16that's already happened.
- 17:17And I think tech needs to take these things very seriously and ask ourselves a question,
- 17:22what is in it for the average person?
- 17:23And it's funny, like, some of the AI people are just like, your job's going away.
- 17:26I'm like, well, that's also not helping the narrative, but it also might be true.
- 17:30So we have this interesting tension between what is the narrative that we wanna tell people
- 17:34about You is good and what's the truth in real and we really don't know what's gonna happen to
- 17:37Jobs.
- 17:38Saying that you shouldn't worry feels like a very privileged argument.
- 17:41And do you think the communications battle being so poorly lost by tech is a result of
- 17:47them just moving too quickly and not thinking it's important, or just assuming those people
- 17:51just don't have any voices or skin in the game to matter?
- 17:55I think most people in tech view AI advances as inevitable.
- 17:59So trying to slow them down or stop them feels like very decel and like a waste of time.
- 18:04And then instead of engaging with people about their real concerns, they're just like, don't
- 18:07be a Luddite.
- 18:08Get over it.
- 18:09This is gonna happen.
- 18:10That's not how you win people over to an argument.
- 18:12That's makes people feel like you just don't care about them.
- 18:14And I don't hear many people addressing the needs of these folks.
- 18:19Some of these data centers are like, they're off the grid.
- 18:21They are like separately powered by other things.
- 18:23They're not taxing the grid, but that's like a nuanced argument.
- 18:26I just feel like tech is not engaged with people on the issues that they seem to care
- 18:30about, which are these things are big.
- 18:32They consume a lot of power, and they are very visible.
- 18:35You know, AI is very abstract.
- 18:37A data center is a physical representation of this abstract fear that I think people have.
- 18:42And seeing three of them go up in your community makes you think, oh, the walls are
- 18:46literally closing in on me.
- 18:47This future state that I'm afraid of is happening even faster than I thought.
- 18:50Well, we will certainly see more discourse about that over the weekend, but we are all out
- 18:54of time today.
- 18:54Thank you, Charles, for stopping in.
- 18:56Thank you to our listeners for hopping in as well.
- 18:58Please like and subscribe, and we will talk with you all next week.
- 19:00Thank you.
- 19:01Bye.