Marc Lore: “Let’s say a founder is shooting for a $1 billion outcome. That’s usually a pretty good sweet spot. You can see a path to building something of that size; it works for early-stage venture capitalists, and it’s not so crazy ambitious that it’s going to require a ton of capital. (If you’re aiming lower than that – say, $100 million – it’s hard to raise capital from traditional VCs.) Next, you need to determine how much capital you’ll need to achieve that outcome. I use what I call “The Rule of 250” to guide my thinking about this. Take whatever sized outcome you’re targeting – $1 billion in our example – and divide it by 250. In our case, we’re targeting $1 billion, so doing the math, we should raise $4 million to get started. If we were shooting for a $10 billion outcome, we should try to raise a lot more to get started and operate at a true startup pace, closer to $40 million. Not everyone can get that kind of capital out of the gate, and you need to have a plan that backs it up. The next step is to operate at true rocketship cadence and raise accordingly. With my companies, my goal has been to double the amount I raise at double the valuation every 18 months.”
Arnold Kling: “The biggest barrier to using chatbots productively is lack of imagination. The only way to become adept at using them is to keep pushing your own envelope by trying to get help from them in novel contexts.”
WSJ: “Companies should start planning for the next stage of artificial intelligence: the orchestration of multiple agents across their businesses. Most companies are still figuring out how to deploy even one AI-powered agent that can perform a task autonomously or in coordination with humans. But developers are creating protocols to harness these agents into teams that handle everything from customer service and coding to supply chain, logistics, finance, marketing and business strategy. Given the pace of innovation and the time it takes for organizations to adapt, companies will do themselves a favor by getting ready now for multiagent systems increasingly available later this year…A true multiagent system, Recchia said, involves agents that dynamically reason, negotiate or collaborate in real time without requiring human-defined workflows, explicit prompts or manual coordination. In other words, the agents take initiative, adapt to new information and interact fluidly with other agents without waiting for human instruction.”
FT: “I ask whether [Sam] Altman finds his brave new world, in which humans are not the most intelligent thing on the planet, threatening — if not for him, then for his son? He is, predictably, too enthralled by his AI creation to feel menace. “Do you think you’re smarter than o3 right now? I don’t . . . and I feel completely unbothered, and I bet you do too,” he says. “I’m hugging my baby, enjoying my tea. I’m gonna go do very exciting work all afternoon . . . I’ll be using o3 to do better work than I was able to do a month ago. I’ll go for a walk tonight. I think it’s great. I’m more capable. He [his son] will be more capable than any of us can imagine.””
