Dylan Patel, SemiAnalysis, Nebius, Glean, Legora.. 12 Hot Takes From The Biggest Names in AI

**Dylan Patel** (0:01)
Rays, Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris is beautiful but it's hot as.

**Marc Boroditsky** (0:09)
Paris in the middle of the summer, in the middle of the heat. People are ignoring it. They're showing up.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:16)
We have Qasar of Applied Intuition. Qasar, how are you doing?

**Qasar Younis** (0:19)
I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me again. Good to see you.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:22)
So you're coming off of what some people are saying, a historic commencement speech. You didn't get canceled for talking about AI. So what happened there?

**Qasar Younis** (0:33)
Yeah, it was at my undergrad. To give credit where credit is due, I went to this place called the General Motors Institute, Kettering University now. I talk about it in the commencement speech.
Let's say the audience, it's not like East Coast, West Coast, elite schools. I think the GMI, mostly guys, the GMI guys are more Midwest pragmatic. So I didn't expect booze, thankfully, and I'm from there and hometown person. So yeah, I gave, I think, what is my authentic opinion, which is I think you can't have a lot of anxiety about this year. New grad, I mean, if you talk to new grads, we hire obviously lots of them. That's the prime fears like, is my career done? Is everything, and I just don't believe that. Fundamentally, I don't believe jobs are all going away, and if there's something in my mind, I could be, this might age really poorly.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:33)
By the way, it's also not true already. It has been reported that jobs have only increased.

**Qasar Younis** (1:39)
Yeah, and if you look at when I was graduating, there was this whole big looming technological reckoning, and that was the Internet. And all these things were being changed at the time, and there was a whole view of like, what's going to happen to the businesses I'm still in, 25 years later, and obviously we still drive, and we still need construction equipment. And so I think there's something similar in the future, like these things are not going well, they're going to change because technology changes things.
So I talked about that, and I think it landed well. I think the risky bet in the commencement speech was, it wasn't like everything will be lollipops and rainbows. It's like, hey, that's life. Like your 20s are actually a pretty tough time in your life. You got to kind of figure out how to get in the right groove, and you have to do this in this very volatile environment that we have. Yeah.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:34)
That's a soft way to put it. I think Jensen Huang once said at Stanford, I wish you all pain and suffering.

**Qasar Younis** (2:42)
Yeah, exactly. It's part of that. I think there's the other extreme, which is like, imagine you don't have to work.
That's very unfulfilling, too. And so if you are going to work, then you should work on things that are really important, because you only get to live once. And so I think, I'm a believer, doing the laundromat, the classic immigrant laundromat, those jobs, my parents, those jobs are just as hard. And every time people ask me, as a founder, like, oh, must be tough, like, applied or whatever. It's like, yeah, but you know what's harder? Like working at Taco Bell, like that's a hard job. And so I think for new grads, you have to have that perspective, too, which is like, there's going to be difficulty, even if there wasn't an AI boom.
There's always difficulty. That's the part of growing up and finding your way and stuff like that. So I managed to wrap that in a more cohesive way, in 10 minutes.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:43)
An inspiring bow.

**Qasar Younis** (3:44)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:46)
Okay. So to bring it to current day, we're at the Rays Summit in Paris. AI is buzzing all around us. It's like a big expo.
What are the trends that you're seeing in the room and around what's going on right now in AI?

**Qasar Younis** (4:01)
Obviously, the broad stuff that we don't need to talk about are things about the IPOs that are happening and kind of just how some companies are sucking up lots of revenue. Super positive, that proves that there's something there. It's not hollow.
I think the below the surface, which is like the rumblings is what's that reconciliation? That reconciliation in enterprise, the world that we are, we're an enterprise company is like budgets and cost consciousness is becoming like a more core theme.
Whereas let's say if we were talking 12 months ago, there was way more of give me everything and I'll take five of it. And now it's like, what are you giving me and how much I'm going to pay? And I think that reconciliation will have downstream impacts on everybody. Not only the big companies going public, but also the small startups that are trying to find their little niche in the world. So I think that's a big talking point. In the physical AI world where we're at, the way to think about physical AI versus let's say, like the large language model universes, the diffusion is slower because you're dealing with safety, you're dealing with physical machines in the real world. And so it's way more linear. So that you don't have these like big spikes and crashes. There aren't like new entrants that come in and this is just because it's safety oriented. So that's a bit more of what, when we last talked or in the last year, it's kind of continuing the same trajectory.