AMD, Starcloud, Coatue..10 Hot Takes From The Biggest Names in AI

**Max Cook** (0:30)
I'm excited to be here, it's pretty nice.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:31)
It is very nice in this very secret location in Europe, which we cannot talk about.

**Max Cook** (0:37)
Not disclose the official location, but you've got an old cement wall, which you have many of in Europe, so it might be anywhere.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:43)
It could be anywhere, it could be a country that Philip and Thomas know very well.

**Max Cook** (0:47)
True, that is true.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:48)
Cannot confirm though. Okay, so we have to get into this. I think you have a couple of big insights you wanna share with us today.

**Max Cook** (0:56)
I hope they're insights, but yeah, I mean, I have a couple of things I've been thinking about, like.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:01)
What's your hottest take?

**Max Cook** (1:04)
Hottest take might be that the keyboard and mouse are slowly dying. I think.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:10)
Damn.

**Max Cook** (1:11)
I think Coatue, you've heard Jamin speak about it, you've heard Philip and Thomas speak about it. We talk about big tech waves. You went from mainframe to PCs to networking, the PCs to desktop internet, which is where you get a mouse and keyboard to mobile internet, which is where the iPhone supremacy began. With each of these big waves, we end up interacting with compute, interacting with computers in a different way.
It seems pretty clear at this point, I think there's a good stat that the average person has 60 to 80 apps on their phone. Wow. They use 11 apps daily on average and 30 apps in any given month. It seems quite clear that we're going from a world in which you have 60 to 80 apps to an agentic AI world, where you've got a lot fewer than that, two, three, four apps where everything else plugs in as an API or an MCP.
In that world, it would only make sense that we reinvent how we interact with compute. It's not the keyboard and the mouse, it's probably natural language. If we're talking, we speak in natural language. If you're working with a co-worker, you ask them what to do, you figure it out together and you go do it. So I think there's been a number of good discussions about this.
Michele from Replit was talking about how natural language is how people communicate. That's clearly the direction we're going in. There's a Greg Brockman quote that I always think about. I'll butcher it, but he had a tweet about, we've always conformed ourselves to computers like by inputting specific data with a keyboard and a mouse, and now we're finally entering the era where computers have to conform to us. And so this microphone is reminding me, we're already seeing it at Coatue, like in the famous Coatue bullpen that you got to see. We've got a number of investors that are whispering into their collar half the day.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:02)
Really?

**Max Cook** (3:02)
Because that's how to give models better context, better prompting, and ultimately produces much better workout. But so that's my take. The keyboard and mouse, you should throw them away, and we're going to natural language interacting with agentic models.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:17)
Sounds like bullish on humans.

**Max Cook** (3:19)
It's bullish humans. Yeah. No, I agree. Yeah, I think, sure, we're building for an autonomous agentic future, but also there's going to be a lot of that, which is just supercharging humans. That's what we see at Coatue is all of our analysts, all the investors that are whispering into their collar are producing better and more workout, but because they're able to more fluidly interact with these models.
I think the Thinking Machines interaction model demo that came out in May, kind of went underloved. There wasn't enough hype around that.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:53)
Really? Why? Say more.

**Max Cook** (3:55)
Yeah. I mean, to me, that Thinking Machines interaction model demo was like a bit of a peek into the future. It's you're going to interact with compute at all times. It's got to have zero low latency back and forth. It has to be able to input images, understand what you're saying in real time, respond to you.
So I watched that and said, of course, this is like going to sit on top of every intelligence layer, every model, every app. That's how we're going to interact with compute. And I think people were excited about it at the time, but haven't necessarily put the dots together between speech to text interaction models and thinking about the historical context, which is that every single time we've moved from one era of tech to another, the device has changed and how we interact with that device and with compute has changed. So I think it's only logical that that's happening again.