The Resilience of Innovation in Silicon Valley

This chapter explores the remarkable advancements in AI within Silicon Valley, focusing on the need for protection and investment in the innovation ecosystem. It emphasizes the collaborative efforts that drive technological progress and the beneficial human network effects that support these developments.

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My guests today are Chetan Puttagunta and Modest Proposal. Chetan is a General Partner at venture firm Benchmark, while Modest Proposal is an anonymous guest who manages a large pool of capital in the public markets. Both are good friends and frequent guests on the show, but this is the first time they have appeared together. And the timing couldn’t be better - we might be witnessing a pivotal shift in AI development as leading labs hit scaling limits and transition from pre-training to test-time compute. Together, we explore how this change could democratize AI development while reshaping the investment landscape across both public and private markets. Please enjoy this discussion with Chetan Puttagunta and Modest Proposal.

My guests today For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

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This episode is brought to you by Ramp. Ramp’s mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Ramp is the fastest growing FinTech company in history and it’s backed by more of my favorite past guests (at least 16 of them!) than probably any other company I’m aware of. It’s also notable that many best-in-class businesses use Ramp—companies like Airbnb, Anduril, and Shopify, as well as investors like Sequoia Capital and Vista Equity. They use Ramp to manage their spending, automate tedious financial processes, and reinvest saved dollars and hours into growth. At Colossus and Positive Sum, we use Ramp for exactly the same reason. Go to Ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus.

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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.

Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com).

Show Notes:

(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best

(00:05:30) Introduction to LLM Scaling Challenges

(00:07:25) Synthetic Data and Test Time Compute

(00:08:53) Implications of Test Time Compute

(00:11:19) Public Tech Companies and AI Investments

(00:16:58) Small Teams and Open Source Models

(00:29:02) Strategic Positioning of Major AI Players