“The question we always focus on is ‘can this company become a monopoly?’”

He then lists several things that can make a company a monopoly:

Super fast distribution on a very thin product (e.g. Twitter)

A technological advantage that is continually built upon: you come up with something new and steadily improve (e.g. enterprise SaaS software)

A truly brilliant breakthrough (e.g. Bitcoin)

However he argues that complex coordination—where you take a lot of little pieces and coordinate them into something new—is continually overlooked as a way to create a monopoly:

“This is the thing that’s maybe 180 degrees antithetical to the Lean Startup ethos. It’s complicated. You have to put all the pieces together in just the right way. I think this is on some level what really drove Apple as an innovative company in the last decade… What was new about the iPhone? There was no single component that was new. It was just that you put all of these things together in just the right way… and once you built it, it was actually super hard for people to replicate. You had an advantage for many years. You could get network lock in—in terms of the app community or the brand.”

He also points to Tesla and SpaceX as examples:

“There’s no component to the Tesla that’s actually that new. It’s just that you put all of the pieces together. You re-engineered the whole distributor network. It was this complex coordination that made it work. There’s like this lost art of accounting where you figure out how much things cost and add them all together. And Elon has discovered this lost art of accounting which no other people practice.”

https://x.com/mikemcg0/status/1711727266537812429?s=46&t=h5Byg6Wosg8MJb4pbPSDow

it’s official - I think GitHub Copilot is the first* generative AI product to publicly claim they’ve passed $100m ARR — enough to stand alone as a publicly listed company

Whenever people ask me “is AI a fad” the biggest thing I point to is “follow the money”:

- revenue, not just funding
- RECURRING, not tcosts on hype
- people publicly saying they’d pay 5x the cost

(*there’s likely a few others but none confirmed officially - see Anatomy of Autonomy post on @latentspacepod)

next up is @DedyKredo LIVE CODING a full test suite, making code changes, and automating commit and PR review, all assisted by @CodiumAI . audible “what the fuck” from @eugeneyan.

youtube.com/live/qw4PrtyvJ…

ends with a powerful message for Israel. we stand with you @itamar_mar.

Probably an underestimate. In less than ten years each American will have a dozen or more AI agents constantly running around the net with AI that is 10x more powerful. Huge increase in per capita consumption of electricity. Add the consumption of electricity by EV's and we will get a suprising nexus that will make household electricity consumption estimate obsolete. nytimes.com/2023/10/10/cli…

https://x.com/vkhosla/status/1711960673754992885?s=46&t=h5Byg6Wosg8MJb4pbPSDow

https://x.com/chiefaioffice/status/1712012639025373468?s=46&t=h5Byg6Wosg8MJb4pbPSDow

The Pitch Deck behind Elevenlabs 📔

The most realistic text-to-audio model across 28 languages.

- Raised $21 million & valued at $100 million

- Backed by Andreessen Horowitz (@a16z)

- Founded by ex-Google & Palantir employees

> 12 slides 🧵

the cost of sequencing a human genome was over $300 million in 2001. today, it's a $200.

expect similar cost reduction curves in AI over the next 20 years.

Witnessing this at MoMA in SF evoked a reflection on our existence within the vast cosmos. Our days might merely represent numerical values, akin to our society in the universal scheme. It underscored the fleeting and minuscule nature of our lives amidst time's vast continuum.